More info out of Powerset
Powerset has released another tiny tidbit of information about their upcoming natural-language based “Google Search”-killer. This time they’re giving a quick glimpse at “Powerlabs”. It looks like they’re positioning Powerlabs as a playground and testbed for new products and concepts much like another site that comes to mind.
The example screen shot shows what they’re working on in applying natural language search to Travel. Or are they? I don’t see anything particularly search-like in the shot. It looks like they’re going to be using some sort of reward-point system and have a strong focus on activities. This particular section lists a survey on how you book travel, a design contest for a trip planner and a poll about Travel Tools. To me this is looking more like human powered search, like a crowd-sourced version of Jason Calcanis’s Mahalo.
Where’s the focus? Is Powerset an explicitly user generated site or a natural language based site? I imagine you can try to be both. However, this runs contrary to the belief that success is reached by doing one thing really, really well and then to expand outwardly.
Travel isn’t the only category listed in the screen shot. You have Health, Shopping, News, Music, Jobs… and Porn. I wonder what sort of “activities”, polls and surveys they’ll have for that particular section? Is this just another ploy to generate buzz without releasing anything of substance? Maybe Powerlabs is just a cleverly hyped porn site, after all it already has the very retro black background.
If you want a bit more information you can check out a video about Powerlabs on YouTube. The company promises more information and videos soon. Until then I’ll mentally file them next to Ginger/IT and Phantom Labs. It is good to see that they’ll be releasing some of their research on user growth rates in the near future in response to a request and an update on TechCrunch. Perhaps there’s more than just hope beyond the hype.
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Hi! Maybe we didn’t make it clear enough that this is a screenshot of Powerlabs, not Powerset. Powerlabs is a community where we’ll test out and get feedback on a lot of natural language products, with travel being one of them. If you check out our blog, you’ll see a screenshot of our current search demo.
[...] of community, Powerset will open up a section of their site called Powerlabs in September. Their goal is to create a social networking site focused around their technology. [...]