Monday, April 05, 2010
kikin integrates citysearch for an even richer (and more delicious) experience!
It’s a beautiful Monday here in New York City, and if you’re like me, the warm weather makes you want to get out and do more. I have been living here for over a year now, and still haven’t been to the famed Momofuku. Lucky for me, kikin just got a whole lot better by incorporating Citysearch as a partner.
Now I can get location information, read reviews, and plan my delicious trip to foodie heaven no matter where I am on the web. I can even share the reviews with my friends and start a conversation.
Pork Buns here I come! Maybe I will even bring some back for the kikin staff…(if I don’t eat them all on the way!).
-Caitlin Abber, Social Meda/PR
Friday, April 02, 2010
a kikin employee experience: the “voice” of kikin
Hi there - Sarah here. I am the team assistant and "the voice of kikin". You know, the friendly, halfway tech-savvy girl-next-door? That easygoing chick whose favorite go-everywhere accessory is her new Internet buddy, kikin? Yup, That's me!
Getting the voice right for the shopping video was about striking an interesting balance. Caitlin (our social media/pr manager) liked what I did for the Cafepress commercials, so I started from a place of 'approachable announcer'. The trick was to represent the brand, with a hint of polish, while also being that average someone who uses the product - so not too slick, not too scrappy. Funny thing is, I am that moderately tech-competent person that doesn't need the details, but appreciates the convenience and added value that kikin represents - so channeling that particular middle ground was easy enough, and it was pretty fun too!
Speaking of, my big kikin 'wow' moment wasn't actually mine. It came when I showed my boyfriend and family the “using kikin to shop online” video, and before saying anything about my performance, they all went - 'Wow - I have to have kikin!'
I guess that really is “the power of kikin!”
-Sarah Elmaleh, Team Assistant & Voiceover Artist
You can watch more kikin videos featuring Sarah here!:
Monday, March 29, 2010
we are doing some spring-cleaning!
The past few months have been very busy here at the kikin office. From integrating new partners like Softonic, to utilizing Safari 64bit and working on getting kikin to function in Google Chrome, we have been programming our behinds off, all with you in mind.
We have also been utilizing social media, like Twitter and Facebook, to get the word out about kikin, and were honored to be featured on Mashable’s Spark of Genius Series as well as Silicon Alley Insider’s 20 Hot NYC Startups You Need to Watch list. We are excited about the direction of the company, and we have expanded and are looking to take on even more employees as the year rolls on (you can apply here).
So as the warm weather begins to arrive in Soho (though it doesn’t look that way on this rainy day!) we are focusing on a little spring-cleaning ourselves. That is why we revamped the home page and our user feedback form. Our main goal has always been to build a product that users love, and we believe that communication is key to any happy relationship.
So take a moment and fill out the form. We read everything you write, and will even get back to you in a short amount of time. Your opinions really matter to us, and the conversation is so important as we continue to grow and improve.
Also, thanks for reading our blog. We hope you enjoy reading as much as we enjoy writing.
Happy spring (and if you’re on the east coast, try to stay out of the rain!).
-the kikin team
Friday, March 26, 2010
cutting edge technology applied to cutting edge results
With kikin, you can receive results from your personal Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader streams. This allows for enhanced general search results returned by Google or Bing with richer, more personal and often more relevant content. Who wouldn't prefer the recommendations of friends through Facebook or Twitter over results returned by a search engine's algorithms?
Providing such a feature requires massive development work that would not be achievable at reasonable cost without leveraging cutting edge open source technologies. For example, here at kikin we use solr/lucene indexes for the underlying search engine to our applications, hadoop to process the data, spring to wire our applications etc ...
I once worked for an investment bank. At the time, large teams of engineers would focus on building the frameworks on top of which specific business applications would be implemented. The bank was uncomfortable using open source software and would rather implement everything in house. They would feel more in control by reinventing everything. However, here at kikin, we feel very strongly about open source. We believe that the quality is outstanding and there is no need for us to come up with a better mousetrap. Moreover, it allows us to focus on the core of our applications which is to provide a more personal and therefore better web experience.
As we keep building a richer web experience for our users, we keep playing with cool open source technology. If you’re like us, and you share a strong interest in cutting edge technology and believe that open source is necessary to build complex and amazing ideas and tackle the hardest challenges, then don't hesitate to come and work with us.
We have some exciting job openings!
-Matthieu Labour, kikin Server Team Lead
Monday, March 22, 2010
The need for speed: kikin keeps getting faster
More great news! If you use kikin to enhance your browsing experience with Internet Explorer, you might have noticed that recently everything loads a lot faster. This is because we have listened to your feedback, and worked on making our product as fast and solid as possible.
But don't just take my word for it, see below how our product has been performing on your computers over time. (Shorter bars = faster)
We've had almost 50% speed gains in Internet Explorer since December's release! And of course at the same time kikin has added more content, more features and just more awesomeness in general.
This isn't easy work, and there's no precedent of anything quite like how we're revolutionizing the way you use the web. We might be ahead of our time, which always brings interesting challenges and decisions ... but we're working hard on making kikin exactly how you (the user) wants it!
-Adam LeVasseur-Arribas, Front End Developer
kikin style: refreshing customization!
Great News! We recently updated the settings screen to give you more customization of what kikin brings you.
I often visit YouTube when my friends send me links, but since I'm often focused on slightly geeky things (especially at work) I rarely want to see them in my search results. So I've set YouTube to never show in kikin. Easy as pie.
(However I've decided that work can wait for me to learn something new so I've set Wikipedia to always show...)
In addition to changing the look of our settings screen we also moved the area where you can manage your connections to Twitter, Facebook, & Google Reader, all to make life easier and save an extra click.
You can access you settings by clicking on the kikin logo in the player or personal browser.
-Brian Rogers, Senior Software Developer
Thursday, March 18, 2010
kikin named one of “The 20 Hot New York City Startups You Need To Watch”
This morning, Silicon Alley Insider named kikin one of "The 20 Hot New York City Startups That You Need to Watch" -- and we couldn’t agree more! Here at kikin, we are focusing on creating a really innovative web experience that brings more personalized content to every user. As writer Nick Saint said, “Kikin makes software that -- built-in to your browser -- dramatically customizes your web experience...”
Read the entire article here.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
kikin broke through the 100 user requests per second barrier!
It is official: last Saturday at 4:14pm, kikin broke through the 100 user requests per second barrier for the first time. As the technical co-founder of kikin, it makes me proud that something I helped start reached this level of usage, and I want to take this opportunity to reflect a bit on this milestone.
On first glance, a person that is not intimately familiar with building scalable services on the net might think that 100 requests per second actually does not sound like much. Therefore, let's take a look at all the things that need to happen in order for a single kikin user experience to appear on your screen.
First, we need to make sure that the data packets that travel from your computer to our servers only have a short way to go. While the speed of light is generally considered to be very fast, it still makes a big difference if your data needs to travel half way around the globe or just around the corner. So dependent where you are located, kikin either connects to an array of servers in Washington DC or Dublin, Ireland to minimize latency.
As soon as the request reaches the server, the query goes through a batch of algorithms to analyze its intent, multiple secondary servers spring into action to select the appropriate content for the response, all bits and pieces are collected together and compiled into an optimized package that gets finally sent back to the client to render the rich user experience that we are used to. All these steps need to happen within a fraction of a second, because in today’s fast paced world, users have little patience when things are taking too long. Now multiply that process by 100 times a second and you might start to see the challenges kikin's engineering team faces every day.
Despite all the computing power that is involved in answering a single user query, kikin does not physically own any of its servers. The service runs completely in the now cloud, which saves us the typical upfront costs of having to buy expensive hardware and at the same time gives us the flexibility to add or reduce server capacity on the fly depending on actual demand, which in turn keeps operating costs low.
While 100 requests per second is an exciting milestone for us, we are not content to stop there. There will be a flurry of improvements going live over the next coming weeks that will allow kikin to scale further and at the same time make things faster for our users. If you share our interest in solving challenging problems, check out our jobs opening page!
-Gerald Kropitz, Co-Founder and Head Engineer
Monday, March 15, 2010
a kikin employee experience: kikin helped me avoid a bad meal!
kikin strives to provide you with “wow” moments: an internet
experience that includes surprisingly relevant information that you
may not have been aware of. One of the most powerful features of kikin
is the ability for users to connect their Facebook account. It’s
super-easy and once you’re hooked up, status updates from your
Facebook buddies show up inside kikin when they’re relevant to the
content of the page you’re viewing.
I like to know what’s going on in the city, including new places to
eat. I get the daily email from Thrillist and I read about a new place
across from the Empire State Building called K! Pizzacone, which is
pretty much what you expect: pizza dough fashioned into a cone holding
a dollop of cheese and sauce. I did a search for “pizzacone” to find
some reviews. I got the usual stuff you’d expect in the search results
but kikin also brought me a Facebook status update from a former
co-worker I hadn’t talked to in a while. She had tried a pizzacone and
said it was terrible and not worth the $5, especially when you get a
real slice of pizza for $2.50.
So I saved a few bucks and went to a place that DailyCandy recommended
in SoHo: Rice to Riches. It’s rice pudding available in 20 flavors. I
put my impressions in a Facebook status update, so my opinion might
show up later in front of a friend who has kikin. Help avoid bad
restaurants! Get kikin.
-Richard Weaver, Trust & Safety
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Opting-In to Advertising
Last week Ari Rosenberg, a weekly columnist for MediaPost, published an article that I found very interesting. In “Online Advertising Recall", he speaks of the ills of the ad industry, focusing on pinpoint targeting initiatives where we over promise and under-deliver for marketers and consumers alike. I found his overtures around business practices, privacy, consent and “better” advertising refreshing and welcomed.
I have spent the last 5 years working at or with companies using anonymous consumer data to improve the ability for marketers to deliver advertising messages in support of their campaign objectives. I have found that the publishers and third-party advertising networks and technology vendors have always been missing one critical component---the consumer’s explicit consent. Now many will argue that the publisher gets this consent thanks to their terms of service and the simple visitation to the their web site. But I disagree. This is like saying that the moment I walk into The GAP to browse their jean selection they have the right to take my picture, body scan me and record every jean I picked up logging the size, sku and color and then using Google to analyze my photo and link it to my Gmail account and begin sending me direct mail about jeans and related accessories.
And that doesn’t sound anonymous to me!
In the wide majority of cases these companies are not doing anything malicious or illegal but the consumer is bothered by the amount of information shared/captured -- or worse yet completely unaware.
At kikin, we want the consumer to be part of the conversation and explicitly participate through opting-in to our experiences. And more importantly, we want the consumer to engage and comment on how their information is being used, making recommendations, customizing their settings and having immediate visibility into the associated data. To be fully transparent, we are at the early stage of providing complete visibility to consumers, but already today we are leading the way with a clear opt-in and consent mechanism. Privacy and content preferences are easily managed and our terms of service/privacy policy clearly state what and how we are using information to improve our service and marketing programs.
If you have questions about privacy or the benefits of opt-in we would be happy to discuss them with you!
-Larry Allen, Monetization
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
And I would like 64-bit support with that!
When Apple decided to completely block Input Managers for 64-bit applications in Snow Leopard, they broke compatibility with most Safari extensions out there. In theory, an Input Manager allows users to enter characters from a repertoire vastly larger than the number of keys on a keyboard. However, because Input Managers are loaded into every program, they quickly became one of the simplest and most widely used ways to create extensions for applications that don’t provide proper extension mechanisms such as Safari and Mail. Popular extensions that utilize the Input Manager mechanism include Cooliris, Inquisitor, 1Password (up to version 2.9) and, of course, kikin.
However, Input Managers may also be used for malicious purposes, as demonstrated by the Leap-A proof-of-concept malware in early 2006, and even badly programmed, albeit well-intentioned Input Managers, can compromise the stability of the Mac OSX system. It is then only logical that Apple decided to restrict Input Managers in Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) so they required the user’s explicit consent to install, and when they saw the opportunity to completely drop support for Input Managers in 64-bit applications in Snow Leopard, they took it.
But where does this leave Safari extensions such as kikin? The widely accepted solution is to ask users to run Safari in 32-bits, allowing Input Managers to work as in Leopard. Why should users have to choose between having Safari extensions and enjoying the advertised speed gains and other advantages of 64-bit Safari? Fortunately, it didn’t take long before developers figured out an alternative to Input Managers and started to create extensions that worked with 64-bit Cocoa applications in Snow Leopard -- among these extensions is SIMBL.
SIMBL, short for SIMple Bundle loader, is an application enhancement loader for Mac OSX developed by Mike Solomon under the terms of the GPL. As simple the name may be, SIMBL is actually the best friend and savior of application extension developers in Mac OSX, because it takes away the difficult task of loading the extension into the target application. Extension developers only need to provide the name and version of the applications they support, and SIMBL takes care of the rest. Not surprisingly, SIMBL was implemented as an Input Manager until version 0.8.2. The latest SIMBL, however, fully supports Snow Leopard 64-bit Cocoa applications such as Safari using Open Scripting Architecture eXtension (OSAX).
Although at kikin we originally considered developing our Safari extension using SIMBL, we wanted to keep the overhead to a minimum. When SIMBL started supporting Snow Leopard, however, it became a clear choice for us. Furthermore, SIMBL’s GPL license does not conflict with the kikin licensing terms because SIMBL does not link the bundles it loads into applications. Overall, it was a winning solution.
Of course, recompiling kikin for Safari in 64-bits and changing a couple of lines of code to support SIMBL was not really all of it. The OSAX-based SIMBL is not able to load extensions into an application as fast as the Input Manager-based version did, so Safari may be all done loading the user’s homepage before kikin becomes active. There was also need for a kikin plugin installer that bundled SIMBL and removed our old Input Manager. Albeit these issues, we are now pleased to announce our new kikin plugin for Safari, fully compatible with Safari in Leopard and Snow Leopard in all its bit modalities!
-Delfin Rojas, Senior Software Engineer
Monday, March 08, 2010
a kikin employee experience: kikin saved me $10!
kikin employees are always impressed with how kikin enhances not only their web experiences, but their entire lives. Here is a great example:
"A few months ago I was looking for a new Xbox game, Batman Arkham Asylum. As always, I stopped by ign.com to read about the game and to check their review.
In my kikin Personal Browser, I noticed people were chatting about the game on Twitter. I thought their opinions would help, and they did. Everyone, including IGN, were saying great things about this game. I was ready to buy. Just then, I saw a new tweet about the best online deals for this game. I clicked and saw a promo from Best Buy with a $10 off coupon.
I bought the game that day from Best Buy and kikin saved me $10!"
-Greg, Product Manager
Friday, March 05, 2010
a kikin minute: get more video
kikin is the best way to get more video, no matter where you are on the web. it only takes a minute to see how you can discover, view, learn, and share with kikin.
Monday, March 01, 2010
a kikin minute: get more events
Take a minute to watch how kikin enhances your social life through informative content, networking, trip planning, restaurant reviews, and sharing!
