Evri Blog

The Evri iPhone

Here at Evri we love the iPhone. We know that its been a complete game-changer in the mobile-space. And, it seems like this whole iPhone App thing is catching on. So naturally, with so many iPhone fans in the company we thought to ourselves, “hey, we oughtta write an iPhone app!”

Starting as a “20% Time Project”, we’ve put together our first iPhone application that showcases our unique content browsing and discovery engine — and it’s all built with the same APIs that we expose to external developers. We call it “EvriVerse” and it’s available now in the iTunes App Store. We think it’s pretty nifty.

So what does it do? Well, one of the questions that we’re good at answering here at Evri is “what’s going on right now, out in the world?” With our ever-growing structured data store and deep semantic understanding of dynamic web content, we have an awful lot of connected, contextual, relevant information to play with. We do the work of finding important information about topics you care about, and let you browse them in a new way. Let’s take a look…

The initial EvriVerse screen

When you first start the app, you have two places you can go. You can either search for something specific by touching the magnifying glass, or see what’s making news by touching the rainbow. Let’s start with the hot list.

Selecting an entry from the list will take you to our main view where you can see that topic and its top-five connections. The connections are to People, Products, Organizations or other things out in the world that the topic you are interested in is connected to.

Here I’ve selected Wanda Sykes. Touching one of the related topics allows you navigate the what we call the “Entity Web”. Think of this as the ultimate “Six-Degrees of Kevin Bacon” tool.

Touching the main topic will give you a list of current articles, as well as current actions, top connections and profile information for that topic.

“Actions” and “Connections” give you a new way to browse web content about the topic you are interested in. With Actions you will see just that, a list of verbs your topic is engaged in - visiting, speaking, buying, etc.. Connections will show you what things your topic is connected to. Navigating any of these will take you to the list of articles that help you understand the connection. You can then follow this all the way through to the article — and you didn’t need to do any typing to get there!.

This is just the first release of this application and we have a host of features planned in the future. We hope you find it useful, informative and entertaining. Please do let us know what you think, and what features you think we should add. If you have questions or comments, please visit our iPhone Support Page and leave us a note.

Once again, you can download the app here . If you like it, please rate and review it. If you have a problem, please let us know.

Cheers!

We had a great time both giving and getting demos at DEMO this year - our CEO, Neil Roseman, wrote this about the experience. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to see collections and the toolbar. If you missed the live broadcast, you can watch it here:

Now you can create and share your own collections! Watch the demo, or check out the sample collections we put together for Obama’s Cabinet and Oscar Winners. BTW, the name of your collection doesn’t HAVE to start with the letter “O”…

Click “Follow This” on any profile page to get started (it’ll ask you to create an account if you haven’t already), and don’t forget to share!

Watch it at Vimeo.

If you love Evri, now you can take it everywhere you go online. Download and install the Toolbar Beta (available for Firefox and Internet Explorer), and you’ll start to see yellow highlights show up on the pages you visit. Place your mouse over the highlights and get a description, the latest news, top connections, images, and videos for each highlighted topic.

It also lets you jump to any of our profile pages by typing a name into the Find box.

Learn more or just go and get it!

We’re very pleased to announce that The Washington Post and Evri have entered a partnership to offer our content browsing and discovery functionality on washingtonpost.com articles.  The Evri widget will appear on all article pages on the site. (It will only appear on newly published articles, so it won’t be everywhere yet!) Our widget will suggest related articles from The Washington Post and separately from the rest of the web.

The Evri widget makes article recommendations based on Evri’s semantic understanding of how the people places and things in the article being read are connected to other people, places and things being discussed on the web. We think making content smarter this way, and connecting it to other content via what we like to call the Entity Web, is a big deal for the future of content discovery.

As our first major content publishing partner, we’re delighted that The Washington Post has selected Evri for this critical service for their readers.  In the coming weeks, we’ll have additional announcements with new partners to share with you.

We’re also very grateful to the many bloggers and websites that have gone to the evri.com site, and launched one of our widgets on their sites.  We’re adding new widgets frequently, and they’re very easy to install. In addition to article and topic recommendations our widgets recommend images and videos as well. Please visit the bloggers and partners page at evri.com to check out what we have available now. If you are a developer, please take a look at our API, which allows programmatic access to all of this good stuff.

Email me at steve@evri.com with any questions or comments.

This post about my current favorite gaming obsession, The World Of Goo, is a bit off topic. Luckily, I read this post. In the review, on the blog Experience Points, was the line “To put it simply, it is a game about forming connections.” Well then. That’s what we’re about - forming connections! So, I could write about the World of Goo and Evri at the same time. The EXP blog suggests that the game is “about industrialization, alienation in the modern world, post-modern commentaries on consumer culture, and the downfall of technologically advanced societies”.  I thought it was a construction game where you try to get little balls of Goo to enter a pipe, but what do I know? The balls of goo, and the structures, follow physical laws so keeping your Gooey towers structurally sound provides lots of challenge. It reminds me most of the classic game Lemmings.

There is a lot of variation within this theme. As the levels progress, you get different types of Goo balls to work with — some that provide flotation, some that can be detached from their structures and reattached elsewhere, and others I have seen in screenshots but haven’t reached yet. The game is pretty charming, but there is enough of a snarky voice in the graphics and text in the game to avoid it being to sickly sweet. The forthcoming “profanity pack” may add a little more spice — I assume that will be left out of the family-friendly Wii version.

The game is really lovely to look at, in beautiful 2-D. The art reminds me of Dr Seuss with a Tim Burton hangover. It’s really hard to believe that this is an “indie” game written by two guys using a hotspot as their network. Or maybe it isn’t that hard to believe -  even the best big company games lack the innovation and personality packed into WoG.

WoG is really about how individual nodes are useful, but it’s much more powerful to build a network. And, if a network of goo balls is fun, how much more fun is the network or all of the people, places, and things we all care about. So, if you like World Of Goo, you will love Evri.

World of Goo is DRM free, available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and the Wii, and it’s only $20.

Evri.com is the only way to browse the connections that exist across the web. Watch this video to see how American Idol is connected to other people, places and things in articles, blog posts, videos and images around the world.

Evri.com Profile Page Tour from Evri

We have gotten lot’s of great feedback – positive and constructive – since we opened the beta up a last week. All of your feedback is helpful, even when critical. I thought it would help to give a little more background on what we are doing, and how we think you might get the most out of visiting and using Evri.com

We think one of the best ways to find us is when you get to us through existing content that has already implemented our content recommendation widgets. From here, you might explore with the widget, go read something else on the same or a related topic, or head directly to an Evri profile page.

When you reach an Evri profile page, our hope is that you see us as more of a browse engine than anything. We definitely aren’t, and aren’t trying to be, a search engine. Because of our methods, using natural language and focusing on the named entities in content (the proper nouns), we train and configure the system on specific subject areas. For that reason, our Find box only finds things for which we have a profile page. We don’t want to disappoint you by taking you to a dead-end “No Results” page. The subject areas we focused on first are Politics and Entertainment, so these are the areas you can expect we’ll have really good coverage.  As a result, we have great pages about both major US figures (like presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain) and international ones like the new head of Israel’s Kadima Party, Tzipi Livni. We also do a good job on entertainment, from not-yet-released movies like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, to classic movie stars like the recently departed and much-loved Paul Newman. We do have lots of coverage in other areas, but it’s not comprehensive…yet!

In coming months, we will add more coverage in Business, Technology, Sports, Health & Medicine, and others. What we definitely won’t have for a little while longer are many pages about non-proper nouns or “conceptual entities”. For example the term “Golden Retriever”, mentioned in an article, isn’t designed to work well in the current product. We think there is tremendous value in applying what we do to these types of subjects, and we will get there, but for right now we aren’t focusing on making this work. (Although, take a look at the UI at the bottom of this page for an example of what we get today for the subject “Bank Failure”.)

Another thing that is easy for our beta testers to sometimes miss is how much stuff we actually have. The key is the two-column grid that appears alongside the “Tinkertoy” relationship display. As an example, look at this section of the Angelina Jolie profile page. I have selected “Actor” in the left column of the “Top Articles” section. The results include a list of the Actors she is related to, with the top ten documents about these relationships listed below.

Selecting any of the actors in the in the right hand column will cause the documents and the media to change to reflect your choice. Here, I’ve selected Billy Bob Thornton:

With this UI you can browse a very large number of web documents without being overwhelmed by a new list of keyword-based search results at each step. If it looks like we don’t have everything that’s because we show the top ten results for each combination that you are browsing. And, coming full circle,  that’s the idea: to encourage serendipitous discovery and browsing of web content about the things you are interested in. Where else could you browse from Angelina Jolie to Hamid Karzi in 2 clicks (the route goes through Jude Law)?

Please don’t forget to send us feedback - it really is appreciated.

We’re pretty excited today, as we are opening the beta and removing the password restriction to the site. We think this is the first step on a long journey in making the web better for browsing and discovering what’s important and meaningful to you. With almost a billion connections between People, Places and Things contained in millions of documents written every day, our widgets and Profile Pages are designed to let you discover more, with less work.

We’re rolling out some new features along with opening the system up to everybody.

• Use the widget on your site! You can now directly add the widget to your TypePad, Blogger or WordPress blog post, or cut-and-paste some script to add it to any blog or web page.
• Try it with your own content: Just paste your text into the submit box on this page, and see what the Evri content recommendation widget comes up with. Try it with a blog post, article, or any text at all. As with the rest of Evri, it will work best with documents about People, Products, and Things of general interest.
• Sharing: Share a favorite profile page, or even a cool grammatical query your built in Evri’s Garden.
• Image Carousel: We have added photos in addition to videos to every Profile Page. We will be continue to enrich the media experience of the site over the next weeks and months.
• Our Garden, where we will feature new stuff that isn’t ready for release, and behind-the-scenes technology that we use at Evri. Right now we have our unique search technology featured there. We will have another blog post with more details, but you can play with it right now.

We are all happy with, and excited by, what we’ve gotten done so far, but I am sure we have a lot more to do, and do better. There’s is a feedback link on every page and we would really like you to use it. Or, send me feedback directly to neil@evri.com.

images on the new Vicky Cristina Barcelona Profile page.

We’ve gotten some great feedback from our early beta users, and we’ve been busy at Evri world HQ working on updates to Evri.com, the Evri widgets, and the rest of our products. Probably the single most frequent feedback request was: “I am looking for a specific person (or place or thing) — where’s the “Find” box?” Well, we heard you, and it’s now there — a brand-spanking new Find box on every page. Just start typing, and if we have a match, it’ll show up in the drop down list. Pick what you are interested in, and you will go right to the Evri profile page for that topic.

What else is new? Here are some highlights:

More entities - We have doubled the number of People, Products, and Things for which we have profile pages. As you can see from the Find list image above, we even have Klingons!

Navigation and UI Improvements - we’ve made some changes to the user interface and experience to improve how the site and widgets work. The home page lists are now streamlined, and we have made it easier to get right to a profile page (just click on the Evri icon). On the profile pages, we have grouped things together in what we think is a more logical fashion, and added better navigation to related profile pages.

New widget types, and a special page for them! Content publishers, bloggers, and anyone interested in cool new widgets should look at our new Partners page. We have some new widget types on display to show how Evri can increase user engagement on your site. If you are a blogger or other publisher that is interested in Evri, please contact us.

Also, lots of improvements to performance, stability, and overall quality (at least, we think so.) We would of course love to know what you think as well — if you haven’t signed up for the beta, please do. And, if you already have, please send us feedback on the new features.