Phil Butler Unplugged

As the search saga continues, rumor has it Microsoft is just about to announce it did a little shopping and acquired Powerset – one of the leaders in natural language search. On the other hand, Microsoft’s future plans of buying Yahoo’s search functionalities no longer seem dead and buried, as they’ve teamed up with [...]

Hakia, perhaps the Web’s front-runner in the search race to relevance, just won the coveted Webware 100 award for “Search and Reference”. Of course Webware 100 recognizes the very best in Web 2.0 sites and hakia has been one of the leading innovators in the quest for semantic and more relevant search since last [...]

Voting started the day before yesterday on this years Webware 100. I cast my votes early for some of this years greatest Web 2.0 applications. I must say my all time favorite - hakia - is up there with some good competition in the “search and reference” category, but in my mind there is [...]

Sometimes the most pleasant surprises come from people we think of as sharks, loudmouths or at least hard boiled. Jason Calacanis has taken a good deal of heat over some of his statements (including from me) of late. Calacanis is a high profile individual who’s latest project Mahalo, has seen both positive and negative [...]

If Money And Greed Only Hadn’t Spoiled It
What in the world happened to the promise of Web 2.0? Whatever it was, we are now bogged down in mud hole only slightly resembling the “El Dorado” painted for us over the last 18 months. Innovation after innovation have failed to live up to expectations. Still [...]