illumio goes for V2; Now scans feeds for news recommendations
By Vivek | May 25th, 2007 at 09:40 am ET
illumio, the desktop based Q&A tool that I had written about last year, has launched a new release with bunch of exciting new features that would target users beyond it’s standard Q&A domain.
Previously, illumio was tracking user interests and then applying them to Q&A discussion that were occurring in various illumio groups that you joined. illumio 2.0 taken this matching capability way further by applying it to web feeds. This means that you can now use illumio to automatically filter any number of web feeds to more easily stay informed, in addition to professional networking with others.
illumio has also made changes to it’s interest matching algorithm. The new release automatically discovers your interests based on documents stored in the My Documents folder, sent email and contacts if you’re using Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, and web browser history and favorites. illumio is giving lot of emphasis on privacy and the information it collects from your machine. As I had written before, all the matching is done locally on your machine. Information about who matched, matched keywords, and the strength of the match is never transmitted to illumio servers.
Besides all the above changes, illumio has enabled the users to create groups to network and share information among themselves. Also, during a new request creation process, illumio automatically extracts keywords to make your request much more targeted.
On the whole, lot of smart new features that can get illumio the much needed traction. Still the space is not without competition. Couple of startups that can deliver the combined effect - Techdirt Insight, which brings companies and analysts together on the same platform in a Q&A format, and Particls(launching next week), which watches your feeds to deliver news recommendations.
Related:
Illumio makes expertise sharing way easier
Links:
illumio
on May 25th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Thanks for the great summary!
While I’m sure there will be competition for us, I think we’re the only thing out there that routes questions and social networking requests to the right person based on detecting what they know automatically — and keeping it private. That’s pretty different from Web based Q&A systems that just broadcast the question to the group, and can only get responses from people who are actively trolling to make them, or who have registered an association manually with some topic. Most folks don’t take the time to do that, or do so very superfically.
We’ll look forward to other comments. We’re just glad this thing is finally out (!) - David