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Dallas Search Startup Viewzi Gets Press!

May 27, 2008

This evening Viewzi was profiled on Channel 11 News. Great press (I will post YouTube link when it gets uploaded). Here is my previous coverage:

Profy, ReadWriteWeb and The Inquisitr are talking about Viewzi’s beta launch. Profy giving the visual search engine high praise by suggesting, “Viewzi May Finally Have Won Me Over to Visual Search“. I have spent a little time playing with the search engine and it looks very sexy. I wrote about the company back in March when I compared it to SearchMe:

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, Venture Capital 

Comments

2 Responses to “Dallas Search Startup Viewzi Gets Press!”

  1. Mike Orren Says:
    May 28th, 2008 at 10:38 am

    Channel 11 is really good to startups if you get on their radar screen. They did an interview with us long before we’d launched *anything*.

    http://www.pegasusnews.com/blogs/pegasusnewsblog/2008/jan/20/tv/

  2. Blake Says:
    May 28th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

    They Also Got Some Press On A Fairly Recent Episode Of The Geek Brief Podcast. All Hail Cali Lewis!

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