Change is coming to Zakta
Things have been rather quiet on this blog for a very long time. But things have been far from quiet at Zakta. There has been a lot of progress and change during these months, and we are now excited to share this more broadly.
1. The Zakta Story
Starting with our work on SearchTeam, the collaborative search and curation engine, we had been vastly enhancing the Zakta Technology Platform. With the latest technology additions, and the roadmap in place now, we have a unique offering that enables applications and solutions to leverage social intelligence, i.e. the collective wisdom of teams of people. This has resulted in a refinement in the Zakta direction and story.
2. New Company Web Site
Zakta will soon announce new solutions that leverage the collective wisdom of people. Soon, Zakta.com will be home to a brand new company web site that shares this exciting story.
3. Classic Zakta.com will be branded zGuides™
The classic Zakta.com web curation service, that you see here, will be rebranded as zGuides™, and will be one of the many Zakta Applications (zApps™) based on the Zakta Social Intelligence Platform.
We thank you for your continued support of Zakta, and hope you will love the exciting new solutions we will announce soon.
How To: Search More Efficiently With The Zakta ClipPad
This is the second in a series of blog posts that present videos on how to get the most out of Zakta.
Here’s a short video outlining how to to search the Web more efficiently using the ClipPad feature in Zakta.
* Viewed best in full screen mode and HD
In our previous post, we showed how to personalize your Web search with Zakta. This method makes it very easy to delete, reorder, and tag/annotate your search results for any single query and come right back to them at a later time.
However, searching for information on a single topic often involves doing multiple queries, sifting through results, and saving what we find through bookmarks, email notes, post-its etc. As most of us know from experience, this process can be cumbersome, time consuming and frustrating.
Zakta makes this process much simpler through a tool called the ClipPad. Here’s a quick review of how to use the ClipPad and how it helps make Web searching more efficient:
- The ClipPad is a feature that you can turn on in Zakta *.
- You can attach or dock the ClipPad to the right of your search results page.
- You can add any Zakta search result to the ClipPad.
- You can incrementally organize your additions to the ClipPad using sections.
- The ClipPad automatically saves your findings into your account.
- You can run multiple queries for your search topic, and the ClipPad will remain anchored to your window, giving you instant access to your previously saved results and enabling you to add and organize new results of interest readily.
- You can also generate a Zakta Guide directly from the ClipPad, and easily share what you found with others.
* You need to be logged into Zakta (sign up is free and easy) to benefit from this feature.
If you search the Web frequently for information, we think that you will love the Zakta ClipPad and how it saves time and reduces frustration in searching the Web.
As always, please let us know what you think.
More to life than Google?
Google’s pace of innovation has been effectively matched by their growing dominance, not just with the Internet, but increasingly with all things technology, and with plans to go beyond, into other lucrative industries.
Here’s a picture of just how dominant there are in the search engine space: Over 65% of all searches are done on Google-related properties including Google.com, according to comScore.
Seeing this from the lens of the buzz in the blogosphere, yet again, we see Google clearly dominating the buzz compared to other popular tech companies.
In face of these realities, I found it quite intriguing when Doug Arthur, the visionary founder of the INTERalliance organization asked me to speak at their inaugural TechOlympics Expo (400 top high school students from 39 schools in Greater Cincinnati region competed and participated in this last weekend), about “More to life than Google“!
With the help of some industry observers including Charles Knight, I assembled a list of 14 innovative services that I really like. In assembling this list, I deliberately left out the other well-known players like Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Ask, which surely are innovating in their own way. I decided to focus the attention on innovations from small organizations that don’t get as much visibility or publicity, and wanted to see what these smart, young people thought of them.
Admittedly, going in, I was a bit skeptical that they would care about anything beyond Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and maybe a couple of other tools! Boy, was I wrong!
Not only did the students in attendance eagerly respond to the various services I presented, but they also shared with me some others that I was not aware of. What was interesting was how so many of them wanted to get a copy of my presentation to follow up and check out some of the cool services I had highlighted. I was surely not ready for this response and I think it bodes well for entrepreneurs out there who are innovating in their chosen areas. I am not suggesting, for a moment, that all of a sudden, an entrepeneur’s challenge in getting the word out, has vanished. No! What I AM suggesting is that it is heartening that the younger generation is so open minded to absorb innovation. They seem to want newer, better, faster, cooler things and they are not afraid to try it out and give it a fair shake.
Maybe you are wondering what the revelation in this is – especially as my realization seems kind of obvious.
Maybe! But then maybe not, when you consider that what I was sharing was a set of 14 search engine tools that do a fabulous job for different needs! Tools that exist right in the space where Google is the dominant player without any doubt! And yet, here were a bunch of really smart young people, ready to lap up new, innovative, cool services even in this space!
Here is my complete presentation on More to Life than Google.
For your convenience, here are 14 search engine services I like, which show that search engine innovation is quite alive outside Google.
- Cosmetic Safety: Skin Deep
- Finding Facts: Freebase
- Health: Mednar
- Images: Cooliris
- Jobs: Indeed
- Mobile: ChaCha
- News: iCurrent
- People: Pipl
- Real Estate: Zillow
- Reviews: Yelp
- Shopping: Milo
- Travel: UpTake
- Video: Clicker
- Web: Zakta
Admittedly, I’ve been partial to the search engine innovation listed last, our own Zakta 
Barring this glaring bit of self-promotion, truly, the other services listed here are worth a closer look. Please visit them and spread the word about them if you like them!
As always, I look forward to your feedback on this.
Zakta delivers “digital curation” platform for the Museum of Advertising
The Museum of Advertising, a grassroots organization in Cincinnati, Ohio, launched their online presence today.
The Museum of Advertising is intended to offer a uniquely compelling exploration of the ways in which advertising has reflected and shaped American culture, from 19th century postcards to 21st-century media. The museum also seeks to celebrate Cincinnati’s unique role in the growth, development, and even redefinition of the advertising and marketing industry. Importantly, we envision much more than just a “physical” place to visit. We also envision an accessible, always-on storytelling lab, anchored to virtual participation and user-contribution. In fact, we hope and expect hundreds of “digital ad curators” will help shape, refine, and contribute the stories and learning we will put on display both online and offline. (Source: About the Museum of Advertising)
Pete Blackshaw, co-founder of the Museum of Advertising presents the concept in this introductory video:
Zakta is proud to partner with the Museum of Advertising to deliver a platform for “digital curation“. Using the searching, information organization, sharing and collaboration tools on Zakta, supporters of the Museum of Advertising can now be “digital ad curators”, bringing together the very best advertising information from the Web, in the form of compelling online exhibits.
Here are some excellent exhibits (“Guides”) that have already come together:
- Mad Men: Mad Men Era
- Super Bowl Commercials: Cars, Beer and Liquor, Technology, Celebrity Ads, Soft Drinks, Snacks
- Brand Advertising History: Crisco, Ivory Soap, Coca Cola
We invite people to jump in and contribute to these Guides.
You can also create new Guides for including in the Museum of Advertising site. How can you do this? Just go to Zakta.com and login. Explore the Web using Zakta’s search tools, create a new Guide, invite others you know to collaborate with you, and publish it for the world to see and add to.
Join the growing team of digital curators at the Museum of Advertising now!
As always, we value your feedback. Please let us know what you think.
Zakta Adds Personal and Social Image Search, Video Search
Over the holiday season, we made a number of improvements to Zakta and added a few new features.
Image search
Now, for all your queries, relevant images from the Web are automatically included in the organized search results on Zakta. You can simply click the “More” link below the image listing to get more images added to your result set.
Video search
As you probably already know, Zakta search results are organized into a single result page. Now, matching videos from the Web are automatically included in your results. Like with Images, you can click on “More” below the last video to get more images into your results.
What is unique about Image and Video searching on Zakta?
Image and Video searching are more powerful on Zakta than elsewhere on the Web. Here’s why:
- You can edit the Image and Video results — you can delete them, drag-and-drop t0 reorganize their order as you see fit, and even add annotations and tags to them.
- You can automatically create Zakta Guides from the search results that include the Images and Videos in them with no extra effort.
- From within the Guide Editor in Zakta, you can incrementally add new Images and Videos to your Zakta Guides as needed.
i.e. Images and Videos are now fully integrated into Zakta’s personal and social search framework for finding, personalizing, and sharing information from the Web.
As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback on this.
We have planned many new and exciting capabilities for this year. We thank you for your support in 2009, and look forward to serving your needs and receiving your support in 2010 as well. Wish you and yours a wonderful 2010!
