Home-Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros Acoustic Cover

Father daughter duo Jorge & Alexa Narvaez have been melting hearts.  From Youtube to America’s Got Talent, people just love them.  Take a look at their heartwarming rendition of “Home” by Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zero’s.

The Best 10-year-old hoops player in the US?

See why this 5’1 fifth grander has already gained the attention of the NBA.  Jayline Fleming, a student at Beasley Academic Center in Chicago, is regarded by some as the most talented basketball player his age in the country.

Ken Block Jumps His Rally Carr 171 Feet

90 miles an hour and nothing but air.  Stunt Junkie Ken Block jumps his rally car 171 feet in the air for the Discovery Channel.   “It’s pretty damn scary” says Ken.  See for yourself.

Pandora Discovered

Sigourney Weaver narrates, taking you on a breathtaking journey through the mysterious land of Pandora (The Avatar).

Pianist(6 year old Japanese girl): Mozart Sonata K331 Allegretto

A bright future is in store for this talented young Japanese girl (you won’t believe she’s only 6 years old!).  Her enthusiastic performance of Mozart’s Sonata K331 Allegretto has already impressed over 2.7 million viewers.

Ferrari Enzo VS Bugatti Veyron

Every car junkies dream.  Check out this slideshow with different styles of the Ferrari Enzo and Bugatti Veyron.

Ukraine’s Got Talent Very Cute Children Performance

An inspiring gymnastic performance from a brother and sister duo on “Ukraines Got Talent”.   These children show amazing strength and skill for being 6 and 7 years old.

Struck in Tsunami

Laird Hamilton surfs a 90 ft wave off the north shore of Maui.  Waves so big, they’ve been mistaken for “Tsunami” waves!

Funny & Awesome-Girl Spinning on Escalator Railing

This funny blonde demonstrates some hard core planking technique.   I’d nominate this unique sport if a Shopping Mall Olympics is ever created.

Street Art: Joshua Allen Harris’ Inflatable Bag Monsters

Street artist Joshua Allen Harris taps into the subway exhaust system to create whimsical animated creatures.   Watch as these animals “come to life” with each passing train.

Flipora’s recommendation engine recommends websites tailored to your interests (A Pandora for Websites). We help users discover the best of the Web on topics they care about. Flipora.com is a product of Infoaxe, Inc (we rebranded last year). Unfortunately (but predictably) with such fast growth, we have to deal with the issue of our user community quality & guidelines. This post is about our fight against spam on the Flipora network and how you can help us keep the flipora community awesome.

Firstly, let’s talk quickly about the kind of spam/abuse we commonly encounter on Flipora and how you can avoid it.

What are the kinds of Spam?

1. In Flipora, users follow topics and follow other users to keep track of the best of the Web. Just like with Twitter and Facebook’s fan pages, users have an incentive to accumulate a large audience of followers since that means their url submissions and “likes” reach a large audience. Most of the times, users accumulate a large following through legitimate means, for eg. with the quality of the recommendations they like and with the quality of their url submissions. Users choose to follow other users who contribute and promote great content on a topic. However, as with any social/interest network our size, there are a few users who do try to spam/game the system. They do this by sending mass invites to obtain followers.
2. Another situation that arises is when a user sends a request to follow someone who does not reciprocate the friend sentiment. Am sure we have all encountered this on Facebook and Twitter. We know this can be annoying at times and want to help users avoid this.

What does Flipora do about this?

1. We immediately ban and suspend the accounts of users, engaging in abuse of any nature. You can also report these users to us at support@flipora.com
2. We make it very easy for users to unsubscribe from all emails with one click. Please see section below that highlights the unsubscribe link in the body of the email. We suggest reporting the offending user to us rather than unsubscribing so you don’t miss out on great recommendations from Flipora and your friends.

Closing notes:

1. If you have any questions or need help, email us at support@flipora.com and someone will assist you with canceling your account or answering any questions about how to use the product.
2. Our FAQ and privacy policy also has a lot of useful info.
3. Flipora DOES NOT sell user info (email addresses, browsing history) to any third parties. All the information collected is private and not shared with anyone. It’s collected to make the product better. The web history helps personalize website recommendations. The email address is used to notify users when they get followed on Flipora, when one of the users they follow shares something with them etc. If you don’t feel comfortable with your web browsing history being used by Flipora to make your recommendations better, then skip the download step for the Flipora addon and enjoy using Flipora via the web bar. . You can even use Flipora without creating an account.
4. If this is something that is not acceptable for you, please follow the instructions above to cancel your account or email support@flipora.com and someone will help you.

Please email support@flipora.com if you have any additional comments, concerns, or questions.

Recommendation Engine:

Flipora’s core technology is our recommendation engine for websites that:

1. Understands user interests based on their web browsing activity. Users can also specify their interests by following topics and people.
2. It then recommends great websites on those topics.

FlipCat:

One of the pieces in our recommendation engine is a Topical Web page Classifier that can classify websites into topical categories. We use this to:

1. Infer a user’s interests based on websites she browses
2. Recommend other websites on this topic

Topical Classification is a important machine learning problem with applications to many businesses and industries and we are psyched at the accuracy we were able to achieve over 3,000 classes.
We whipped up a quick demo for you to play with the classifier yourself to get a sneak peak under the hood of one of the pieces driving Flipora’s recommendation engine. You can type in a website url into the box and see the topic that FlipCat assigned to it. You can play with FlipCat here. Expect the classifier to keep improving constantly as we train on more and more data.

Flipora now supporting Safari:

We have also released a Flipora Browser Extension for Safari. We have seen Safari growing in usage recently, particularly in 2012 and users have been asking for it so here it is. Now it’s easy to begin flipping from wherever you are on the Web with Safari! We kept the extension pretty minimalist like all our extensions. There is just one button added to the browser Chrome that you can use to Flip to an exciting new recommendation.

Submit websites to Flipora:

One feature we’ve been receiving a lot of requests for from publishers and users alike is for a way to submit urls to the Flipora index to reach a targeted set of users interested in a topic. Users can now share interesting websites on a topic with a huge, targeted audience that is following that topic that can engage with it via comments, sharing etc. The more liked & shared your submission is, the more likely that it will be recommended to other users interested in that topic. While testing this, we already saw users using Flipora to drive significant traffic to their blog posts, videos etc. The Flipora recommendation engine decides which of these submissions are interesting and engaging. The more liked, shared & engaging your submission is, the more likely it is to be shown to other users interested in that topic. Spam and other self promotional content that is not interesting will be removed from the system.

Suggested users:

We are also rolling out a “Suggested users” feature. As you know, in Flipora you can follow topics and you can follow users who contribute interesting content on a topic. We have identified certain users from our system already who are power flippers on certain topics, for you to follow. We are also accepting nominations for other users in Flipora who you think should be made suggested users. You can nominate yourself too! Email support@flipora.com with your Flipora handle and tell us what topic you should be made a suggested user for and why. You can also tweet @flipora with your nomination and the topic you’re nominating yourself or someone for.

We’re listening!

We hope you enjoy these new additions to your Flipora experience. We’d love to hear from you on how you enjoy using Flipora, what you like, what you think we can do better etc. You can email Vijay and I at vijay@flipora.com and jonathan@flipora.com respectively with your feedback. The Flipora team looks forward to building you the best Discovery Engine for the Web.

-Jonathan & Vijay

Founders, Flipora by Infoaxe

VentureBeat: Flipora is the fastest growing social surfing service you’ve never heard of

TechCrunch: Infoaxe’s Flipora passes 8M reg. users, adds Discovery

AllthingsD: Flipora launches smarter StumbleUpon based on your Web History

San Jose Business Journal: Flipora grows from Infoaxe with new Web Discovery Product

Techli: Sunnyvale-Based Flipora Knows What’s Good For You(r Web Search)

Consumer Headquarters: Discover the Web With Flipora

Hitech24: Flipora, Intelligent Content Recommendations based on your Internet activity

Cool International: Flipora: End bookmarking and discover content

Flipora – a new word in the world of social tools for web surfing

Killer Startups: Flipora-8 million Users Discovering the Most Colorful Parts of the Web

Russian ToWave: Flipora – A New Word in The world of social tools for web surfing (English Translation)

Spanish WWWhatsnew: WhatsFlipora, a new Recommendation Engine for web sites (English Translation)

Greek- Techgear: Flipora, intelligent content recommendations based on your Internet activity (English Translation)

Chinese ChinaByte: Flipora: based on browsing history, content recommendation engine (English Translation)

German Web2null: Flipora (English Translation)

Bulgarian Kaldata: Flipora- New StumbleUpon? (English Translation)

Chinese ITSonhu: Flipora Map of recommended sites based on user interest (English Translation)

If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and start Flipping! Tell us how you like the product and send us your feedback at support@flipora.com. We’d love to hear from you!

How fast are we growing?

Hot on the heels of winning Red Herring Magazine’s Top 100 Most Innovative Companies in N.America Award, Flipora crossed 8M users last week! We are growing by almost 25K users/day.

What does Flipora do now?

Over the years the Flipora product has gone through several design improvements while still keeping the core use case almost identical to what it was when we launched. We make it easy for users to keep track of all the great websites they visit so they can easily search and find it later. With our addons for Chrome (recently launched), FF and IE you will never forget a webpage again. Ever. Web History search is an incredibly powerful product that has helped us get to 8M users. This was and is the foundation for everything we do at Flipora. This is our platform and it is making a lot of exciting applications possible. Applications that leverage the data generated by this platform.

What is Flipora launching today?
A Discovery Engine best described as a ‘Pandora for Websites’

The big announcement today is that we are adding Discovery to Web History Search. We’ve been making it easy for our users to go back to where they’ve been in the past (with web history search). What we’re announcing today is a way for users to discover where to go next (based on where they’ve been in the past). Just like Pandora offers recommendations for music based on music you like, we help you discover great new websites based on the ones you already like. The recommendation engine is currently in Beta. Expect it to continue to improve rapidly in the coming months. It also gets better the more you use it.

What makes Flipora unique?

Flipora’s recommendations are based on two primary sources of data.
A. A user’s individual web browsing history

B. The aggregate, anonymized attention data we collect on websites from our user base as a whole. We index ~20M websites/day or close to 6 times the size of wikipedia each day. We know the pages users spend a lot of time on, frequently revisit etc, effectively giving us a handle on the ‘pulse of the planet’. Another thing that’s great about this data is that its fresh. We know what’s popular today on topics you care about.

We are incredibly lucky to have access to this kind of data, thanks to the continuing success of our web history search engine. In fact, when we started Flipora one of the main aspects of the product that excited us was the prospect of the kinds of ways in which we can build more and more value into the product, the bigger we became.

Why build a Discovery Engine for the Web?

Unlike Web Search, which is a fairly mature space that has been developed a good deal due to great search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! (Inktomi of the past), we think the space of Discovery is still very very nascent (similar how web search was in 90s). The battle lines are still being drawn. Discovery of relevant information on the Web is a huge problem with no great solutions at the moment.

There are 2 broad forms of Discovery.

A. Social Discovery:
You discover websites based on what your friends or people you follow, share. The best examples of this are links shared on the Facebook news feed and the Twitter feed. Companies like FlipBoard, Delicious are great examples too of products built on top of data that users explicitly contribute with attribution. Although this is a good start, we believe this is still scratching the surface in terms of helping users discover great websites that they are truly interested in. Just like the assumption that you are interested in ALL the movies your friends are interested in, is deeply flawed and verifiably untrue (substitute movies by music, food, tastes in shopping etc and this still holds), it’s safe to say you’re not interested in ALL the websites your friends share on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter does a little better than Facebook in this regard because of the asymmetric nature of the follow relationship but you still need to do quite a bit of work to set things up. You need to know who are interesting people to follow on the topics you care about. Discovering the best of the Web on topics you care about might not be the core use case of services like Facebook and Twitter.
You need a better way to Discover the Web.

What about Web Search? Can Search solve the Discovery problem?
Not really. Web Search works only when you know exactly what you’re looking for. For eg. I love crazy car stunts and so totally enjoyed this video I discovered on Flipora, of Ken Block jumping his rally car 171 feet in the air. I would have never found this by search since I never knew it existed. It’s extremely unlikely that I would discover it through my social networks on Facebook or Twitter as well (and I didn’t) given the marginal overlap in interests with friends for the most part.

B. Algorithmic Discovery:
With an algorithmic approach, discovery gets a bit more structured. You declare the topics you’re interested in and then the recommendation engine helps you discover great content on these topics. StumbleUpon is probably one of the best known companies in this space. We think StumbleUpon has built a great product and brand over the last 11 years or so and is one of the earliest companies to begin thinking about Discovery. Wavii and Zite are also likely in the same algorithmic discovery space. See this post by Zite CEO Mark Johnson on the limitations of Social Discovery.

Flipora falls squarely in the algorithmic end of this space except that our recommendation engine relies on data (web browsing history) and technology (algorithms for mining this data to make interesting recommendations) unique to our product. We are very excited about building a uniquely differentiated discovery engine that truly understands users interests based on both ones they explicitly declare and the ones implicitly declared (from web browsing history).

We also have Social Recommendations (from Facebook) but that is a relatively small part of the product for now.

How do you use Flipora’s new Discovery feature?

Simple. Follow topics you care about. Follow people you believe contribute interesting content on topics you care about. To get started you don’t even need to follow anyone. Pick topics and begin Flipping. Our recommendation engine gets better and better as you use it since it learns what you’re interested in and what kind of content you like.

Flipora’s discovery engine connects a user to topics(interests) she cares about. Some people in the industry call this the Interest Graph. This set of topics is of course a dynamic set since interests change with time and there is only a handful of topics that might be top of mind for you at any point. Here are some thoughts by Vinod Khosla, Max Levchin and Bill Gurley on this topic. We think this is the evolution of Web Search where we move towards a “Find without Searching” model.

We are just getting started and our recommendation engine is still in Beta. Expect the recommendation quality to vastly improve over the next few months as we collect more data and fine tune our algorithms. We already have some big updates to the core recommendation algorithm coming up in the next month. To keep improving we need you, our loyal users to keep using the product, giving us your feedback on things we can do better and your suggestions for new features.

Go head and start Flipping! Discover the best of the Web. Use the magic of web history search to keep track of pages you love.

The Flipora Team

We are still a fairly small team relative to the size of our user base. Vijay and I are lucky to work with an amazing team to continue onward with our mission of building the best discovery engine on the planet that truly understands what users want and gives it to them before they know to search for it. Great discoveries can Inspire, Inform, Entertain and spark something that can change the World. We want to do our small part to enable that.

-Jonathan & Vijay
Founders, Flipora by Infoaxe.

We’re super excited to announce that Flipora (by Infoaxe Inc.) won the Red Herring Top 100 Award. Red Herring’s Top 100 North America Award honors the most promising private technology ventures from the North America business region for the year. Flipora celebrates being recognized as one of the winners of the Red Herring Top 100. Past winners of Red Herring’s prestigious award include Facebook, Google, and Twitter. With 7.8M users and counting, Flipora looks forward to fundamentally changing the landscape of Personalized Search & Discovery. Stay tuned for a big announcement later this week!

The following is the official Press release by Red Herring,

Santa Monica, CA – Red Herring announced its Top 100 award in recognition of the leading private companies from Americas, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their sector peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Americas.

One of the big changes we are making is a name change from Infoaxe to Flipora. Infoaxe is the company and Flipora is our ONLY Product. Flipora is of course still the same great Web History Search Engine that you’ve been enjoying all these years.
Both domains will continue to work while we finish the transition. Let us know if you run into any technical issues as a result of this by emailing support@infoaxe.com and we’ll help you.

Why are we making this change?

Very simply, although we are nostalgic about Infoaxe (Info was short for Information and Axe was a play on access and a nod to Stanford where we first begin working on this idea and started the company ), we felt it was a little confusing to users. We had cases of people misspelling Infoaxe as Infoacts or Infoax and so forth.

We thought long and hard to come up with a simple, yet fun name and settled on Flipora. You can begin signing up for and using the web history search engine from http://www.flipora.com We are also timing this with an exciting new redesign of the site so we hope you like it!

We wanted to give a shout-out to some of the blog posts you, our users wrote about Infoaxe and how
you have been finding the service helpful. Thanks for recommending us to your friends
& readers. We have some exciting new features lined up this year which we hope you enjoy
and let you get even more out of Infoaxe.

8 Best Addons to super-charge Internet Explorer
Top 10 Best Useful Addons for Internet Explorer 8
8 Best Addons for Internet Explorer
Infoaxe – Using a Bookmark Manager for Firefox/Opera
4 Firefox Extensions to Search & Record Browsing History.
100+ Powerful Firefox Addons
Top 10 Best Addons for Internet Explorer 8
5 Ways to add a Search Side bar to Google SERPs
10 Popular Search Tools for Firefox
4 Awesome Ways to save your Bookmarks & Internet History Online to search from any computer
Firefox Extensions to improve History Tools
Infoaxe – Search through Visted Sites
9 Free, Fun, Invaluable Tools & Websites for You
What else would you like to see on Google Search Results Page
100+ Powerful Firefox Addons
Bye Bye Del.icio.us? http://www.infoaxe.com
40 Free Software Tools for Creating, Producing, Promoting & Fun
Top 10 best useful addons for Internet Explorer 8
Moving to a New Computer
Firefox Facts: Sync your History between Firefox and IE
Infoaxe: Full text Web History Search synchronized between Firefox, IE on multiple computers
Hubpages: Use Browser Addons to Save Time
Makeuseof.com: How to Expand Google’s Universal Search
Memory Search Tool -Infoaxe
Web History – Let your Memory run to your Firefox Browser
TechWhack -Infoaxe is a Search Engine for your Web History

As always, let us know what you think at support@infoaxe.com. Tell us what you love about the service, what you think we can do better etc. We’re listening.

Infoaxe Real-time Search

With Infoaxe’s Real Time Search you ask the question, ‘What’s popular now for X?’ (where X is your search query).

For eg. if you search for ‘iphone review’, Google shows a review of the first generation iphone from 2007 which is irrelevant now. Infoaxe on the other hand, shows a review of the iphone 3GS which is what is relevant NOW for such a query.

Infoaxe’s real-time search engine works by analyzing the aggregate attention data collected by our Web History Search Engine with over 2.5 million users. We know what the world is looking at NOW and leverage that data to figure out the most timely and relevant results for queries. Infoaxe’s ranking algorithms use signals derived from this aggregate browsing data to provide a real-time view of the Web for searchers. Instead of merely sorting results by time, Infoaxe’s algorithms use freshness as a signal alongside several other relevance signals to provide relevant results. We think the best result for a query is one that is as fresh as possible but not fresher ;P. We think Einstein would agree .

Infoaxe does particularly well for queries relating to Shopping, deals, movies/sitcoms/ebooks etc. Check it out here and let us know what you think! This is just our first step out the door. We are constantly tuning our ranking our indexing algorithms so expect search quality to keep improving!

So, what is Friend Share?

With the deluge of information available on the Web, it has become much harder to sift through and find content(news, videos etc) that is relevant and interesting to us. At Infoaxe, we are hoping to make that sifting a little easier (and maybe even fun ) by letting you filter it via your friends.

Friend Share answers the simple question “What are my friends reading today?” You can,

• Stay up to date with news, videos and other interesting articles your friends are reading on the Web
• Share your favorite sites with your friends who will be able to see whenever you read an article on these sites (or watch a video)

[Image courtesy:http://blog.campography.com/%5D

Using Friend Share is very simple,

Step 1: Select the sites you want to share with your friends. You will be able to conveniently manage your shared sites later.

Step 2: Invite friends to follow (in a manner similar to Twitter, Friendfeed etc). Invite your friends so that, they can see what you’re sharing and you can keep track of what they are sharing as well. In your Friend Share home page, you will see updates from the friends you are following.

Webpages get added to your Feed on Friend Share ONLY if you have the extension installed with Record ON. You can get the infoaxe addon for Firefox here and for Internet Explorer here.



As always, at Infoaxe we are extremely careful with respecting your Privacy. We will never share anything without your explicit permission. You can always a delete a site later from your shared sites. You can also delete explicit items that are shared.

Click here to get started with Friend Share!