The Aussies answer to Silicon Valley
The good part is that while Europe is working hard in the web 2.0 space, the Aussies have taken the concept and have developed an incubator service much like the Americans have with Angel and VC funding of companies. The LLC in place, Internet Property development Group, has been funding groups and sites, with their first release this month.
On that news we were really excited about it because the USA, Asia and Europe are working very hard on web 2.0, and coming up with some great stuff. In reading the PR flash below, we thought it would be way too cool.
New Web 2.0 Internet Incubator, Internet Property Development Group LLC (IPDG), launches in Silicon Valley with backing from Australian listed company Photon LTD (ASX:PGA), with goal of launching new web 2.0 consumer innovations from around the world in to the US market. IPDG’s first product http://www.Wookah.com will launch in the USA on 1st of August at the Always On conference at Stanford University showcasing the new navigational and searching functionality across the best sites on the internet. Source: PR-GB
Went to take a look at wookah, which was supposed to be a meta search engine, but then we ended up with Google, just Google, and no meta search engine across the ones we would have expected to see. So while we were disappointed with Wookah, maybe we will get better as the LLC learns to develop companies that are not putting an IFRAME around Google results. You have tabs that will bring up the standard big six search engines, but unlike other meta search engines, the results are not mixed.
Note the to the Aussies, if you are going to take on Britain, and the USA for innovation in web 2.0, please do something better than Wookah.
Hi, just thought I would clarify a couple of things about our first project Wookah. There is some confusion about the product, but to be clear, Wookah is NOT a search engine, and is NOT a metasearch.
Feedback from users was they wanted to find the best sites on the internet, and then be able to search and interact with those sites.
We’ve tried to create a new paradigm for navigating around the internet. This is not meant to replace search engines at all, rather its meant to enhance using seach engines and websites. So you would never stop using Google etc, but you would use Google through Wookah.
The concept is that Wookah is a multisearch, and provides two key elements:
1. CONTENT - It allows you to quickly see the best sites in a given category on the internet (eg click Jobs, and get the top jobs sites…) - you don’t need to search for these sites or try and remember them
2. NAVIGATION - It also allows you to search across multiple sites by tabbing, rather than by getting all the results on one page (in a traditional metasearch).
This is beneficial because it allows you more granularity of results, you can see exactly where sites / results are coming from… rather than metasearches which often do not have clarity about their algorithms, and often do not live up to people’s expectations.
Travel is a perfect example of this. Often in travel you can use a metasearch which claims to search all the sites online etc, but then if you go directly to a travel site or directly to the hotel, you will get a different (and often better) rate.
Wookah’s goal is to help people find, search, compare and share the best sites online. New features being launched soon include personalization and sharing.
So Wookah is NOT trying to provide a metasearch experience, but rather a multisearch experience. We have got a growing number of people who are using the service, and have had a lot of positive feedback.
IPDG have got some new and exciting products currently in stealth mode that we are currently working on.
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While the incubator idea is great, and love to see more of it, we were really dissapointed in Wookah, the PR piece that we used specified one thing, the web site is something else. That is great that it is working, but is it really web 2.0 to dump an iframe and cache results from a search?
IPDG has other stuff, let us take a look at it, that would be cool.
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