HeyStaks selected for START 150 at the Dublin Web Summit

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Hurrah, hooray and huzzah, HeyStaks will be exhibiting with the world’s most exciting, disruptive startups at this year’s Dublin Web Summit.

logoWe’ve been selected to participate in the invite-only START 150 event, which runs in parallel to the Web Summit itself. It gives “incredible young companies” an opportunity to blow their trumpets to the gathered startup, media and investor attendees. Luckily we just bought a shiny new trumpet.

We’re planning a couple of juicy announcements at this year’s summit. The START 150 event will give us a great platform to sing our message about a Web where people find the content that they want to find, not the content that search engines think they want. Our platform for adding collaboration to any search environment has been on the boil for a while and now it’s time to lift the lid.

Stay tuned for more exclusives, and in the meantime we’d love to hear below if you’re heading to the Dublin Web Summit and what you’re looking forward to. We love meeting interesting people so please reach out.

The Selfish Web: Is Sharing Really Caring?

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In an earlier post, we described how the term “social search” can be roughly translated to mean “searching the social Web” for many of the offerings out there. We argued that social search can be thought of as a process, not just another source of results. Also, the differing intents behind sharing on social networks and searching may result in lower relevance when using social posts as search result recommendations. Here we will discuss how the social Web – although undoubtedly a useful source of relevant results for searching – may not cover the gamut of peoples’ searching interests and that the motivations behind posts on social media sites may limit their usefulness as a reliable source of search recommendations.

Sharing is only partly caring

The psychology of sharing has been well studied in recent times, with many motivations identified as to why people choose to post things to social media. Altruism, self-promotion, validation, relationship-building; all feature across various studies, as does building thought leadership or authority, image- or brand-construction. Even altruism itself can be viewed as self-serving, though studies have shown that humans may possess an “altruism instinct“.

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Social search: searching the social Web or a social form of Web search?

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For a number of years now, a growing trend in online information retrieval has been “social Web search” (or simply “social search”). It’s a term that continues to be tweaked and defined, and there are some quite different interpretations of what social search actually means. Generally speaking folks interpret social search to mean a form of Web search informed by the searcher’s social graph. The way in which the social graph informs search tends to be searching social feeds from the likes of Facebook, Google Plus and – once upon a time – Twitter. Posts or status updates containing links that match the user’s query can be integrated with regular search results. In this post we explore some of the ramifications of this approach to social search and suggest a different way of looking at things.

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Chief Information Officer (CIO) as Innovator: Demand or Desire?

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The role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is changing. The enterprise of the future is a globally-distributed, hyper-connected entity with collaboration software at its core. The Chief Information Officer who embraces this movement will see high engagement, productivity enhancements, improved customer support and, ultimately, increased revenues.

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For today’s knowledge-intensive enterprise, collaboration and engagement are key to productivity and innovation

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Context-defined Communities & Personalization

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Our short- and long-term context defines who we are and what we’re interested in. Furthermore, when we can automatically identify others who have a similar contextual makeup and group them together, a powerful form of personalized recommendation is possible as we search and browse. As we go about their daily lives, our context changes. While engaging in projects at work, taking up new hobbies, attending events, using apps and searching on particular topics, these activities reflect our interest profiles. Some interests are long-lived, such as an interest in science, a career in a particular field or an artistic hobby. Others are more short-lived, such as attending an art exhibition, listening to a talk at a conference, frequenting a store or executing a Web search. Short-term interests can often be connected to long-term interests (e.g. listening to a talk at a conference is usually linked to a long-term interest such as a career), and in general we can characterize both short- and long-term interests as elements of a person’s contextual makeup.

 

HeyStaks Keynote Example

 

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