2007 December archive at Conceptualist.com, By Sahar Sarid

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Archive for December, 2007

Update: Most Deadlines Met On Time

Published on December 31, 2007 in ASSISTA, Business, Domain Names and General. 2 Comments

Just a quick update on this post from three weeks ago.

1. Although we were ready on time, Flowchart.com v2 was not released. We plan to release it in a week or two. This is because Jeff’s decision to delay this release in order to focus on Assista’s immediate improvements and feedback.

2. FuneralNews.com was not released on time due to hardware provider sending the wrong configuration. Plan to release within seven days.

3. Memorial platform as well did not release on time, for the same reason as above.

4. Recall Media Group’s Domain venture announcement. This one was met on time as we announced Bido. What we have yet to announce is the acquisition of a great company in the domain space. We plan to announce this within a couple of weeks.

5. Release of Assista, met on time. Feedback so far has been extremely positive.

6. Six figure domain purchase, met on time. This was a private acquisition and to meet deadline, had a great cooperation from seller as well as John Berryhill.

7. Sale of a six figure domain. This was a decent sale, went smoothly thanks to buyer’s cooperation and Ari Goldberger.

8. Seven figure investment contract (Recall Media Group), met as well. This was a contract we’ve been trying to complete for a while and now in the process of following through on terms.

There are few more deals in the pipeline and 2008 seems to be like it is going to be a really busy year for us. We’re going to release Bido, a number of vertical directories for Recall Media Group, improve Assista, improve Flowchart.com, improve FuneralHomes.com and related ventures, and who knows what else.

Take care, and see you in 2008!

Sahar

Assista: Functionalities In The Works

Published on December 31, 2007 in ASSISTA. 1 Comment

A couple of improvements coming very soon to Assista:

1. Wiki for every question - With over 120 millions questions in the database this is guaranteed to be an interesting proposition. We had the idea for wikis long ago and even developed a NLP technology to initially populate questions. We plan to use the NLP technology at a later stage.

2. Firefox/IE browser extension - We have had this for a long time as well but released without yet perfecting it. I wrote about the functionality of this extension here but in short, the functionality is to anchor and highlight a question when opening a question (see image).

If you think of other concepts you would like to see please let us know. We’re listening!

And before I go, let me wish you all a happy new year, may all you wish come true in 2008!

Cheers

Sahar

Assista Goes Live. What To Expect?

Published on December 30, 2007 in ASSISTA. 9 Comments

Over three years in the making we’re finally releasing Assista (if you are not sure what Assista is, see this link). This release is not of a finished product (will it ever be?) but of what we have done so far. Our main objectives for this release are three-folds:

1. Results Speed: When searching for keywords, topics we wanted to be able to show results in less then five seconds. Google, Yahoo, MSN set user’s expectations high when it comes to speed and if we are going to make it, speed must be addressed.

2. Question Expansion Results Speed: Same as above. Speed is an important issue, we struggled with it for over a year, not so because we didn’t know what to do but because unlike the big search engines, we do not have their budgets, infrastructure.

3. Design: After many tries we decided to stick with basics. Design is not our forte so we rather focus on navigation, ease of use.

Assista currently has over 120 million questions. By end of 2008 we expect to have over a billion questions in the database.

To get you started, here are some interesting Assista queries:

5. Sepsis, Acne (Note: As you are soon to find out, Assista does extremely well with medical queries)

6. Abraham Lincoln

7. World War II

8. Intellectual Property

9. New Year Resolution

10. Gifted Child

We still have allot to do, things like adding privacy policy, about us page, clearing some issues on front page (for example, some links in “recent searches” are to non existing results), fixing the sub-topics results, and more. We’re aware of it, we’ll work on it. At the moment we set a goal to go live before end of year and even though we can delay it (that’s the easiest thing to do in life) we rather put it out, get some real feedback, and improve as we go along.

Thanks goes to our world class programming team, Hitfarm’s Kevin Ham and Colin Yu, our good friend Chris Hartnett, “Hardware guy” Michael Wiesman, Recall Media Group’s Darren Cleveland, and the hundreds of others who believed in us over the years. It is that faith you give us that keeps us moving forward.

Feedback as always is most welcome, highly appreciated!

Cheers

Sahar Sarid and Jeff Bhavnanie
Founders, Assista.com

GoDaddy’s Bob Parsons Does The Right Thing

Published on December 29, 2007 in Domain Names. 2 Comments

There’s not much more I like then to highlight the goodness of some in the domain industry. A great way to end a great year.

Via Scotsman.com:

“Internet mogul Bob Parsons owns the domain registry firm GoDaddy.com which web designer David Airey used to log his own site.

Mr Airey was shocked to discover, earlier this month, that a hacker had broken into his e-mail account and used the details to steal www.davidairey.com.

The hacker, believed to live in Iran, then demanded up to £500 for its return.

Mr Airey refused to give in to the ransom demand, despite facing the loss of £5000 of new business while his site was down.

Mr Parsons, a flamboyant former marine who served in the Vietnam War, contacted Mr Airey, 28, and asked for a copy of his driver’s licence to prove his identity, allowing GoDaddy.com to transfer his domain name back.”