It’s not often we hear about a startup’s venture financing before we see the product, but that is the case with yet-to-launch Spock, located in Silicon Valley. Rumors about their $7 million Series A round of financing from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital Ventures circulated last December, months before the beta service was planned to launch.
I met with founders Jaideep Singh (CEO) and Jay Bhatti (VP Product) last week to test the service, which they plan to beta launch next week.
People search is a space that went from nowhere to crowded, fast. Wink changed direction and launched a people search product last November. Also in this space is Streakr (yet to launch), ProfileLinker, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Upscoop.
Spock’s People Search Engine
Unlike the others (for the most part), Spock goes way beyond searching just social networks for people information. They are positioning themselves specifically against Google for web search and Amazon for product search, saying the third important type of search is information about people, and that 30% of Internet searches are people-related. Wink is Spock’s closest competitor among all of the ones listed above.
In my testing, Spock did a great job of finding information about different kinds of people – bloggers, celebrities, and even lesser known individuals with some web presence. See last screenshot below for an example search results page.
People Profiles and Metadata
But part of where Spock really shines is what they do after the search is completed. They are slowly indexing the entire web , which is no small feat, but focusing on important hubs of people information like blogs, wikipedia, photo sites and, of course, social networks. Each person discovered by their search engine is run through a process of de-duping (for people with identical or similar names) and given a permanent profile page (see screenshot of former President Bill Clinton’s profile to right – click for larger view). Spock auto-creates tags for individuals based on the information they find. Prominent tags for Bill Clinton, for example, include “former U.S. President, “Great Leader,” “Womanizer,” “Left Handed,” “Democrat,” and “Saxophonist,” among others. Spock also auto detects other relevant meta data about the individual – age, location and sex.
Users can add new tags and vote on whether existing tags are relevant or correct. Also, individuals can claim their own profile (Spock runs your email through the social networks to see if it is attached to the right profile). Once claimed, that user has additional voting weight with his or her own tags and description. It will be interesting to see prominent individuals fighting the masses as they try to dominate their own identity, and lawsuits will inevitably surface as well.
People Relationships
Spock also finds relationships between people based on an analysis of information obtained in their web index, and based on user added data later on. When looking at a person’s profile, there will be links to others that Spock thinks are related.
Matt Mashall got a very early look at the product last year. See his notes here to see how it has changed since then.
Screenshots (click for larger view):
Wow, that looks impressive.
It’s good to see people are still prepared to innovate in the search-space.
Now that’s a great idea!
I’ve worked for web/technology startups for the last few years and for the recruitment you often can’t afford or don’t have time to hire an agency to follow the process. So after reading the candidate CV the next natural step for me is to Google the person. This product will make my life considerably easier if it’s really slowly indexing everybody with even a minimal presence on the web!
We have been following this company; this service will be useful to those in our industry, especially as their database and technology grows.
If this business model become popular, it will be interesting to see if it gets acquired or ingimitated by the major search engines – who appear persistant in implementing any successful vertical technology.
IMO, this will be an addictive tool – to dig out the info on people. Every time I enter orkut, at least 1 hr is lost before I realize… Seems like spock will be more addictive.
can’t ever see this going mainstream or even being worth more than the funding. People will still just go to google. Now if it comes up high on a google search for people then it might start to spread.
will it spread before they run out of money or get bought now thats the question.
also this space is crowded and if google wakes up to it whats to stop them rolling out people.google.com using their own indexes.
I don’t see anything in those screenies that has not been lifted straight from Wikipedia (via dbpedia, most likely) and been given a 2.0 makeover. What is Spock going to provide that is distinctive? Voting on tags, is that it? What about submitting prose profiles? Is there going to be a wiki free-for-all, or Citizendium-style expert-led stewardship, or isn’t that a priority? Where are they getting their images from? Are they paying for them? Are they going to get model approval from everyone whose picture they show? Do they want to compete with Wikia? Where are the screenshots representing how Spock is “indexing the entire web”? Does it have news aggregation features? Will there be a Google News/Techmeme front page for its news content? What proportion of the 100 million mentioned in the VentureBeat piece come from external databases like Wikipedia and IMdB, and where else are they getting these names from? How many names will have any tags related to them at all? Is there going to be a hierarchical taxonomy of tags or is it completely flat?
A lot of questions, I know, but there isn’t enough meat to go on in this preview IMO.
These “profile linkers” and “people finders” are basically like investing a business plan on someone else’s failure in a sense that, the best social sites will attract most users. And if the most users are on the same site, then why have more than one profile?
Plus, those of us who are OCD refuse to have several websites that we can’t keep track of so we just find one that can fill all of our needs.
The only positive i could see of this is making it easier to get found by stalkers, seeing as how they can go to these sites and search my name and find me on all of the sites i’m on, instead of having to find that site itself. That’s not a big positive, and that’s not a big podium to hold your business on either.
hi Mr. Arrington,
Thanks for this interesting post.
Adam
By the way: have you written anything about SuTree.com?
I saw it in killerstartups.com – it’s their #1 startup and I keep reading about it and seeing posts about it all over the place.
Why are there so many startups that continue to use the faded out blue and orange colour scheme? It’s time for some creativity in their designs – first impressions are everything.
[full disclosure: i am an advisor for Spock]
@Paul: lots of good questions, however i can assure you the profiles are not compiled exclusively from Wikipedia; rather the information is built from multiple publicly-accessible social profiles and disparate sources of people data found on the web. in addition, after compilation into a Spock profile, the user community’s opinion expressed via tags & voting & other measures continues to detail & refine what the profile says about individuals. while similar to Wikipedia in some respects, it is quite different in that Spock focuses exclusively on people data rather than all types of data.
regarding your other questions, the company will be debuting on the Launchpad at Web 2.0 Expo and more information will be made available at that time.
@Josh: your assessment that Spock is built by utilizing other public social data as a foundation is correct — in the same way that Google & Yahoo are built using other public webpage linking data as a foundation for their services. indeed, that’s part of the beauty of the web: we all stand on the shoulders of previous giants.
you’re correct there may be a number of folks who “live” solely within one social networking environment such as MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn, however in the majority of cases most people have profiles on multiple systems. in fact, the trend is significantly expanding more in the direction of having MORE profiles, not consolidating into having LESS. as the “long tail of social profiles” grows, the challenges are more based on discovery, organization, and management of that data. Spock believes there is a significant benefit to people in helping provide a better way to solve those challenges.
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
Are Democrats the only people you can find on it?
It sounds cool.
Wow…this has been long overdue!! Cannot wait for them to roll it out…
how is it different than xoominfo? they’ve been around for last 3 years and I think were doing well for a while….
Am I the only one who is sick and tired of web 2.0 “designs”? All the light green and other pastel colors make me sick already.
It reminds me a bit of Freebase, on how it works, isn’t it? It sounds interesting but i see numerous obstacles on the way to clean results, such as how to handle different versions of information appearing in different sources? Not an uncommon with politicians and celebrities…
Anyway the future is specialized search engines, i hope, so best of luck.
I would be happy, if this service is not used by programs to steal / attempt to breach user credentials
kind rgrds
saran
Still dont get Spock:
1) They claim that 30% of internet searches are people searches. How many of those are celeberity based? (do I really need to go to Spock to learn more about Barrack Obama?). So their differentiation is better UI (web 2.0 packaging)
2) Searching for regular people – I am guessing they are indexing from MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo etc. Again, I am not sure if these social networks are flouting their own TOS’ by handing out profile information to Spock. I dont think I signed up for having my MySpace profile information collected by 3rd parties.
3) They will need to do a terrfic job in SEO/SEM work with Google and Yahoo to try and get in the top page of Search engines – I guess thats why they need the $7 MM.
According to me the fun will start when Spock tries to make $$$ out of these people searches. Thats when I think they will need to cannibalize the social networks by trying to create their own.
This is good. I see many niches coming out of this idea. eg. Rapper search or Rock band only search or something like that.
Good.. Now I can finally find everyone I need to in one place. I can’t wait to make up a bogus bio about myself.
Right now all that comes up is some guy who died on death row.. sucks.
I saw new Blogger trying to emulate Michael Arrington’s anti-venture capitalist post. I got addicted to reading a wasted of money news!
I like it. I can’t wait to read more. They have better way to attack million dollar web 2.0 dot com era.
Wow. Nice…. I like to read more. This is stuff people should do read it!
That’s a really cool idea, I hope the focus is on finding your peers and not the really famous.
I’m doing some interviewing for market research for a site, and everyone I talk to over the age of 35 (who’s not into technology unlike most who probably read this blog) are scared of all these sites. They really like to be more anonymous and really fret over safety and privacy – a lot more worried than I thought they’d be. Unless they’re famous; then it comes with the territory.
Kids (ie anyone under the age of 30)
don’t care, they put up everything and anything about themselves these days and want/expect to be able to find out info instantly about others.
not long before the spoof on spock is “spook”. scary.
Amy,
Ah, but will they when the increasingly find out that the wild party photos and other things that were so fun to do at 18, 19 and 21 come back to bite them when they are 27, 32 and 40?
There are obviously pros as well, but recently there was a girl’s school here (Seattle) which had a woman in to talk about how some of the risks associated with being very public. Several of the students just hadn’t thought of the information the put out there are *really* public – they were sharing with friends and friends of friends. When the speaker dug up a random student’s full name, email and home address in 20 minutes, they were stunned.
On topic – I’d be interested to see how this does in identifying people who are not celebrities. Clinton or Obama are easy. But a search for my name on Google brings up several different people. Which is me? And if Spock gets it wrong and creates a profile page that is inaccurate… and that page does some damage to me – are they liable? Can I get it changed? By aggregating the information and creating a profile page they’re implying that their page is correct and authoritative, something that Google, Yahoo and others aren’t doing.
Rick – definitely – my boss was talking to a school on Career Day and said the same thing to the students. Every single one of them had MySpace pages (although many of them were really computer illiterate, sadly). They too were surprised by that thought that once on the web always on the web. [And they all thought they were going to make $100K salary the minute they graduated too.]
There is a potentially interesting business model emerging here, anybody else see it?
@Amy – only $100k? Kids just aren’t ambitious these days…
@Theo – Um.. no, not really. Oh I could construct a model… but consider this (via Read Write Web
“Hitwise says that Google accounted for 64 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending March 31, 2007. Their main competitors were far behind: Yahoo! Search got 22%, MSN Search 9% and Ask.com 3%. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 5 percent of U.S. searches. “
So, does anyone know when they’re planning to launch
That people searches are the third most common type of search is quite a silly statement. If Google dominates “web searches” it dominates all search. To start segmenting things into “product” search and claiming Amazon dominates that and that Spock will dominate “people” search is stupid.
I could start a new search engine and call it “Searchr” or some similarly stupid Web 2.0 name and claim I will dominate the market for “thing” searches. “Things” represent the most searched for item on the internet!
Seriously, the only play here is a social network. There is already a start-up that does what Spock claims to do called Naymz (http://www.naymz.com/).
I think the entire “meta-social network” concept is dumb. All these things only appeal to the geekiest of geeks. The vast majority of the world doesn’t give a crap about Google Reader. Why? Most of the world doesn’t give a crap about blogs or bloggers or their opinions.
There is far too much noise in this market place. The power belongs to Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Facebook, etc. The rest of these companies are interlopers who can get cut off at any time (are you listening PhotoBucket?).
This is the same reason most people don’t care about:
- Digg
- Redditt
- Ning
- Delicious
- any other mostly worthless site
There are real problems in this world. Keeping track of my various online social networking profiles is not one of them.
The number one rule for an entrepreneur should be: find a pain point and make it better.
There is no pain point here. If someone is really important, I will find them on Wikipedia. If they are decently important, they have a corporate profile or university profile. If they are marginally important, they have a blog. If they are totally unimportant, I really don’t care and I can find them on Google.
Have fun burning through $7 MM.
Interesting read, I cam across spock sometime ago, and still await the launch (would like to be a fly on the wall when they pitched to the VC’s).
Anyhow I think its addictive, BUT BUT, for a short while, we will all goto google eventually, especially since all this data is being collected from the same source google gets its data…except I guess the social networks.
Also what happens if the results for me are wrong, can I claim damages, how is span dealt with, i mean how long before will it take to create spam posts about people, and inflict damage on their profile. I know the article said that they will go through the social networks, matching emails etc, but people have several diff emails, and most still do not display them publicly.
Having said all this, I guess all of us really want to know is where is the $7million, cant be for the robots trawling the web…paid per hour
I like their domain name.
Good think they didn’t call it Stalk.
I’d like to have the access to that site, would you please invite me?
ggarak@naver.com
What an offensive demo at the Web 2.0 launchpad! Can’t believe Mr. Bhatti actually asked the audience comprised of both genders if they would like to see a search of the Swimsuit Illustrated models or the Victoria’s secret models!
He managed to effectively offend practically every woman in the audience with his idiocy and denseness. Spock wants no female users? Good luck with the other 50% of the world population.
@sam:
as an advisor for spock, i’d appreciate hearing more about your perspective on the demo. while i spoke to many people who thought it was a great technology demonstration and were not offended, i also heard from a few folks who thought one of the search examples for models wasn’t in good taste and had negative reactions. i’ve passed on this feedback to spock to think about further.
i believe the folks at spock were simply trying to show representative examples of searches, and data from Google Zeitgeist would indicate that indeed female celebrities & models (along with political & sports celebrities) are some of the more popular topics:
http://www.goog...tgeist2006.html
most people i spoke with at the show did not seem to have a problem with the demo — in fact, the real-time voting from the audience indicated that Spock was the top Launchpad demo that day (76% of voters on Mozes chose Spock), and ZDnet/Cnet named it one of the top 5 products at the entire conference.
however, there were obviously others such as yourself who reacted strongly & negatively to the demo. i’m sure the Spock team is sorry if they offended anyone, and it certainly wasn’t intentional by any means. still, based on the reactions i think Spock is re-considering how they will conduct similar demos in the future, so as not to offend yet still show a wide range of search examples & product functionality.
in any case, thanks for the honest feedback & i’ll make sure they know your perspective.
regards,
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
Sounds like an interesting concept in online people searching. Best of luck.
That,s a great service to business and relationship!
Marcelo
I’m wishing for a better life!!!
oh.. and i’m looking! Lol!!
Hey Guys – I use this site to find old friends.
PeopleSearches.com
http://www.PeopleSearches.com
Here is my resource for cell phone lookups – Canadian Cell Phone Reverse
Hi all -
I have used this site to find people:
peoplesearchfree.net
http://peoplesearchfree.net