May 2011
16 posts
8 tags
Memorial Day
In the United States, the last Monday in May is a day to honor our fallen heroes.
Memorial Day is a somber day for us at Ask, as many here have loved ones who died serving our country, but it’s also a day of appreciation and remembrance.
Holly Boston, Homepage Guru
11 tags
Ask.com Q&A community: a look under the hood...
It is so exciting to watch the Ask.com Q&A community grow and observe users’ interactions and behavior. In particular, we see that users who interact with answers from real people (a feature currently in beta) are more active than those who don’t engage with our Q&A community - in fact, users who engage with human-powered answers visit the site twice as much as those who...
Happy Towel Day!
Here at Ask.com we pride ourselves on answering a huge range of questions from the mainstream and trendy to the geeky and obscure. On a geeky and obscure note, May 25th is Towel Day, a day when fans and admirers of Douglas Adams and his classic book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy carry towels in their honor. Why towels? Well according to the book, a towel is ‘about the most massively...
8 tags
Co-workers as Pastries
In 2003 I started working on the Smart Answers team here at Ask.com. We spend our time doing research and pulling together answers. Even still, we are a quirky group, we like having tea and doing crafts. For instance, I have a bit of an obsession with painting my co-workers as various pastries, baked goods, or other sweets based on their personalities.
Charlise Tiee, Knowledge Engineering...
Ask.com Volunteers with the Fishing Derby for...
For the fifth consecutive year, the Ask.com team helped sponsor and participated in the Fishing Derby for Special Kids, hosted by the East Bay Regional Park District. The event took place at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA, where the Ask volunteers were paired up with kids with special needs for a morning of fishing, arts and crafts, face-painting, and games.
It was a gorgeous, sunny day and many of...
14 tags
Ask for iPhone v2 is here!
The latest version of our popular flagship mobile app, Ask for iPhone, is now live! Download it from iTunes here.
Since its initial launch last November, we’ve had a tremendous response and more than 500,000 people have downloaded the app. Now it just got better.
We made big strides in making this version more personal and social by allowing users to “follow” each other and browse by...
Quora lifts ban on self promotion.
Industry watchers have picked up on a recent policy change from Quora saying the company is now OK with “self-promoters” touting their affiliations — if those individuals are transparent about those connections in their answers. This is a fairly significant pendulum swing from earlier this year, where all but personal accounts were banned from the site.
It’s an interesting...
Ask Anniversary Video: CEOs Look Back
To commemorate yesterday’s big day, we put together a short video with former CEOs (as well as the current one) weighing in on the past, present and future of Ask.com. Featured in VentureBeat and Forbes, we thought we’d include it here too.
Thanks to all of the CEOs who participated! Enjoy!
Ask.com turns 15 from askdotcom on Vimeo.
Really, what's a birthday without cake?
A few deliveries to our friends at Wired, TechCrunch and VentureBeat. Hey, you don’t turn 15 every day!
Happy Birthday Ask: 15 Years Young
Tuesday, May 10th marks the official 15th birthday of Ask.com, which immediately gets me thinking, “Has it really been 15 years?” It’s hard to believe that 1996 (our founding year and a time period remembered as the dawn of “irrational exuberance”) was actually 15 years ago. I joined the company in 2006 (as it was just turning the tender age of 10) to run products under Jim Lanzone. It was a...
You have questions – our partners have answers.
One of the single biggest reasons you see so much attention being given to Q&A sites is that regular web search is just not that great at answering questions. Between the over-abundance of content farms and the limitations of algorithms, the time it takes to extract a simple answer from ten blue links is becoming increasingly tiresome.
At Ask, our goal is to find the answer on the web if it...
8 tags
Mother Knows Best
A couple things I noticed about Mom’s Day:
1. Even if you’re generally bad with holidays, you’d feel really bad to miss this one (I certainly do).
2. You’re supposed to spell it Mother’s Day (not Mothers Day or Mothers’ Day).
3. Some countries created Mother’s Day celebrations really in order to promote motherhood in an effort to increase the national...
Internet Users Agree - Ask is Top in Q&A
Consumers now have an unprecedented number of websites they can consult when they want to ask a question, look for an answer, or answer a question online. Here at Ask.com, it’s been exciting to see the Q&A category gain momentum, as new entrants like Quora and Stack Exchange join established players such as Yahoo!Answers and WikiAnswers. Q&A is a space that Ask.com knows better than...
Ready, Set, Build…..!
We were really excited to sponsor the second annual Technovation Challenge Pitch Night in Berkeley last night. If you’re not familiar, the Technovation Challenge is a program designed to offer young women the experience of participating in a “start-up” company and understand what it takes to be a high tech entrepreneur. Its mission is to promote more women in technology by giving high-school...
7 tags
¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo!
Here at Ask, we like to celebrate holidays and events with questions and answers, of course. Cinco de Mayo is no exception. There are lots of questions surrounding the holiday like What does Cinco de Mayo celebrate?, How do you make guacamole?, What do people wear on Cinco de Mayo? and even today’s Question of the Day.
Did you know that even though Cinco de Mayo is widely celebrated in the...
10 tags
AppNation and Real-Time Mobile Data
I had the privilege of attending AppNation last week to moderate a panel called: Beyond The Check-In: How To Harness Real-Time Mobile Data.
Joining my panel was Di-Ann Eisnor from Waze, Rob DeMillo from 4INFO and Akash Agarwal from Location Labs. After launching the Ask.com iPhone app in November of last year and Ask Around for SXSW this past March, it has become clear how important mobile and...
