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New Media News Every Morning

Avvo takes guess work out of finding a lawyer

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A new Seattle start-up is promising to help you out in choosing the right lawyer next time you need to mix it up with the complex legal system. Avvo has launched a public beta of their Web site to provide you free ratings and profiles of legal hounds in your area.

Avvo, which currently covers lawyers in Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, rates lawyers based upon the “Avvo Rating,” or how well a lawyer might be able to represent a client. The rating is apparently based upon “a proprietary mathematical model applied equally to each lawyer to analyze information Avvo has about them, including their experience, disciplinary sanctions and professional achievements.”

Avvo apparently draws upon a wide variety of sources to create all of these lawyer profiles, visiting state courts, bar associations and lawyers’ Web sites to collect its data. Users of the site will also be able to submit ratings of their experiences with a lawyer, while lawyers themselves will be able to endorse one another and update information on their online profiles to give potential clients more of a sense of that lawyer’s background.

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Originally posted on June 5, 2007 @ 5:16 pm

Ask.com goes 3D

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Ask

Leveraging on its underdog image to experiment on new search engine features, Ask.com has radically altered its search results display from static stack to 3 vertical panels spread across the screen. Hence, the moniker Ask 3D.

The far right of the screen will display photos, music clips, and videos even without leaving the page. Results vary according to location of pc used and type of search requests.

“In some ways, we are becoming a convergence engine. We want to bring you the right information from the right source at the right time,” said Jim Lanzone, Ask’s chief executive.

The search engine is aggressively seeking ways to improve its performance. Based on the April data from comScore, Ask remains a minor player with only 5.1% market share. On the other hand, Google shares about 50%, Yahoo! 27% and MSN 10.3%.

Originally posted on June 5, 2007 @ 5:06 am

Expedia ranks world’s best hotels and resorts

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expediaselect.jpg Online travel provider Expedia will has started rating the best hotels and resorts around the globe with its new Expedia Insiders’ Select.

Identifying the top 1% of more than 70,000 hotels, rankings are based on factors like reviews from Expedia’s 300 expert market managers, Value for money, and Expedia’s Traveler Opinions®, the largest collection of qualified traveler reviews on the Web.

“Expedia.com is committed to delivering the tools and information that help people book their trip and travel with confidence, knowing they’ve selected the best hotel for their trip,” said Paul Brown, President, Expedia, Inc. Partner Services Group and Expedia North America. “The Expedia Insiders’ Select gives our customers another powerful way to find the perfect hotel by harnessing the trusted insight of millions of travelers, and the destination expertise Expedia enjoys by having hundreds of employees in local markets across the globe.”

Originally posted on June 6, 2007 @ 5:18 am

Krugle aspires to be ‘open-source Google’

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KrugleKrugle becomes the go-to search engine for open-source developers. With its partnerships with sites such as SourceForge.net and CollabNet (a community of 1 million developers), Krugle aspires to be the Google of software code search.

With its latest search appliance for software developers, Krugle aims to help users by allowing them to find codes that have already been written. In the case of SourceForge, for example, developers usually visit the site to download projects that are similar to the ones they’re doing. What Krugle does is to enable them to search through similar projects without having to download them entirely, cutting the search time significantly.

“They spend 25 percent or more of their time searching for lines of code to perform certain functions that may already exist. There’s no sense in writing code that’s already been written,” says Krugler, co-founder and CTO of the open-source search engine.

“Krugle gives software developers one thing they need most, time,” said John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data, a research firm. “If you could shave 10 percent of that time off, that is a huge productivity improvement either in costs savings, revenue generation or just spare time,” Andrews added.

While Google is still the first stop for many developers, having a search engine that’s solely dedicated to providing tools for developers will significantly make things easier when it comes to open-source search. Krugle was founded in 2005.

Originally posted on June 4, 2007 @ 12:44 am

Baidu to expand in Europe

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baidu.jpg China’s most popular search engine, Baidu, plans to enter the European market. Details of this new development will be announced by Baidu CFO Shawn Wang this month during a Nasdaq investor conference, according to UK Telegraph.

With more than 59 million monthly users based on comScore, Baidu remains a trivial player when set against Google’s 73% market share out of 635 million users per month.

But its success in home market is enough motivation to expand internationally and compete head-on against its Western rivals. To date, Baidu is the world’s fifth largest search engine with strong non-English speaking customer base.

“The pressure is on for a lot of showcase Chinese businesses to show they can compete in other markets,” said Daryl Arnold, Far East-based chief executive of digital marketing agency Profero.

Originally posted on June 4, 2007 @ 12:21 pm