Clupedia Corporation
Second place in AlwaysOn Global 250 Stanford Summit Clupedia is the encyclopedia of Clues from crowds. Clues consist of people’s opinions about anything and everything, from products to politics and everything in between. What Wikipedia is for words, Clupedia is for clues. While Wikipedia collects from the crowds the definitions of words, Clupedia collects from the crowds their opinions. If you have an opinion about something (and who doesn’t), Clupedia is the ultimate platform that allows you to express your opinion either at any point of interest anywhere on the World Wide Web using Clupedia Toolbar, or from a centralized location using our web site. Essentially, it is the ideal “expression engine” that propagates your clues, diffuse your ideas, and spreads your opinions like brushfire from anywhere to everywhere. It is no longer about just rating, reviewing, or even blogging, but rather, it is about influencing. You may write a review at any of the popular reviews sites, or you may write an editorial column in your magazine, or you may write an article in your blog, in all those cases, people have to go where your opinion resides. So you might be vocal, but are you being heard?!! Clupedia expands the walls of your web site, your magazine, or your blog to the whole World Wide Web by bringing your opinion to the people wherever they are at. In short, why limit yourself by hoping that they will come to you. With Clupedia you can go to them with just one click. That’s compelling!!! On the other hand, if you want to get the inside scoop about something (because what you don’t know might hurt you), Clupedia Toolbar sits eagerly in your browser ready to serve you with just one click from wherever you might be – no need to go anywhere or search for anything. Clupedia is where word of mouth travels and buzz hums so that you no longer need to hear it through the grapevine. It will forever change your surfing habits, leaving you wondering how you ever surfed the web without it. Clupedia brings you on a silver platter the wisdom of crowds - the collective opinions of people, which is often smarter than the opinion of a single expert. In his eloquent book entitled “The Wisdom of Crowds”, James Surowiecki explains why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes businesses, societies, and nations. Whether using our web site or our browser toolbar, Clupedia allows you to generate new clues or retrieve existing clues for free and with great ease, classic elegance, trendy style, and unparallel convenience. So if you think that YouTubing, MySpacing, or Starbucking with a “1/3 decafe triple grande sugar free vanilla white chocolate non fat stirred carmel Macchiato” are addictive, then wait until you start generating clues or peeking through people’s clues!!! Clupedia includes comprehensive features, advanced functionality, high usability, robust scalability, and very rich user experience. It combines the best computing paradigms found on the desktop, the web, and mobile devices. You can select one or several of those different ways of expressing your opinion in a single clue. Thus, you can be very brief by just rating, or you can be elaborate by reviewing, recommending to others, and suggestiing to the manufacturer. Like unified messaging where different types of messages such as voice mail, e-mail, or fax messages are saved in a single inbox, Clupedia supports a single integrated clue that includes one or several types of opinions in a single transaction. When you hover your mouse over a marker, a pop-up appears with a list of categories of clues that have been assigned for the selected clued item. For example, if the word “Bonds” has been clued, the pop-up will include: The corresponding average rating and the number of clues are displayed next to each category. If the list does not include the category that you are interested in, that would mean that there are no clues for the desired category. In such case, you can create a new clue with a new category that interests you. If you click on a particular category, then you will get the corresponding list of clues, which you can then search, sort, group, and filter. Standard filters include top rated clues, most visited clues, most recent clues, clues that were generated by specific Clupedians who belong to your trusted circle, etc. , etc.
An item in a web page can be any word or a combination of up to 10 words that can be highlighted using the highlighter located in Clupedia Toolbar. Hence, a highlighted item can be a person, company, product, service, activity, pet, idea, social issue, politics, religion, education, or anything and everything displayed on the web. Once you highlight an item to be clued, you must then select its category from a folksonomy (i.e., a collaborative taxonomy of categories created by the crowd – a term coined by a technology blogger Thomas Vander Wal). Such folksonomy allows you to handle homonyms. For example, the word “Bonds” can be tagged as a name of a person, a relationship, or a financial instrument. Furthermore, in order to avoid clutter, common words or prepositions such as if, then, than, the, a, and, else, and the like cannot be clued without permission.
In addition to our own internal editors, we rely on our Clupedians to police clues by reporting invalid clues, grading clues, and voting for Clupedians. As a result, a meritocracy system establishes the merit, status, and reputation of Clupedians which helps safeguard the integrity of Clupedia. While the web has introduced democracy by leveling the playfield, the meta web is about meritocracy (i.e., who has merit and who doesn’t). You deserve to rely on information that has merit which can be delivered with style to you through the wisdom of crowds by Clupedia – the encyclopedia of clues from crowds.
By retrieving clues, you will:
[Read more]
Types of Clues
Clues can be ratings, reviews, pros, cons, suggestions, recommendations, notes, referrals, blogs, links, and favorites.
- Private: only you can access them.
- Sem-private: only those users that you named can access them.
- Semi-public: anyone can access them except those whom you specified.
- Public: anyone can access them.
Markers
- Sports Cards
- Business & Industrial
- Business organizations
Pages & Items
Propagation & Aggregation of Clues
Benefits
By generating clues, you will:- Help others by sharing your opinion
- Contribute to the wisdom of crowds
- Earn recognition and notoriety
- Establish your online merit
- Become famous
- Win prizes
By retrieving clues, you will:
- Never, ever, be caught clueless
- Be “in the know”, which is always cool
- Get a second, third, or nth opinion from the crowd
- Cut through all that clutter
- Boost your surfing habits
- Find influencers
- Discover some interesting trends
Business model
Advertising and Affiliate Referral Networks.
[Read more]Competitive advantage
- Patent pending for the propagation and aggregation of clues from crowds.
- Integration of all types of clues in a single integrated clue
- Text, audio, and video clues
- Posting of clues onto blogs
- Folksonomy
- Two paradigms of clueing, namely: distributed from a point of interest from the browser toolbar, and centralized from our web site.
- Slick user interface with high usability
Management Bio
Dr. David Saad - Founder, Chairman & CEO
Dr. David Saad is the founder, Chairman, and CEO of Clupedia. He is responsible for the overall direction and management of the company. He has invested over $2 million to date in Clupedia. He is a seasoned veteran in the software industry with over 25 years of experience in marketing, sales, and R&D making him uniquely positioned to lead Clupedia. After 5 years of extensive study and research, he became one of the leading authorities in referral automation and viral marketing. Dr. Saad started his career as a system programmer, became a data base consultant, and did some public speaking covering topics such as relational databases, data modeling, methodologies for logical data base design, software engineering disciplines, etc. Prior to founding Clupedia, Dr. Saad founded Braintec in 1986. He developed ProofReader - a suite of utilities such as spelling checker, grammar checker, style checker, dictionary, and a thesaurus. ProofReader included a very sophisticated technology based on computational linguistics, heuristics, and artificial intelligence. Subsequently, Braintec focused on the fast growing and lucrative IT consulting industry and became the largest Unix engineering firm in Southern California with customers such as AT&T, IBM, Sun, NCR, and Teradata. Braintec was sold to Technisource – an IT firm listed on NASDAQ which was taken private by IntelliMark Holdings. Prior to Braintec, Dr. Saad worked for Mathematica Products Group – a software division of Martin Marietta where he was instrumental in establishing the Canadian division. Dr. Saad won several awards for his software sales achievements including the ICP award. Prior to Mathematica, Dr. Saad worked as a programmer and data base consultant for IST - a consulting and service Bureau based in Montreal, Canada. Dr. Saad earned a PhD in Computer Science with high honors from University of Paris, an M.Sc.A. Cum Laude in Computer Science from McGill University, a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Concordia University, and a D.E.U.G. in Mathematics & Economics from University of Paris. Dr. Saad speaks four languages. He had a very successful athletic career in Judo. He participated in the European Championships, World Championships, Pan American Games, and the Olympic games. Dr. Saad was also the executive producer of a Rhythm & Blues (R&B) album by a female group called Foxx Empire.
Mr. Steve Valenzuela
Mr. Steve Valenzuela is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Clupedia. He is responsible for the design and the architecture of all Clupedia’s products. Technology wise, Mr. Valenzuela is also in charge of keeping Clupedia at the leading edge by researching, evaluating, implementing, and enforcing new technologies, methodologies, and standards.Prior to Clupedia, Mr. Valenzuela was the IT Manager at Cal State Fullerton where he was responsible for their IT infrastructure, web site, and application development.
IP and defensibility
Patent pending for the propagation and aggregation of clues from crowds.
[Read more]US traffic of Clupedia Corporation
US traffic of www.clupedia.com
The number of people visiting a site.
Compete ranks the top one million websites in the U.S. based on the number of People the domain attracts each month.
The number of visits made to a site. A person can only be counted as one person in a month, but can make multiple site visits.
The total time spent on a domain as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users.
The number of minutes an average visitor spends on a site during each visit.
The number of pages an average person views on each visit to a domain.
Worldwide traffic of Clupedia Corporation
Worldwide traffic for the website www.clupedia.com
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www.thomcalandra.com
Thanks for posting what I believe will be very effective tools for refining clues.
A lot of key benefits of having such an application have been pointed out in the previous comments. However, I think the most important unique feature, and indeed benefit, has not been brought out clearly as yet.
This is the availability of "highly focused" criticism - good, bad, or indifferent - about "almost anything", gathered world-wide in real time, at the touch of a button. No need to trawl through thousands of results from search engines, only to give up after already wasting too much time searching and not finding what you’re looking for.
Also, when new products are tested, it will often be on relatively small samples of the population – Clupedia will provide the possibility of having thousands of opinions in a relatively short space of time.
Yes, it’s true that this will be dependent on the widespread adoption of Clupedia. But as “Brian Zandpour” mentioned earlier, Clupedia is “VERY easy to learn/use”. If people are aware that taking a minute of their time to “clue” things will contribute to better overall results and many fewer hours wasted searching for meaningful information on the web, then all it takes is for these people to start actively using Clupedia and to talk about it to their friends to trigger a massive viral outbreak!
I feel this will be a tough act to follow, never mind surpass ….
1. In the next release, clues can be graded and commented on. Clues can be sorted based on their grades and their comments. The bad ones will show at the bottom of the list. Therefore, Clupedians will be able to self-police the community and the clues.
2. Clupedians can vote for other Clupedians based on the quality of clues that they create. Clupedians with the highest votes will tend to have their clues appear at the top of the list. here again, we will be providing another type of self-policing feature.
3. Filters define in settings to display or hide markers. Filters can be based on number of different criteria such as user interests, surging habits, categories, tags, Clupedians in the user's trusted circle, etc.
4. Filters on the list of clues to narrow down the number of clues for the user.
5. Software that picks up offensive clues.
6. Manual editorial service, which we plan to establish in mid 2008. The manual editorial service will pick up objectionable clues that fell through the cracks through our software.
7. We are considering creating two categories of users: novice and experts. Hence, we will be providing not just the wisdom of crowds, but also the wisdom of experts or influencers. In doing so, the clues from influencers will appear first and will tend to be of high quality and relevancy.
In conclusion, we are considering many different ways to garantee as much as we can a good value proposition to our users. having said that, we do recognize that with every system there are abusers to be dealt with, and we will deal with those at the appropriate time. As an example, when eBay started, they had to deal, and still have to deal, with crooks who get your money and never send any merchandize. Well, they dealt with this particular problem.
Hope that this comment answers some of the commentators' concerns.
I also agree with other commentators about the challenges that Clupedia will have in getting adoption, but if they do, and they seem to be capable based on the pitch that I saw and their web site, they could be disruptive and threatening to some of the more established players including search engines. I can clearly see the exit here.
Has anyone heard of Third Voice? I think Third Voice tried to do something similar few years back but failed. Granted, Clupedia's execution is far better and we live in times in which users are far more involved, but maybe Clupedia will run into similar issues as TV did. But maybe not.
Also, how is Clupedia comparable to StumbleUpon? Even though StumbleUpon offers ratings and reviews of web sites, but their main trust is social surfing and not the "wisdom of crowds" as Clupedia seems focused on. It is true that the CEO did mention in his pitch that they intend to offer social surfing, but that could also be vaporeware. I'll believe it when I see it. So for the time being, they are not comparable.
The other thing I like about the product is that it appears to provide the user with a 'mobile chat room' (probably the wrong term but where ever you go/search you can pick up opinions rather than just reading bloggs in some other space (on one of the multiple sites which are out there and indeed often offer have a skewed view based on the user group). It also adds additional value on web page content 9not always positive value but you will have that).
Listening to the pitch, it took me a while before I understood what the product was about but as this was not a pitch to 'investors' I had no problem with it.
As I write there as many ideas coming into my head as to the possibilities for this product. That has to be a good thing.
The web page with the flash dimension would not be my choice of design but I am sure many will like it.
In summary, this is a great product which will can offer a different value proposition to each user - that feature alone is very marketable and attractive.
Also, do I hear a bit of sarcacism with Peter's "Good Luck" ending? I wouldn't bet against Clupedia because a week ago they were under the radar screen and now they are at the top everywhere. I doubt that this kind of traction is accidental. Looking at their web site, they seem to be pretty marketing savvy. I wouldn't be surprised if they have already figured out the chicken & egg problem that Peter pointed out.
Personally, I think the pitch was very effective and I love the idea of clues from crowds. I had a bit of difficulty sometimes understanding the CEO because of his accent, but otherwise, I think it was just fine.
BTW, where's your pitch Peter? Or are we only into Monday Morning Quaterbacking?!!!
BTW, I have no connection with Clupedia, I just don't like VCs who think they know it all.