Yahoo buys Indian startup Bookpad

By Vasudev Ram

Just saw this on GigaOm via Twitter: Yahoo is buying a one-year-old Bangalore-based Indian startup called Bookpad. Bookpad has a product called Docspad which is used for document viewing and editing etc.

Links about the Yahoo acquisition of Bookpad on some news sites:

On GigaOm:

Yahoo buys Indian startup Bookpad for document viewing and editing capabilities

On the Economic Times:

Yahoo buys Bangalore-based tech startup Bookpad for Rs 50 crore

On TechCrunch:

Yahoo Acquires Bangalore-Based Bookpad, Makers Of Online File Editing And Collaboration Software Docspad




- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Yahoo introduces Yahoo Stores

By Vasudev Ram

Seen via HN.

Yahoo introduces Yahoo Stores for e-commerce.

Yahoo Stores for e-commerce

Plans start at $26 per month.


- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Jig.com launched by Delicious.com founder Joshua Schachter

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

Saw this in a very recent post by "A VC" Fred Wilson (http://avc.com, @fredwilson):

Jig (http://jig.com) has been launched by Joshua Schachter (@joshu) of Tasty Labs, who earlier founded Delicious (http://delicious.com or http://del.icio.us) which was acquired by Yahoo!.

Jig is a site where you can post your "needs" about anything, and others on the site can give you advice or answers on how to solve that need.

Sounds like a good idea. I would have said "Get it?" about the name, but it's too obvious :)

About Jig: http://www.tastylabs.com/

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- Vasudev Ram @ Dancing Bison

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's new attempt at Semantic Web goals?

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

Seen on TechCrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/02/google-yahoo-and-bing-collaborate-on-structured-data-to-make-search-listings-richer/

This looks like another attempt at making the Semantic Web's goals (*) work.

It would be good if it does work, because it could improve the quality of web search results, and,  as frequent users of web search know, the quality of search has been going down for some time, due to the large number of spammy sites, that use keywords in their sites' content that have no or very little relevance to their actual content, just to make money off ads.

Too early to say, of course, but it may be that this attempt may work out better than earlier semantic web efforts such as by the W3C; I've heard it said that those efforts may not have made much progress due to being too complex - something like the way the TCP/IP set of protocols won over the OSI protocols. Only time may tell ...

Update: On further checking, it looks like the Google / Yahoo / Microsoft effort is based at least partially on prior W3C work, specifically on microdata - see:

Getting started with schema.org: http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

HTML Microdata: http://dev.w3.org/html5/md-LC/

(*) Related links:

W3C - World Wide Web Consortium:

http://www.w3.org/
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/

Semantic Web:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Semantic+Web

TCP/IP vs. OSI:

http://www.google.com/search?q=tcp%2Fip+vs+OSI

TCP/IP model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP_model

OSI model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises