Uclue: Google Answers Reborn

Google Abandoned Google Answers in late 2006, after experimenting with it for 4 years. But now, some researchers from the Google Answers team have started their own service, Unclue.

The model is similar to the failed google service with minute differences like payments by paypal instead of credit card, support of Spanish and German Languages alongwith English.

From signup to asking a question everything is easy to use and accomplish. Uclue would be charging in the range of $5-250 to be paid in advance. Questions could be canceled and refunded if the answer is unsatisfactory or remains unanswered for 30 days.

Can a startup pull off what one of the most prolific companies of our age couldn’t, by changing the mode of payment and adding multiple language support. I am not so bullish on this from the upstart.

Other Q&A services include Live QnA, Yedda, Ether, Bitwine, Guruza, Answerbag, Tinbag, Amazon’s Askville, and offcourse the market leader Yahoo Answers.

Shop Visually With Mpire´s Shopwave

Mpire which launched initially in November 2006, has launched Shopwave, a service that lets you shop visually using a Flash based tool.

The User Interface is clean and simple with a rich feature set. The feature that i liked the most is the ability to visualize the price trends of your desired items in recent days. This way users could make informed decision on buying immediately or holding on for a few more days.

Other features include mashup of Amazon and Epinions to provide user reviews on site along with coupons and deals, plugin support for IE7 and Firefox, Digg like voting on popular deals and the ability to describe your item visually in case you don’t know exactly what you are looking for.

Visual shopping is an exciting space and we are beginning to see startups like Browse Goods, Riya´s Like.com and theFind.com targeting this market.

Also see Mashable and Techcrunch.

Geni: Social Network for the Family Raises $10M in Second Round

Geni, which could rightfully be called a Social Network for the family has raised $10 million in their second round of financing from Charles River Ventures at a post money valuation of $100 million, which is a staggering amount considering the fact that the service is just a few weeks old. George Zachary from CRV will be joining the Geni Board. Geni initially raised $1.5 million from the Founder’s Fund.

Geni currently boosts 100,000 registered users with 2 million family nodes.

Geni provides an extremely easy to use Flash based family tree. When you fill out your family tree, the family members are mailed (optional) to register and help out in building the family tree. I have not come across a social network that is more usable than Geni. Signup is a breeze, and all you need to do after this is to add your parents and here you go. It would be interesting to look at the tree in some years. Many people would come across family members that they haven’t even heard off before.

Geni plans to launch support for localization, messaging between family members, audio, video and photo storage and sharing and other social networking goodies along with the ability to automatically merge overlapping family trees. They would also be integrating with Google Maps to find out where a family member currently is.

An integration with Linkedin would create a network of family members along with their business relationships, thereby making it even more killer. All in all this is a social network to watch out for.

AddThis To Solve The Social Bookmarking Clutter

AddThis is a new widget service that was launched in October 2006. With so many bookmarking services popping up these days, something like this was imminent. By Creating an account on AddThis blog and site owners could generate a simple, free button that could be placed at the end of posts (see sample button at the end of this post). Readers can then bookmark the post on Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks, Technorati, Reddit and the likes with a single click on the button. The service also provides with statistics including content that your readers bookmarked the most, over various periods of time.

AddThis claims that they have served 100+ million buttons to-date, with 2 million buttons being served daily.

From a usability perspective AddThis removes the clutter of multiple bookmarking icons at the end of the posts and replaces them with a clean single button. However this creates indirection and in order to bookmark something you will have to click on the AddThis button and then select the bookmarking service on the next page. Clearly this is an execution speed vs less clutter scenario. Apart from this, the service is easy to use and is gathering steam.

Also see Techcrunch´s take on this.

OctoPart: A Vertical Search Engine for Gadget Parts

Octopart is a vertical search engine that lets electronics buyers find great deals by aggregating product data provided by Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, mouser and Newark InOne. Octopart is YCombinator backed and was started by two physics grad students who got tired of searching for identical electronic parts in lots of different catalogs.

Octopart already supports advanced search features like wildcard searches, phrase and boolean matching. Results include price comparisons, specs of the parts in pdf fromat along with images.

The User Interface of Octopart is clean, tidy and extremely usable. As of now it also does not include the Adsense clutter.

Widget Service ClearSpring Raises $5.5M from AOL Founders

Red Herring is reporting that widget service ClearSpring has raised $5.5 Million in a second round of Investment, which brings the total amount raised so far to $7.5 million. The round was led by Novak Biddle Venture Partners and ZG Ventures. AOL founders Steve Case, Mark Jung and Ted Leonsis also participated in the investment. Jung who served as the COO of Fox Interactive, and was deeply involved with MySpace affairs, will take on the Chairmanship of ClearSpring´s Board.

ClearSpring would be battling with Snipperoo, Widgetbox, Fox´s SpringWidgets and Muse Storm in the entrenched widget space. ClearSpring will widgitize the content from providers like RockYou and serve it on social networks like MySpace.

Brad Feld from Mobius Ventures says that there are around 23 “widget management systems” with most of them heading towards a disappointing end. So atleast he for one will not invest in this space. Vivek Puri from startupsquad thinks that ClearSpring is a great service and has included it in his list of 8 startups to watchout for in 2007.