Thanks for the question, whitten! You raise a very interesting point.
We definitely plan to contribute information back to Wikidata and, in fact, we already did as part of our experiment. We contributed more than a thousand edits, mainly on company data like industry of operation. Of course, we need to strike a balance between what we contribute back and what we keep as competitive advantage.
Besides that, we always comply with licenses and give credit to the original source when this is required. For example, when displaying Wikipedia content there's always a prominent link to the page where the content has been extracted from.
Thanks a lot, freediver! This is Francesco, co-founder.
We are using Entity Linking to detect entities in text. The algorithm takes into account context to disambiguate words, i.e., in "Mercury is a chemical element with the symbol Hg and atomic number 80" the word Mercury should be linked to the chemical element rather than the planet. When documents are indexed this way, the user is able to perform queries for specific concepts rather than simple keywords.
We had a demo open until a week ago, but we decided to close it to focus on finishing up some infrastructure work that will help us handle more efficiently maintenance of data sets. On the other hand we didn't want to drag it for too long and decided to just launch :)
We'll re-open to the public once we do that. If you're curious I can share a login for you to try it out.
> Techstars contributes $20,000, which is commonly used as a stipend to support living expenses during the program, and in return receives 6% common stock from each company.
I was considering Techstars, but the deal looks kind of unappealing, especially compared to YC.
I mean, yes, they give you access to their network and "300k$ of cash equivalent hosting, accounting and, legal support", but I suppose you also get that at YC plus 120k more in cash.
It is an enterprise search engine which departs from traditional keyword-based search in order to provide an easier way to run complex, semantic queries on huge collections of text documents.
Why it's cool: image a pharmaceutical research task, where you need to find all documents mentioning drugs that interact with a specific class of diseases. In a normal setting, you would need to first research which drugs satisfy your condition and then either build a boolean OR query or probably query them one by one. Doqume saves you this hassle, because it allows to express conditions like "drugs that interact with infectious disease" with a simple user interface. As a result, you can get both the items that match your conditions (i.e., in the example, all the drugs that we know interact with the class of diseases that you specified) and the documents that match the query (e.g., recent research articles mentioning those items). The approach is not specific to pharma and you can easily build queries that span across several domains (e.g., "cities with more than 1M inhabitants", "USA companies with more than X employees", "singers who are born in Chicago", etc...).
If you want to give it a try you can see a demo with this query building capability at http://doqume.com/search.html
Well, you can obtain these results with Google, but not really in most scenarios. For example, if you search "cities in Palestine with more than 1000 inhabitants" you will get lists of cities in Palestine and things like that, but not that New York Times article talking about Hebron (and not even a complete list of cities that match your criteria). This happens with lots of queries, where in the best case scenario Google will just return you a list of items (and not actual content talking about those items) and in the worst case scenario you will just get random results because it failed to parse the query.
It's just one of the examples that came to my mind and that I thought was good. From what I know people working in pharma routinely have to search thousands of documents (e.g., research articles) looking for information.
This also happens very frequently when I'm connected through a VPN. Must be that the IP is blacklisted or something, but basically there's no way to go past the captcha because it will keep showing images to validate forever.
I see many people here complaining about this feature, and while I completely agree with them I also find it difficult to imagine an effective way to clearly explain these concerns to a random average user with limited to no knowledge of computers. How would you go in explaining this stuff if you wanted to convince somebody to switch to another browser?
I would say that I hate this change. I have a university education in computer science, have worked with computers for many years, but don't understand what my browser is doing any more. The UI is unclear, the privacy policy says one thing, and the project manager says something else on Twitter.
It really frustrates me when applications try to guess what I want, and do things without asking. Computers are fun and interesting because they do what you tell them to do! When they do what someone think 90% of people want without asking you, they are oppressive and depressing.
Lastly, it feels like Google wants to trick me into giving them my browsing history by mistake.
So, all in all, I'll uninstall chrome from my personal computer.
That, and the fact that the government has decided to keep giving away EU visas to people from geographies that are notorious for corruption (e.g. Brasil, Angola, China) in exchange for meager (500K€) real estate "investments" [1]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's relevant: if you open your service to EU users you have to comply to GDPR as far as their data is concerned. Am I missing something here?
That Netflix has offices in the EU[1] where GDPR can easily be enforced, while YC does not. Supposedly, the EU will try to enforce its own law on all the nations of the world, but I've yet to hear of a case where it does enforce GDPR outside of the EU.
EDIT: I remember there's also had the "requirement" for worldwide businesses to setup physical offices in the EU before accepting EU citizens as clients. I put "requirement" in scare-quotes, because I find that equally difficult for the EU to enforce throughout the world. Maybe, the GDPR will either apply only to those companies that have set-up physical offices in the EU and not the ones that haven't, or cause the creation of The Great Firewall of Europe to block out businesses that haven't set-up physical offices. I do wonder if some nations will allow this enforcement of foreign law by treaty.
EDIT 2: s/Realistically speaking/Maybe/. Realistically speaking, I have no clue how GDPR enforcement will play out.
We definitely plan to contribute information back to Wikidata and, in fact, we already did as part of our experiment. We contributed more than a thousand edits, mainly on company data like industry of operation. Of course, we need to strike a balance between what we contribute back and what we keep as competitive advantage.
Besides that, we always comply with licenses and give credit to the original source when this is required. For example, when displaying Wikipedia content there's always a prominent link to the page where the content has been extracted from.