NY Tech Meetup Recap Part II – OrganizedWisdom and Yoink’d w/video

Part II from the NY Tech Meetup Recap includes Organized Wisdom and Yoink’d. Check out the other NY Tech Meetup recap posts as well.

OrganizedWisdom

OrganizedWisdom is a human-powered, doctor-certified curated search. It’s Mahalo for health. Mahalo goes wide and shallow, OrganizedWisdom goes narrow and deep (in health). Notes:

• Founders claim its ungameable by those evil SEO people – of course a question was asked about doctors gaming it and it’s just as gameable as any human powered search
• The app uses MediaWiki and is pretty good looking but still looks like a standard human-powered search (see Mahalo and Hakia)
• They use a review system made up of: two guides, a reviewer and a doctor (and each page shows the team who approved it – I like this)
• They are looking to have 10,000 results over the next year
• The founders believe the best combo is humans plus algorithms – of course they have no algo, they use Google and the others I suspect
• They are hiring MediaWiki experts
• They didn’t talk about keeping the results up-to-date which is the biggest issue for anything human-powered

I could see OrganizedWisdom doing very well if they can grow via viral. It appears to have much more potential than Mahalo does as it covers a niche instead of creating pages on a whim like Mahalo does.

Yoink’d

Yoink’d is a mediabox which at a basic level can take any RSS feed with enclosures and turn it into a playlist. The founder showed a Facebook RSS feed as a playlist in Yoink’d. It does three things: take, make and share. The team is located in Berkeley, California (why were they allowed to demo??). The official launch is in a week and below is the demo video.