Genieo - Your Personal Homepage

From Plight to Flight – Courtesy of St. Genieo

Genieo — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:37:58 +0000

Anybody who has an Auntie as ferocious as my aunt Matilda should have no problem relating to this plight of mine – Birthday remembering!
Aunt Matilda is 85 years old and at the respectable stage at which one is privileged to forget anything they so wish, without having to account for it to any of their peers. And Aunt Matilda, if I may say so, seems to enjoy exploiting this privilege to the farthest extent of even forgetting my name.
Until her birthday of course!
On each and every birthday of hers, Aunt Matilda appears to be bestowed upon with the heavenly gift of a most perfect moment of clarity, resulting in a wonderfully acute aptitude of memory, one which wouldn’t shame an elephant!
Unfortunately this miracle seems to always happen in full coincidence with a sudden loss of memory on my part!
“Abi” I would hear her croaky, ill foreboding voice on the phone, “haven’t you forgot something?”
Agrhhh… I shudder to further describe this dreadful moment.
Fortunately enough, my best friend Jerome from Genieo came to my aid yet again. As it turns out, Genieo has incorporated a new birthday reminder into my personal homepage (which has become my right hand since the exhilarating incident with the Dodo bird chase).
This feature apparently connects Genieo to my Facebook account and enables it to notify me of my friends’ birthdays! So now I can finally enjoy the bliss of forgetfulness, knowing safely that Genieo will alert me of Aunt Matilda’s birthday right on time!
All I had to do now was to create a Facebook account for Aunt Matilda and register her as my friend. While at it, I took the opportunity to register her with as many friends as would accept her on Facebook, for the chance of her being as busy as possible on her birthday, being showered on with greetings and E-cards and what have you (all courtesy of St. Genieo of course).
I dare say, Aunt Matilda’s upcoming birthday promises to be truly happy!

P.S. (Can you say PS on the internet or is it ePS? Never mind) I should mention that I have acquired quite a bit of popularity on Facebook and twitter as well, using Genieo’s Share function with my Dodo bird expedition findings. I could disperse my news among all my colleagues with a single click of a button, in real time, at my highest stage of enthusiasm, and receive their bravo instantly. Very satisfying I’ll have you know.
Unfortunately, using the same function on Aunt Matilda’s profile (to incite my colleagues to remember her birthday of course…) has caused her to become more popular than me! My colleagues seem to find her quite a catch… Anyway my friends, I would advise you to use Genieo’s Share function wisely. It is alarmingly efficient!

A few pics from the Genieo launch @ Demo Spring 2010

Genieo — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:37:49 +0000

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A Ghost From The Machine V2.0

Genieo — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:42:05 +0000

Well my friends, it seems the impossible does sometimes happen, and given the right technology it can even come to your attention.
My hand was shaking when I dialed my friend’s number on the phone.
“Jerome” I shrieked as he answered on the other side, “You are not going to believe this…”
“I know” he answered calmly.
“How?!” I wondered and then… “Wait a minute! WHAT do you know?”
“A Dodo bird has been sighted”
“Yes” I jumped, “Genieo told me. It just brought it up for me… But how did you…?
“After our last conversation about your Dodo bird interest, I tried to browse for some information on it, just to test Genieo you know, and right as rain, it brought it up for me as well”
As it turns out, a professor Charles Diddly-McFly who happens to be the highest authority on the subject, as well as a known misanthrope, has been keeping a Dodo bird watch somewhere at the end of the world, on which he wrote a daily blog describing his findings – not something anybody is likely to come across on the web, but then professor Diddly-McFly doesn’t give a Dodo’s behind on who reads him really. So luckily for me, Genieo found his blog for me and impossible as it may sound, the man is actually tracking a Dodo bird as we speak.
“I’ve got my bag packed” I informed Jerome “and I’m heading for the coordinates the old hag has just published in his blog. Care to join me?”
“I’m afraid I can’t” answered Jerome, “I’m leaving soon myself for a demo presentation of Genieo we’re giving in Palm Desert. We’ve just made it compatible with iPhone and we’d like to tell the world about it.”
“And a good thing too” I agreed, “it would be lovely if other people could share my fortune. I have one problem though and I wonder if you can help me”
“What is it?” asked my friend.
“Well, as Diddly-McFly is my only source on this, and I have to keep track on his blog while I’m looking for him and the Dodo at the end of the world, which may not have proper internet connection as one may expect, I was wondering if you could track his blog for me and I’ll call you once in a while for an update”
“I’d love too” answered Jerome as a good friend should, “However, you don’t really need me for this. You can follow your Genieo yourself from your own iPhone from wherever you are”
“What? My iPhone? Why didn’t you say?”
“I just did” he replied and indeed I couldn’t argue. He did mention something about Genieo, Palm Desert and iPhone which got lost in my Dodo excitement.
“Are you serious?” I tried to redeem some dignity.
“Yes” he let me have it.
“Good then” I settled the matter, “How do I make it work for me?”
“I’m coming over” replied Jerome, “It’ll take a minutes to setup”
“Thank heaven for technology” I exclaimed excited.
“Is your iPhone’s battery fully charged?” asked prudent Jerome.
I checked….
“Damn it!”

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Santa’s new virtual little helper

Genieo — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:34:15 +0000

At some point I noticed the banging on the door.
Jerome looked utterly flabbergasted.
“You’re alive!” he exclaimed.
“Of course” I retorted, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Why don’t you answer your phone and you email?!” He almost shouted. “Everybody’s been trying to get in touch with you for ages”
“Phone?” I wondered, “I never even heard it. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure I know how it sounds like. Gerard used to deal with these sorts of trivialities… to tell you the truth…” I felt my heart sink, “I’m not the same now without my Gerard… I’m telling you Jerome, I feel like too much is happening and I just can’t keep track of it all. Gerard knew me. He knew how to get everything I liked. Now I seem to be wasting half my life filtering what I like from what not. You know he even used to sift through my Facebook and Twitter messages, and show me only the interesting ones. He even helped me research my project, you know, The Mating Dance Properties of the Dodo Bird – he was good at finding things on the net. Now all I get is this irrelevant crap! How do you call it?… you had a name for it at Genieo…?
“Information overload” smiled Jerome.
“Exactly” I answered, “Do you think there’s any chance Gerard will consent to return to my service?”
“Not the slightest” chuckled Jerome, “He’s mentioned a few times how happy he is working at Genieo and how un… well, no need to go into it any further”
“Oh…” I mumbled, “Right… then what am I to do now?”
“I’ll tell you what” Jerome looked smug all of a sudden, “We’re about to release the Beta version of Genieo any day now, But I’ll let you have it now”
“What?!” I startled, “Are you suggesting I replace Gerard with a piece of software?”
“Well, it’s the next best thing” Answered Jerome calmly.
“You must be joking…”
“No” he persisted, “Think about it. Your biggest hassle these days is about handling information; sorting the relevant from the irrelevant, maintaining contact, keeping updated… this is exactly what Genieo does for you, and without you having to tell it anything. Genieo will automatically learn what you like, and get it for you. And now with all the features we’ve integrated into the Beta version, it’s even better. It’ll fetch top news headlines from your favorite sources, right to your homepage; filter your Facebook and Twitter messages by your preferred topics of interest; It will explore the web for you and bring you updates and new information on the topics you specifically care about; it will provide you with live updates of ongoing events you’re following and so much more. I’m telling you, it’s practically a Gerard. It’s even based on him”.
“Well, I can’t very well shout at it when I feel like it, now can I? … and then apologize, of course”
“Why not? It won’t mind – less than Gerard anyway. That’s where being a piece of software comes in handy”
“Oh… OK. Well, you have me interested. I’ll give it a try” I consented, “By the way does it make coffee?”
“No” Smiled Jerome “But it does make interesting reading for coffee time”
“As long as it has something to do with Dodo Birds”

Genieo Goes Live! The First Fully Automatic And Personalized Newspaper for Web Users

Genieo — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:13:11 +0000

Without lifting a finger, web users now have a smart and easy way to automatically filter their news, blogs and social networks according to their own personal interests

Genieo enables layman web users to experience information in a way that will keep them continuously updated on the topics they care about

Herzliya, Israel, February 16th, 2010 – Ever imagined a place where all your personal web content is centralized, after being automatically filtered according to your specific topics of interest, including your favorite news, blogs, videos, and even your Twitter and Facebook stream updates?

Genieo is a newspaper styled homepage, designed exclusively for you, and featuring personalized news and information specifically relevant to your interests. Offering a new informational experience for all Internet users, Genieo adapts to your online behavior, saves you time and helps discover items of interest to you, all in a process which requires zero management and in which your information remains completely private.

Genieo is available for download at www.genieo.com,

How does it work? Genieo is a desktop application employing a new technology called Micro-Behavioral-Targeting (MBT), pioneered by Genieo Innovation. MBT continuously studies the user’s individual topics of interest from his browsing activity, follows them as they form and evolve, and accordingly forms connections with sources of information across the web which are most relevant to the user’s interests. For example, a reader who has been recently following the latest news about baseball player Derek Jeter will be updated not with general sports stories, or all articles concerning baseball, or all news about the New York Yankees, but with news specifically relating to Jeter himself, ranging from news sites, blogs, tweets, and more.

Genieo automatically identifies and continuously adapts to any changes of the user’s topics of interest – so that the user doesn’t have to manually predefine his topics or set categories.

Additionally, Genieo discovers RSS feeds while the user browses the web, it ranks and then manages these sources, (automatically opting in/out from feeds) based on the individual changing interests.

What does it look like? The user receives items of his/her interests in the following categories of content:

1. Top Headlines – Latest headlines from a user’s most visited news portals, irrespective of topic.
2. Hot Items – Topic-focused items, most read by other internet users. Genieo also deliver to the user the most read and popular news articles according to his/her topics of interest, in addition to the items from news portals and blogs he/she most frequently visits.
3. Follow-up items on news articles the user has previously read, so that he/she doesn’t miss any updates on stories he/she cares about.
4. Up-to-the-minute updates on live events followed by the user (i.e. sports, technology conferences, presidential speeches, award shows, etc).
5. Interesting Items – Topic focused items of the highest interest to the user, and from his most frequently visited sites.
6. Facebook and Twitter updates filtered according to the user’s most recent topics of interest.

Unlike other personalization solutions, Genieo does not collect any private information. As a desktop application, Genieo’s entire mapping and profiling process is performed solely on the user’s computer, and for the first time, you can enjoy a personalization engine that does not involve any server side interaction. This way the user’s private information remains always with him/her, and none of it is shared in anyway with any third party, or anywhere on the web. Furthermore, Genieo respects secure content and automatically disables itself once the user navigates into secure sites, such as emails boxes or online calendars.

“Genieo marks a new era for information management – “Mashup Personalization” – where all personalized and relevant content is centralized in one place,” said Sol Tzvi, CEO and Co-Founder of Genieo. “In the current online content model, with everything being highlighted, nothing seems important. So if we want to know what’s happening in our world, we need a smart tool to serve as a human algorithm and highlight the most promising choices for us. Genieo makes this concept a reality.”

Genieo currently works on Microsoft Windows via Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, with additional browser integration planned in the future. The application is currently compatible with the following languages: English, French, Italian, German, Russian, Spanish and Hebrew.

Personalize, Personalize, Personalize!

Genieo — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:27:15 +0000

It’s ok to admit it. As useful, fun, and informative as the web is in revolutionizing the way we communicate, work, learn and relax, it’s all quite overwhelming. How many of us visit over 10 different sites every day, not including those which we visit every few days, or simply occasionally? How much time passes as we try to see what we might have missed, even overnight, or perhaps for just a few hours? List of web “things to do”: 1. Check the local, national and world news. 2. Let’s read about last’s night game, and what the different bloggers have to say about it. 3. I heard about a really cool new netbook – what do the reviews have to say? 4. Email. 5. Facebook. 6. Twitter. 7. Crucial stock market developments…the list goes on and on. As the Internet continues to change the way we live our lives, from following friends on what seems to be an endlessly increasing number of social networks, to being able to search in real time for almost any information on Google, Yahoo or Bing, software developers, desktop application providers and mobile operators need to think about ways to ‘organize’ and personalize our web experience. The personalization of the web is not new. With a growing list of RSS readers, customized home pages, and software that helps better coordinate various social networks to be a lot easier to keep up with, the process is clearly in motion. Behavioral targeting – both in real-time search, targeted advertising and more – appears poised to become one of the most influential web trends in 2010. As the average Internet user – not just the technology geek – becomes more familiar with RSS feeds, online news blogs, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter continue to grow at lightning speed, they too will soon demand programs that will act as a “personal assistant” in helping them sift through the “mess” of all their communication and information channels. We even may see the development of enterprise-focused applications as well that will actually cause bosses to encourage their employees to use the Internet, and to allow their key information (important litigation news for lawyers, stock news for financial advisors, etc.) and business development networking tools up-to-date and well organized. Providers of personalization programs, however, must meet a few key demands for the average Internet user to buy into the program and trust the process. Privacy and security remain the primary concerns among respondents to studies on the subject, and developers must find a way to balance ‘studying’ Internet behavioral data without compromising on the clear limits to web confidentiality and the safety of important bit of information. Secondly, with time and simplicity being of the essence, personalization tools must be as accurate, but as user-friendly as possible. Personalization should be stressed over customization – the user should not have to spend time adjusting settings, and practically setting their own preferences, but rather as personalization tools continue to develop, they should become almost a mirror image of the users preferred content. Third, the personalization tools should be as comprehensive as possible. As the technology develops, we should see emails, video and audio content, additional social networks, and more be part of the all-encompassing personalization platforms, in addition to already existing RSS readers and personalized homepages aggregating news sites. And finally, as with all technologies on the web, a viable revenue model must be developed to allow the technology to be financially self-sustaining. Targeted advertising being just one example, personalization program must adapt quickly to keep itself going. Overall though, one thing does seem abundantly clear – that with the web only getting bigger, we need ways to make it more approachable. Privacy, Accuracy and Simplicity will hopefully be the key elements that will guide the technology forward in the year ahead.

The secret of service

Genieo — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:56:37 +0000

“Gerard” I informed my butler this morning, “Your services are no longer required”
“May I inquire why?” Gerard asked, and the underlining tone of ‘You will not last 24 hours without me’ did not escape my acute sense of observation.
“You are too conspicuous” I retorted mildly.
And after all, really, one should not be expected to be constantly busy himself with respect to being serviced.
The idea came to my mind after a brief yet very informative conversation with Jerome, a good friend of mine who works with Genieo. Apparently, at Genieo, although in the software realm, they’ve managed to make proper sense of what is considered service.
I mean, really, if one wanted to do things for himself one would not require service. And what is the use of service if it is thrusted upon one in an impersonal manner which would require one to constantly service his own service provider by providing him with the particulars of which he would like to be serviced with. Personally, I truly find this utterly boring.
“The whole idea of service is to be inconspicuous” said Jerome and captured my immediate attention, “And personalized of course” he added inevitably. “The service provider should gather all the information about you without making fuss and without you having to bother about it yourself, and present the service to you in a way that all you have to do is just enjoy the results”.
“Cheers!” I exclaimed. “Are you looking for a job?”
I was just joking of course. Jerome is quite happy working with the team at Genieo.
It seems some people are perfectly happy investing their time, efforts and resources in researching and developing something which is designed to service you and precisely you in a perfectly individual manner.
In their case, it’s software. “This software” explains Jerome, “will study your interests, inconspicuously, and respectively will run around the internet and search for things which you may find interesting, presenting it in regular updates on a personal start page of your own, right to your browser”
“Smashing!” I said, “I’ve got to fire my butler!”
And so it happened. However, I’m not as heartless as that and I found Gerard another job.
At Genieo.
Yes. He’ll just be hanging around there, setting an example of how to render a perfect conspicuous service, and thus helping the team to come up with all possible ways to avoid it.
After all, research is everything.

Don’t stereotype me

Sol Tzvi — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:46:07 +0000

Collaboration vs. Personalization Approach
Personalization is all about people experiencing personalization; it cannot be answered on statistical model of future behavior prediction alone, but as something that one has lived through.
Personalized experience is a subjective observation in everybody’s life and it’s always personal feeling of emotions and sensations as opposed to thinking.
Now days, because of monetization reasons corporate are trying to answer the question of how to better serve their customers in order to increase revenues.
Matching between services and an online person is the new killer feature on the internet today.
How can we force the digital box to think out of the box and start the new digital life spine?

In order to implement personalization mechanism the system should predict in some level what will catch the user’s attention at any giving time.
On the Matrix movie, the Oracle told Neo not to worry about the vase, as Neo turns to look for a vase, and as he does, he knocks over a vase of flowers, which shatters on the floor. Then the Oracle asks Neo “would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?”
Did the Oracle predict what’s going to happen or maybe she manipulates Neo and cause him to break the vase and does it really matter? Either way, Neo experienced this situation as prophecy.

Our individuality is unique
Recommendation system needs to predict person’s choice and interest and also to make a persona create new behavior. Personalization is happening when the content adapts itself based on the person’s profile, and provides something new, different, and possibly unexpected, is this a paradox? Does the human’s minds so predictive?
In order to provide a working recommendation system, there are two major methods;

- Collaboration Filtering (CF); recommendation agents employ prediction algorithms to provide users with items that match their interests based on their virtual community.
- Profile-based recommendation; history as an indication of user’s current or future desires.
Both methods have pros and cons and the combination of both will be a good predictor for any recommendation system.

Collaboration filtering, predict a person interest by analyzing the behavior of the virtual tribe he belongs to at any given moment. By being one of many alike, we all feel special but do we act the same or we’re all individuals?

Behavioral patterns
Can our past behavior predict our future behavior?
If you will ask a person how he will react in a certain situation, although he can’t really know, his answer will be based on his past, based on his intention and past behavior-future behavior relations.
Previous experience is our best way to answer any question that should predict our actions in the future, we can imagine it, we can vision our self’s based on our beliefs, faith and hopes.
But is previous behavior is the best predictor of our future interest? In some extant probably yes, but as our intention is dynamically changing the personalization system that based only on our past behavior probably won’t predict what will be our next click…

As I mentioned at the beginning, personalized experience is a subjective observation and it’s always, always a personal feeling of emotions, so I must state that I don’t feel well when the big news portals stereotype me based on my virtual tribe.

By: Sol Tzvi,CEO
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What is Most Important to You?

Lior Gavish — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:48:05 +0000

If asked to list those things most important to you, answers given would range from family, friends, and God, to career success, good health, romance, or world peace. At Genieo Innovation, we understand the value of constantly staying connected with what matters to you most, quickly and effectively. With an ever increasing and seemingly overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet to sift through each day, we decided to help you make it simple to focus on the things that are most important for you when reading on the web. Our goal is to eliminate the need to handpick the articles you want to read from numerous RSS feeds and sites. Instead, we provide a web startpage that shows you the items that are most relevant to your interests.
No more manual management of news readers, separate checking of your social networking sites, and more – we believe we have a good understanding of the mix of categories that make up what you want to know, based on your recent Internet behavior. It’s simply a reflection of what your interests are already, without you having to customize anything – we even decided to design our startpage according to the following categories
At the top, you will find what we term objective hot. These are essentially the main headlines from the news portals you frequently visit. Why are they important? Simply because these headlines are the hottest in the world, what you need to know NOW. You do not really want to remain wordless when people chat about the latest hostage crisis, right?
Right below, we provide subjective hot headlines. These items are hot by considering which have most recently grabbed your attention, or your friends’ latest attention. You will typically find follow-up items on unfolding news stories you have been tracking. You will also see items posted by your Facebook and Twitter friends. Oh, don’t worry, not just any item your friends posted – only those that are important to you.
Finally, we recognize that you might be interested in issues that are not currently “hot”. The headlines at the bottom part of the page might relate to your favorite NBA team, the rock band you can’t live without, the latest IPO or all of the above. In short, topics you find interesting, but only occasionally pop up in the news.
All in all, we believe that this balance of items – ranging from the attention of the entire world to your specific areas of interest – provides a COMPLETE, COMPREHENSIVE and PERSONALIZED experience. And you do not have to do anything at all to get all that! We analyze what headlines deserve your attention fully and automatically. More on how we do that next time.

By: Lior Gavish, Algorithm Developer

How to Automatically Build Your Feed List, Part I

Amos Yoffe — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:44:15 +0000

News feeds (or RSS feeds, as they’re sometimes called) are a great way to keep up-to-date with the latest from your favorite web sites. Be it news, blog posts, tweets, search queries and more – most of the content out there is available as a news feed.

Rather than having to “pull” new information by each time visiting browsing your top sites all over the Web, you can use a Feed Reader application to subscribe to your favorite sites’ feeds. The Feed Reader will periodically fetch the latest feeds from all your sites and “push” the new content to you as it is published.

Feed readers are nice (my favorite is Google Reader, even Microsoft Outlook reads feeds), but they have a few problems. One of the annoying things about feed readers is that you have to manually “subscribe” to new feeds if you want the reader to fetch them for you – it’s sort of like having to bookmark your favorite sites, only more of a pain. And keeping your feed list updated with new sites you’ve discovered, removing feeds you’re not interesting in anymore and various other maintenance chores can get pretty tedious. I know my bookmarks are in pretty rough shape, and my feed list is even worse.

Here at Genieo Innovation, we help fight information overload by bringing you only the content that’s relevant to you. We wanted to use news feeds to get some of this information from your favorite web sites, since they’re a widely supported industry standard, but we didn’t want to require you to maintain tedious feed lists and filters. So we’ve developed a system that allows us to build your feed list automatically – no participation is required on your part.

So how does it work? You browse web sites, which are made of HTML pages. Some HTML pages contain a special link that points to a news feed with related content. Many web sites, although not all, use these special links. Browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer even display a special button when they find these links, allowing you to easily view and subscribe to these feeds.

So imagine what would happen if a small application (say, a browser addon) would make a note of all these feed links, as you’re browsing the Web. You’d end up with a list of all the feeds from all your favorite web sites! No extra work on your part whatsoever.

But this approach presents a few problems. Perhaps the biggest problem is that a lot of the feeds on this list might not be truly interesting for you. Wikipedia’s most recent changes, for example, is not something I care to be updated about, even though I browsed many pages that link to it. So how do we figure out which feeds are actually important to you? More on that in a future post. In the meanwhile, happy feeding!
By: Amos Yoffe, Genieo Core Development
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