I personally met the founder of the CEO of Linkool Labs, Xiaofeng in Beijing, when Juice was still in private Beta. She was kind enough to run a demo of it by us, and I got to admit, it was truly an exciting experience, and now that the cat is out of the bag, I no longer have to keep an abated breath about it.
Try it! It'll rock your browsing experience!
Visit it at: http://juiceapp.com/
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Ogilvy China Digital Watch: "Juicy News: An Interview with Jin Xiaofeng, CEO of Linkool Labs
Posted on October 24, 2008 by Kaiser Kuo | 1 comment
Filed in: Search, Incredibly Useful Tools, In-text Advertising, Innovation, China News, Web 2.0, Widgets
My friend Jin Xiaofeng and her team at Linkool Labs here in Beijing have been hard at work for the better part of this year on a very, very cool app called Juice that I might have mentioned at some point on this blog. It’s a browser plug-in currently available for Firefox, and for the last couple of months it’s been in invite-only Beta. Next week, Juice goes into public Beta and I thought I’d give you all a heads-up with an interview with Linkool’s founder. Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure, Xiaofeng recently asked me to join Linkool’s advisory board — a real honor for me, but certainly not the reason that I thought her company and its new app would be of interest to readers of this blog.
When I first met her — we were introduced by mutual friend Po Chi Wu — Linkool was doing the context engine for an in-text ad service under the brand name ClickEye. Even then she had very big ambitions for what Linkool would become, and the ideas that became Juice were already germinating. Give her new app a try. You’ll see why friends of mine are saying that it’ll really change the way you use the Web, and wondering how they got along without it.
A native of Suzhou, Xiaofeng graduated from Peking University. After spending some time with fusionOne and Lucent in the Valley, she started a software outsourcing company called AcornSoft, which she sold. She now divides her time between Beijing and the Bay Area.
KK: What is Juice, in a nutshell?
JXF: Juice is a browser plug-in that aims to improve browsing experience in an environment where search is a frequently repeated, daily action, and where interaction with multimedia content represents a significant portion of user’s online media consumption. Juice discovers rich content intelligently for you when you highlight and drag a chunk of text in the browser. This rich content, which can be photos, news, or video for example, is contextually relevant to the highlighted text, and is displayed in a sidebar area of the browser. It offers a non-intrusive, dynamic, multitasking browsing experience.
KK: How does it differ from regular old search? Doesn’t Google also return multimedia search results?
JXF: Nowadays an ordinary or “flat” search on just about any keyword will return thousands of results. This is testimony to a search engine’s ability to index and rank all sorts of information. We set ourselves apart by focusing on keywords that have distinctive attributes, and display the most relevant content through a feature of Juice that we call “Magic.” For example, when we search for “Quantum of Solace,” the new James Bond movie. Do you really need or want over 7 million results? Or do you, or the average user, simply want a brief introduction of the movie, a trailer you can directly click on and play, related products available on perhaps Amazon and some reviews about it? These are the sorts of results that you’ll get through Juice. You can also bypass Magic and just perform searches from popular search engines, as a complement to “Magic.”
KK: In what sense is Juice “intelligent”?
JXF: Juice is intelligent in a couple of ways. Just to give you a few examples, Juice deals with keywords that have distinctive attributes. Juice’s backend platform automatically and intelligently learns distinctive attributes of any keyword a user interacts with. If distinctive attributes are found, the most appropriate content pertaining to the attributes is shown. For example, if Juice’s backend platform learns that “Brad Pitt” is an actor, it returns photos, movie trailers, news etc. Juice also has the ability to do fuzzy matching. Juice knows that “Barack Obama” or “Sen. Obama” or “Barack H. Obama” refer to the same person.
KK: It’s unusual that a Chinese Internet company should release a product for the international market before releasing it in China. What was your strategy here?
JXF: Our product is all about aggregating and sifting through a lot of rich data from reliable sources, either through open API access or through strategic partnerships. We aim at creating the best user experience possible and, looking at the availability and depth of data today, we believe the international market is the best place to kick-start our effort. To be sure, we can always enter a market by entering into data supply partnerships with the leading content providers in that specific market. China will be following in the near future, as we’re working with our partners on bringing that same experience in a local flavor. In any case, we believe that an enhanced browsing experience will have a market anywhere in the world, albeit, of course, with some localized tweaking. Eventually, Juice will be as language-neutral as the number of languages, and the corresponding data sources, we choose to support.
KK: What inspired the creation of the Juice app?
JXF: The idea came to life a few years back when I was reading an article about Tom Cruise’s visit to Shanghai. The article talked about a hip restaurant he went to that sounded really interesting, so I started to search for it. But I had to get through many not-quite-relevant web pages and click through many links to get relevant information I truly wanted. At that time, I thought how wonderful it would be if I could just highlight the name of the restaurant and get the restaurant’s address, its phone number, some photos, a neighborhood map, and maybe even some reviews.
KK: What do you personally find to be the most innovative attributes about Juice?
JXF: The most compelling reason for a user to use Juice is that the user can literally search for intelligent content at his or her fingertips even while the user continues to browse in the normal browser window. By implementing a highlight-and-drag feature, the user no longer has to re-type a keyword or a phrase in the search engine, or to copy and paste. By displaying the intelligent content in a sidebar area, the user can choose to read the intelligent content, or continue to browse in the normal browser window.
As a side feature, we allow the user to save links to intelligent content, like photos and videos, into a photo album or a video playlist. These photos and videos can be pulled up for current or time-shifted viewing. Users can also save links to photos and videos from the normal browser window by clicking and dragging a photo, or by clicking and dragging a Juice tab attached to a video. We truly believe in enhancing the browser’s experience by creating an environment where users can discover and organize the way they want to.
We’re all about “User-Focused Innovation.” It’s about small enhancements with a user’s experience in mind: minimizing clicks, maximizing the quality of content, reducing or even eliminating any user interruption. When you add up all these little things, you get a far more efficient and enjoyable browsing experience.
KK: Tell me about the team that developed this app.
JXF: Our R&D engineers have been working on the plug-in and the corresponding backend platform for well over a year. I couldn’t be more proud of their efforts and the high-quality, smart solutions they deliver. By backend platform I mean the dictionary management system that maintains the relationships between keywords and API services, the load balancing mechanics that are critical in these massively deployed consumer products, and the semantic engine that attempts to understand what the user truly wants to search when the user searches for a particular keyword. Equally impressive are our QA staff and our UX experts, without whom Juice wouldn’t be as stable and easy to use as I believe it is today. The Linkool team is made up of both local Chinese and westerners. The westerners I think really took us to the next level with unfaltering focus on quality and user experience, and our Chinese team can be credited for the robust programming and the relatively fast deployment. But at the end of the day, it is their collaborative effort and mutual respect for each other that allow the app to be as good as I believe it is today.
KK: What’s the intended revenue model for Juice?
JXF: Initially, we plan to monetize through e-commerce affiliate programs. I’m confident that we can drive significant traffic to partner assets. For example, if a user searches for “Julia Roberts”, we return products that are related to the Academy-award winning actress. We monetize when the user eventually clicks through to complete a purchase. Of course, we will keep looking for monetization opportunities, including traffic referrals and branded messages. After all, our sidebar is a valuable piece of real estate, each bit of which can attract eyeballs and should be monetizable. We will plan our monetization strategy carefully — and always with user experience in mind!
KK: What can we look forward to from Linkool and Juice down the road?
JXF: Some things we’re still keeping quiet about, but I can tell you about a couple of services in the works. One is a sharing capability within the plug-in, where users can share their Juice-powered intelligent content with their friends and networks. We are also building a suite of backend analytics that will help our data providers and program affiliates monitor the performance of their content.
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