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    June 15

    Hunch - helps you make decisions and gets smarter the more you use it.

    “
    most of us must be very familar with many Q-A services/communities, for example, QnA@microsoft, zhidao@baidu, vark.com, etc. answers@yahoo!, etc. However, most of them are very similar to each other. You could ask a question, subscribe to answers to your questions, you could show you answers to some question, or you could explore some questions that interest you. Here, I would like to introduce hunch.com, a new innovative idea from the co-founder of flickr.com, Caterina. Hunch is a decision making service and community which could help you make decisions or find out the answers to your questions of some topics. It is technically an expert system over crawdsoucing. I think it becomes more and more obvious and important for the emerging services and startups to help people discover and decide on such as what they want, how they could do, why they should do like that... ? Collaborative filtering based recommendation systems, crawdsourcing based expert systems delivers such kinds of services at the first places, even though there is long way to run in the future... There is an article introducing more details about the new startup company and its service "hunch.com" from readwriteweb. Just follow the links below: 
    or the chinese versions: 

    Quots: 

    Hunch is still in closed beta, but is accepting requests for invites. We're thinking you will want to sign up, though, after you hear what Caterina says about it:

    Look. Decision-making is difficult, and decisions have to be made constantly. What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What toe ring should I buy?

    It's dark and lonely work. Coin-flipping, I Ching consultation, closing your eyes and jumping, postponing the inevitable, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and asking your sister are all time-honored means of coming to a decision -- and yet we think there's room for one more: Hunch.
    1:00 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | startup
    May 31

    think by listening: winding down, dead whatever...

    Most of us are probably interested in listening to success stories around the world. We must have been used to talking about the big successes esp. in the web era, yahoo!, google, youtube, flikr, facebook, linkedin, twitter..., which have beed leading us from one milestone to another, from the early days to even longer. It's actually so appealing that lots of ambitious startups are seeking to win a battle in the web everyday. Successes are always very inspiring and then are followed worldwide. So, how about the failures? How about when you read a title "Vidoop Is Dead, Employees Getting Computers In Lieu Of Wages" and something such as:
    Vidoopsters:
     
    I am currently working with our counsel on next steps, but here is what I know:
     
    Vidoop LLC is officially out of business. Unfortunately, there are no funds to pay the unpaid wages or other liabilities. I don’t yet know if this means there will be a bankruptcy filing. However, we are in the process of winding down and vacating the office.
     
    Tomorrow and Friday we will be offering certain equipment such as laptops and desktop computers to employees in lieu of a certain amount of wages owed. As an example, a laptop might be worth $1000 in back wages. You would only need to pay taxes on the actual book value of the asset, which might be $250. So you would write a check for $0.153 on $250, or $38.25. The company’s liability to you would be reduced by $1000, and you would have a laptop for $38.25.
     
    The investors who walked out of the May 5 deal created a situation that made an orderly shutdown impossible. However, several of us have worked nonstop to preserve everyone’s stake in Vidoop, and efforts are ongoing. We hope to provide details soon.
     
    Thanks to everyone who is volunteering their time to help shut down the office. There is simply no roadmap for a situation like this, and I know it is frustrating. Your support during this difficult period is very much appreciated.
     
    ...
    "What a pity!", most of us might comment in frustrated and disappointed. Probably it just remains a news or story which just tells another death in the industry, after all, "Success is not surprising, so is death". To be best of all, we could get to understand why it's dead or winding down, which might be a good lesson for us to draw, esp. for those who are also running startups.
     
    There are a bunch of death here: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/. Smile
    12:41 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | startup