This year at DEMO 08 I met with a company called Silobreaker. They showed off a cool new search tool that was fun to play with. Recently, during a Europe tour I took with Don Dodge, I met with Per Lindh, the CTO of SIlobreaker in their Stockholm, Sweden office. It was not a real formal meeting, but whenever I am in the neighborhood, I like to see as many cool startups as possible. I chatted with Per regarding some of the Microsoft platform challenges they are having, Silobreaker is 100% on the Microsoft stack, and I was telling Per how I have been using Silobreaker, mostly reading what political news I ever do read.
Per gave me some tips but then he said, hey, you can create and share your own personal pages. I said really? How cool is that. Yeah, you can do this with iGoogle, but Silobreaker has some very cool features. My favorite is the relation network diagram. Silobreaker takes your key words and searchs for high very active references. It focuses on current, temporal news. Here is the diagram that Silobreaker created for Parature (it works best for unique names):
You can drag nodes that don't make sense off into the garbage can and hone down the network diagram to the news that interest you. Right clicking the line connecting nodes will bring up the news item that is creating the connection. Hovering over a node will light up the entire network of news relationships that are related to that node, for example Accel Partners lights-up all the related funding news.
You can create a tab focused on a specific company in your personal page area. This can include blog search, news search, top news items, analyst research and YouTube videos. Oh, yeah, and you can share the pages you build with your friends, here, take a look at the page I built for Parature.
Oh, yeah, and about Parature. They are a leader in self-help solutions, you know when you go on a web site to figure out how to configure that graphics card you just stuck in your computer ( Parature does this for ATI, now part of AMD). Parature just received $16 M in funding from Accel Partners, who have backed other little startups like Facebook.
