The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

The whole thing requires substantial set-up, a process that began three years ago and
is continuing now as Medstory adds new fields relating to particular kinds of cancer
and other conditions. The company has a set of tools and domain-specific models
that make the process of adding new fields semi-automatic; the search and structuring
functions themselves are fully automated. In short, it requires a fair amount of
human intervention to set things up, but then the software runs through new data
automatically. “We still need people to do this,” says Rappaport. “But using our tools,
we can go through data in an afternoon that would likely take a year with a person.
We’re doing tasks that would otherwise never get done. Our hubs act like dynamically
changing lenses to help the users focus their search and solve their problems.”
Fields it has covered so far include breast cancer, hepatitis C, arthritis, hospital infections,
obesity, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and certain targeted cancer treatments.
That is, the system now knows enough to interpret articles about developments
in these fields intelligently. The software “knows” what drugs and disease
mechanisms and therapies and conditions are, how they interact, and who the relevant
people and organizations are. It can find all the recent documents that discuss
drugs that seem to retard the development of cancer, whether they were being tested
for that feature or not. That’s a useful capability: Viagra was a failure for its original
purpose of reducing angina, but some clever scientists caught a curious side effect....
Arkady Volozh, Yandex: Doing no evil in Russia
(DISCLOSURE: ESTHER DYSON IS AN INVESTOR.)
Russia is one of very few markets where Google does not hold the largest market
share; a 12-year-old start-up called Yandex leads with about half the traffic vs. No. 2ranked
Rambler with about 25 percent. Google comes in third at a little under 15
percent. Yandex offers an e-mail service with a variety of enhancements and spam
filtering, shopping goods listings, automatically clustered and annotated news, blog
search, a Web page-hosting service and a variety of other services, most of which are
free. Imagine Yahoo! plus Google, but for a market of only about 20 million people
online. Yandex has a do-no-evil reputation in Russia, but it has a much broader
range of services and a more commercial feel than Google. . .though, like Google’s,
its search results are sacrosanct and untainted by commercial considerations.
Although the market is smaller, there is also less competition than in the US. While
Russian techies are often techier, the consumers are often less sophisticated than in
the US, making for interesting marketing challenges. That is, advertising in Russia is
only a few years older than online advertising.
MARCH 2005 RELEASE 1.0 51