Quotations Book Diary

QB launches moonrise!

Amit — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:11:00 +0000

We’re proud to announce that we’ve opened the doors on moonrise!

moonrise is a wonderful place where you can post how you feel. The latest news will be on the moonrise blog. We’ve used API’s to make all the best photos, videos and quotes (from QB of course!) available so that you can post a feeling with conviction and meaning. It’s been well received in our early trials.

Look out for much more in the future, as we fix bugs, add features and so on. You will soon be able to post your feelings about things including web pages!

Merry Christmas and here’s to a wonderful 2008!

Amit — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 03:58:16 +0000

We’d like to wish you a wonderful holidays and look forward to releasing a whole set of new features in 2008! For now, we leave you with Christmas and New Year quotes.

Find what someone said about something

Amit — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 03:39:43 +0000

We’ve built a neat little search which tells you what someone said about something! This is powered by our friends at daylife - and uses lots and lots of newspapers to fish out that great little snippet. Let us know if we can improve on it!

Quotes from the News!

Amit — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:58:31 +0000

We’ve just launched an awesome way to look at the world news - browse it in quotes!

The topics at the moment include things like Iraq, George Bush, Google, etc. and we’re expanding it. The news from quotes is updated every 5 minutes and keeps up with most of the world’s newspapers and news channels.

Playing with our data - feeds and RDF!

Amit — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:18:08 +0000

Since we released our data and feeds as open services, the feedback has been interesting and varied. We’re currently syndicating our content to answers.com, and various semantic web projects like DBPedia and Freebase. We’re talking to various others, and at the same time, growing the essential features for people to be able to add their own quotes, tag, discuss etc.

If you’re a developer, check out this interesting article on the Talis wiki about playing and processing our RDF which is freely available. Remember that you need to link a click-through to QB in production environments for each item. Other than that, you’re free to mangle our data for your needs

Announcing .. our facebook application

Amit — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:01:15 +0000

We’re pleased to present Quotes of the Day - our facebook application . Facebook users can send any quote to their friends. Coming soon - the ability to search the entire quotationsbook database for any quote you like - and being able to send that to friends!

We’re a Skype extra!

Amit — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:31:20 +0000

We’ve built a Skype extra which works with the latest version of Skype - it’s called Your mood in quotes!. It lets you set your mood message in Skype to a quote. You can search for one, and set the quote in one click! This is powered by our feeds which we recently released.

Quotes of the Day on your mobile phone

Amit — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:25:02 +0000

Widsets have created this wonderful widget which gives you quotes of the day on your Nokia or any other mobile.

Common questions

Amit — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 01:03:45 +0000

Will you build something to let me add my own quotes?

Yes, we’re building this. It’s difficult, because we want to make it as easy as possible for people not to make mistakes. Accuracy and care is important to adding a quote.

Is your data freely available?

Yes it is - developers have ready meals of juicy content on tap!

It’s easy to use all of it (with bulk files for Google Base or Mixed Schema) or easier - just use our feeds. See services

What are your future plans?

We can’t disclose them - but maybe they fall under:

thinking about becoming a platform for emotions, or an “emotional search engine”
making use of voice to-text transcription.
SMS services.
syndicating really good reference collections.
ways to take our quotations away, including an API.
recommendation engines.
publishing collections into physical form.
books and bookshelves.
people meeting up in real life.
a marriage between advertising and quotations.

Some more information about our future is on this interview.

As a startup, do you have revenue models?

At the moment:

We aim to partner with a print-on-demand provider to let users publish and take away books of quotations. Sales will go through our site.
With our API, we hope to partner with other providers of physical goods aimed at “social networking” sites.
We use affiliate links (such as those from Ask.com and Amazon). These generate information that is relevant.
We’re developing a compelling pro account which is a paid subscription. It may be a while before this comes on stream.

A new world!

Amit — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:44:28 +0000

We lost all our previous blog entries due to a hard drive crash! That will teach us to backup our things next time! Sorry! We start this blog again with our welcome note to QB.