Congratulations to the winning companies of the Summer 2008 iVENTURES10 program.
Athena Advertising:
Athena Advertising is building a platform that leverages both social
and contextual information to provide more relevant advertising across
various social networking platforms. Leveraging the team's skills in
designing highly scalable advertising systems and applications for
Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Google, the platform will give social
network users the means to monetize their pages, as well as give social
networks as a whole better tools to monetize their traffic.
Fusion.IM:
Fusion.IM is instant messaging that makes sense. The company is
designing a global messaging platform which will keep contacts
synchronized with and between different social networks, e-mail and IM
platforms. This means that there will be no need to manage your buddy
list with contacts that have real names and information. A lightweight
version of the fusion client on these social networks will be made
available for both browsers and mobile devices.
Vision Assisted Fashion Search (Real name TBA):
Online shopping currently provides the advantage of quicker querying
over multiple catalogs as compared to conventional means of shopping.
For some items (e.g. electronics), a text query is appropriate, whereas
for clothing a visual description is more suitable. The company will
use its expertise in machine learning and computer vision to design
better visual search for fashion.
News Aggregation and Categorization (Real name TBA):
The company is designing a service that aggregates news articles and
blog posts and classifies them based on various factors such as
referenced companies, article type, and target audience. The team will
use a proprietary algorithm that is able to extract the general
sentiment of the article based on a variety of features. The news feeds
can be accessed and searched quickly through both a browser interface
as well as through subscribed e-mail and RSS alerts.


Hello Rob,
You wrote some interesting articles. I am particularly interested in Fusion.IM and News Aggregation and Categorization services.
Posted by: The Kingston Chronicle | October 18, 2008 at 02:15 PM