startupi

We were contacted by the software architect Fernando Andrade, who instead of building another Twitter service or social network has stepped into the search engine market, using an open API from Yahoo.

The site is www.quiui.com.br, and it launched recently as an innovative alternative to the usual search engines. Quiuí (Portuguese for “Kiwi”) offers innumerable tools, like search histories, previews, tagging of best results, a blog tool, and additional information about results, including security information. The blog tool allows the owner of a customized version of Quiui  to publish messages to their own site’s users. Read more…

Everyone heard Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, say that the social media tool was created by accident, and that it’s important to think like an artist or designer. What he never said was that a Brazilian was leading the product design at Twitter at the mere age of 20.

At the age of 22, Vitor Lourenço - who is from São Paulo but now lives in San Francisco - is now an Interactive Designer with 7 years experience. His projects have been used by millions of people around the world. Read more…

In the US, Digg is heavily used and routes users to diverse sites and blogs with a variety of profiles. Digg is nothing more than a service in which news links are voted on by the crowd, and the most popular float to the main page.

I was researching Digg-type services in Brazil and found the situation no different than two years ago. I am a “heavy user” of the internet and use various filters, including Digg, to arrive at the most interesting content. But I lost interest in Brazilian Digg type services back in 2007. From there to here things have apparently not changed much.

I had difficulty finding new Digg type services and stuck with the usual ones, the well known Rec6 and Linkk. If the number of votes on the home page of each is any sign of how the service is going, Linkk appears to have the advantage right now, the opposite situation from two years ago. I don’t consider Uêba or Yahoo Posts as Digg-like, because they are services in which the choice of items is made by editors, not the crowd.

Read more…