Archive for March, 2011

Engage is a new web-hosted tool that makes it very easy to monitor the performance of teams, and motivate them to do their best when things are not really going as expected. Any manager will be able to clearly define what must be done by each and every member of the team, and feedback can be served in a timely (and open) way. The performance of every team member can be reviewed and rated, both when it comes to individual goals and in the grand scheme of things.

Read more: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/engage-calibreapps-com-set-goals-for-your-team

Googles enhances his search results using human intelligence. Their goal is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible. But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages. That’s why they started to include more information from people you know—stuff they’ve shared on Twitter, Flickr and other sites—in Google search results.
Today they’re taking that a step further, enabling you to share recommendations with the world right in Google’s search results. It’s called +1—the digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” To recommend something, all you have to do is click +1 on a webpage or ad you find useful. These +1’s will then start appearing in Google’s search results.

Googles "+1"

More…

The LOV dataset contains the description of RDFS vocabularies or OWL ontologies defined for and used by datasets in the Linked Data Cloud. Whenever available each vocabulary includes references to the datasets using it, in particular those listed in CKAN. The descriptions use in particular the VOAF vocabulary to state different ways such vocabularies can rely on, extend, specify, annotate or otherwise link to each other, and reuse a lot of vocabularies it describes, such asDublin Core, voiD, BIBO, and many more.

Clicking on the vocabulary’s namespaces (including the balloons), the user can navigate the vocabularies and get further information about them.

You can find all the information at http://labs.mondeca.com/dataset/lov/index.html

In the 2006, Luis von Ahn gave a speech at the Google TechTalks  entitled “Human computation” on a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot solve yet. He presented some games (ESP game, Peekaboom, Verboity)  for image recognition, tagging, and more in general, content creation. It is very interesting to notice how he  measured the quality of the content produced,  and what incentives he embedded in the system to motivate  people to play  (see  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143#).

getupp is a location-based commitment service. Commit to activities that require your presence at a specific location at a certain time, for example, going to the gym after work or being home on time for dinner. getupp verifies and shares whether you keep or break such commitments. Open the getupp iPhone app at the right location at the right time, and your commitment is completed. But if you fail to show up, your commitment is broken, and your failure is automatically shared with your friends on Facebook.

You can find all the information at http://www.getupp.com/