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Visual Search: Viewzi or SearchMe?

March 11, 2008

Local entrepreneur Brandon Cotter’s newest startup, Viewzi, has been in the works for more than a year and is currently in private alpha.  I caught up with Brandon and the Viewzi team at Barcamp/SXSW and he explained that Viewzi should be released in public beta in April.  Brandon and I go way back (I was returning $15MM to investors when my account came up $100,000 short; he loaned me the $100,000 on a handshake until I could re-capitalize my startup).

This morning Kara Swisher wrote a posted about a new visual search engine called SearchMe.  She reported that Sequoia Capital (the key investor in Google and Yahoo) invested $31MM in the Mountain View-based company.  She describes the search engine as a mash-up of Google with Apple’s iTunes 3D interface. According to Kara, Google is working on a similar project in its labs.  In my view (and Kara’s) SearchMe looks like a complete iTunes rip=off.

Of course, both are pre-beta so I have only seen private demos of each, but they are surprisingly similar in their ‘view’ of search.  To honest, and I am biased, I think Viewzi’s model of engagement with users is more intriguing.  Viewzi attempts to allow ‘makers’ to create their own ‘views’ of a particular search term.  To start there is a ‘view development kit’ and in the future their will be an online wizard to allow anyone to create a custom view.  There is real power in this sort of community engagement: think wikipedia + google + iphone = Viewzi.

For those of you interested in a great product, coupled with great people and a great value (i.e. pre-money valuation) I recommend talking to Brandon about Viewzi.

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Startups 

Comments

One Response to “Visual Search: Viewzi or SearchMe?”

  1. Alex L Says:
    March 11th, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    Incidentally, the iTunes effect was actually developed by an individual who Apple bought the software and IP and integrated it into iTunes. It’s now fully integrated into Mac OS X and called “Cover Flow”. (open finder windows, click View->Cover Flow)

    Sun Microsystems also had some demonstrations with a similar interface but without a list on the bottom, only displaying the visual content in a “slide by” effect.

    I’m glad to see these companies employing these UI paradigms so quickly. All together, they are making applications better.

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