Looking back at 2008
Posted on Wednesday, December 31, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs
2008 had its ups (Beijing Olympics & Paralympics) and downs (Sichuan earthquake, snow disasters and unfortunately many more), but for Linkool Labs, it has been an amazing year! We launched Juice (beta) on the very last day of October and have since been downloaded well over 38,000 times. Our second product, Live Margins (bundled into the Firefox China Edition), launched three weeks later in partnership with Mozilla Online and has also seen massive downloads and activity, even many times that of Juice.
Juice has been written about on well over 800 websites, ranging from personal blogs to TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb (also mentioned in their post ”10 more semantic apps to watch”), The Next Web and Ars Technica.
Here are some quotes from those sources:
The powerful plugin automatically culls information from around the web whenever you search for or highlight a term, making it a handy reference tool that I could quickly get used to. -Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch
Juice is ridiculously easy - and addictive - to use. -Rick Turoczy, ReadWriteWeb
Even the Applications area offers some nice UI polish, as images can be double-clicked to view a larger version in Juice’s sidebar, with links to open the image’s direct URL or originating URL. -David Chartier, Ars Technica
The team at Linkool Labs was also highly touched by the amazing webcasts created by others about our product:
Like this video by Wisibility (in French).
And this video created by Demo Girl.
Our own video (YouTube, Vimeo) has been watched nearly 43,000 times.
Huge thanks go out to all of our users, partners and friends, but also to Twitter (for helping us keep in touch with users) and Get Satisfaction for making it easy to help our users and exchange valuable ideas.
Which brings us to what’s in store for 2009. We believe that 2009 will be an excellent year for the Semantic Web and also believe that through our patent-pending intelligent discovery engine we will be able to play a significant role in the evolution of the internet. We have many exciting new features and products lined up for this year, that will introduce innovative contextual features to the browser with that same ease-of-use that Juice already introduced late 2008, making it even more easy to navigate the web in an age of information abundance.
Linkool Labs wishes you a great 2009!
Firefox’s distribution in China to bundle a localized adaptation of Juice
Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 by Mark Tong
For Chinese users eager to see a more comprehensive, seamless integration of Firefox and Linkool’s technology, here’s some good news: a localized adaptation of Juice is now bundled in the latest Chinese-language Firefox distribution, to be publicly released by Mozilla Online today. This Firefox release marks the first time that third-party extensions are bundled into an official Firefox release, and we at Linkool are proud to be a part of this historic milestone in Mozilla’s history!
This localized adaptation of Juice, branded “Live Margins”, is the result of nearly half a year of tireless collaboration between the folks at Mozilla Online, the China subsidiary of the Mountain View, CA-based Mozilla Corporation, and Linkool Labs. Live Margins’ backend is fully supported by Linkool’s proprietary intelligent discovery engine and keyword management system. At the UI-level, Live Margins offers many of Juice’s exciting features, including Magic results, drag & drop ease of use and intuitive media storage.
Live Margins is specially localized for the China market with different content sources, a different UI language (in Chinese), and tailored applications. To cater to the China market, Live Margins takes full advantage of Mozilla Online’s local partnerships and culls rich content from popular Chinese language sources, including Baidu (search), Youku (online video), Yobo (music sampling), Dianping (restaurant review), Sina (stock and music) and many others.
The partnership between Linkool and Mozilla Online aims to be a shining example of innovation in the China market, fostering the development of a vibrant Firefox developer community and encouraging Chinese web properties to open their content to a wider audience through public API access and increased platform interoperability.
To check out Live Margins, please go to: g-fox.cn.
Related: download our Press Kit
Thirsty? Start squeezing now!
Posted on Friday, October 31, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs
Folks - the wait is over; we at Linkool Labs are releasing Juice into public beta today!
Juice, our intelligent discovery engine, has been in private beta in the past two months. With helpful feedback from our private beta users, we have tweaked our user interface and our backend system with the goal of creating the best, most fulfilling experience for all our users.
Now that Juice is in public beta, we welcome everyone to go to juiceapp.com to download and try out Juice. When you have a spare moment, please also check out our brand-new, absolutely rockin’ webcast that will give you a quick start guide on Juice.
We value any and all feedback! If you have ideas on how to improve Juice, don’t hesitate to drop us an email.
Happy squeezing!
Related: download our Press Kit
Kungfumaster visits Linkool Labs
Posted on Monday, October 27, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs
Kungfumaster plugs Juice.
Juice’s sidebar supper
Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs
The browser is the new Operating System; we’re not claiming it, you guys are! And we couldn’t agree more. That’s why we believe we got it right by casting our intelligent discovery engine, Juice, in the form of a browser plugin. Building an application on top of the browser allows us to do things that web-based applications can not (although we have some exciting goodies coming up in that area too). Unlike a web-based application that is always parked under a URL, our plugin is always accessible and always available to the user as long as the browser is open. Even if the user chooses to hide Juice, we’re always standing by to help the user find that juicy piece of rich content.
By delivering rich content inside the browser’s sidebar, Juice enables you, the user, to keep browsing while the rich content is neatly juxtaposed nearby. For example, you can now watch your favorite YouTube videos in the sidebar while you keep browsing in your normal browser window, with both your browsed content and Juice’s rich content available in plain view.
In order to make Juice the friendliest piece of UI out there, we implemented several ways with which you can trigger Juice. You could try highlighting text and dragging it (just a bit or all the way), dragging an image, or grabbing the tab that pops up next to a flash video. You could also try right-clicking content and bring up several Juice options in a context menu as well. Moreover, Juice cleverly listens to what you search for in the browser’s default search box, and finds you that juicy piece of rich content just when you may need it.
Many of our competitors choose to bother you with in-text pop-ups or rollovers that, in our opinion, disrupt your browsing experience. We strongly believe that you should be able to browse the web uninterrupted, and enjoy a rich experience only when you want it. Pre-defined pop-up content (or, horrors!, pop-ups with nothing but ads) just won’t pass the user-friendliness muster with us.
Our public release is coming very soon! In the mean time, we welcome you to sign up for our private beta at juiceapp.com (try the unlock code juiceblog, for which we’ve just extended more invites).
The Juice perspective
Posted on Wednesday, October 08, 2008 by Xiaofeng Jin
Web 2.0 is a revolution that enables the development and evolution of the Internet - not merely as an information repository but as an information-based community that fosters creativity, collaboration, and sharing.
This revolution not only sets off an explosion of information creation, creative collaboration, and sharing, but has given birth to a plethora of web services, each hosting and delivering targeted, topical information related to certain aspects of our lives. Nevertheless, only a few services and their respective communities have become so integrated into our online experience that we devoutly spend time on them. Often enough, we simply don’t remember those services even when they can be most helpful to us.
While search query provides an effective means to find the links to these services and the information they host, it also requires extra clicks, especially when the desired result is not on the first page of search results. For certain search queries, e.g., “Gone with the wind”, do we verily need over four million search results? Or will we be better served if we obtain targeted results from service leaders for each Internet category, e.g. Wiki encyclopedic content, Youtube videos, and e-commerce offerings from Amazon?
Juice’s Magic is a mash-up of rich content from these service leaders. Through Linkool’s intelligent discovery engine, Juice identifies distinctive attributes for the keyword “Gone with the wind”: the name of a movie; an old movie; a book etc. Based on matching the keyword “Gone with the wind” with these attributes, Juice assembles a summary from Wikipedia, a list of video clips from Youtube (with comments from viewers) and shopping options on Amazon.com, and then displays the assembled mash-up as Magic. Juice is therefore bringing services and information closer to us even as the breadth of available services and information becomes more profound.
Magic is not designed for all types of search queries. For example, for the search query “who is Microsoft’s executive leader”, Juice may not find any distinctive attributes, and therefore, may not know what rich content to display. What Juice is designed for, however, are keywords that are clearly attributable. For example, if the search query is “Steve Ballmer”, Juice assembles Magic with a biographical summary from Crunchbase, some user-uploaded videos on Youtube featuring a passionate Ballmer, and news items about the CEO. Juice also provides a plain-vanilla search engine result for “Steve Ballmer” to complement Magic and make the information discovery experience more complete and fulfilling.
As the Web 2.0 revolution brings forth more structured rich content as well as web services that allow easy access to the content, we see the benefits of not just intelligently matching keywords with the content, but also assembling and then displaying the content. Our research on the technical and usability aspects of such an experience is reflected in Juice and the Magic it provides.
Design decisions
Posted on Saturday, September 27, 2008 by Thijs Jacobs
Before publicly releasing Juice, we’d like to share with you some of our design decisions related to our exciting new browser plugin. Plenty of healthy challenges abound when designing a plugin, as we try to come up with a design that works and conveys a large amount of information in a confined space. Juice is designed to be as non-intrusive as possible, but we want to make sure that, even when the user hides our Juice sidebar, we’re still able to alert the user when our intelligent discovery engine finds new information.
When the Juice sidebar is hidden, our main communication interface with the user is our icon in the browser’s navigation bar. The icon itself is designed to convey four different application states: an idle state, a loading state (a cycle of 5 separate images), a discovery state and an open state.
Traditionally, this 32 pixel piece of icon real estate (in the case of most modern browsers) is rarely used and we wanted to tackle the challenge of alerting the user, without using any pop-ups, words or sounds. At the same time, we tried to stay as close as possible to our Juice mantra of “squeezing” the web. The final result, nicknamed the “Mexican”, is a rich and compelling icon set, using both animation and bright orange colors to indicate state changes. We hope you’ll like, and hopefully love, our “Mexican”, as much as we do!
As a bonus, we’re giving away 50 invites to Juice; unlock code: juiceblog
The final icon design is the work of our excellent designer Frank Müller.