Synature Corporate Blog

The Synature Search Experiment - make your PC Carbon Neutral for free!

We are carrying out an experiment to get a better understanding of how people use search engines.  Our ultimate goal is to make search engines work better, by presenting more appropriate results to each person.

For our research we need a history of the searches that a person does over a period of time, together with information about which search results were clicked on.  We collect this via a browser extension.

Participants in the experiment are completely anonymous and we don't collect any personal data from anyone, just a list of the keywords they searched and which results (if any) they clicked.

To show our appreciation for the volunteers who join our experiment, we are making donations to a carbon offsetting charity sufficient to offset the carbon produced from running each PC.  So if you take part, your PC will be carbon neutral for the duration of the experiment!  "You search the web, we hug a tree."

It's easy to take part - just download and install a small browser extension from the experiment's homepage (which includes full instructions).  The browser extension works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox - sorry, Safari users!  You can leave the experiment at any time by uninstalling the extension, and it will automatically deactivate when the experiment finishes.

See our Facebook page for full details and to keep up to date with the amount of carbon we have offset!

Sorry it's quiet... we're thinking!

Just a quick update on what we have been up to at Synature over the past few months, and what to expect  from us in the future.

We launched a beta version of qubox.com and its related Facebook application in the summer of 2007.  These feature quboxes for a range of subjects including travel, love, music and sport.  We've been pretty pleased with the way those have worked out technically, and we've had a certain amount of success with users: in total across the various applications almost 100,000 people have used qubox to date.  So that's a lot of great real world experience with qubox for us to learn from.

Our next challenge is how to take that interesting technology and build a commercially successful business.  Over the past few months we've been thinking hard about that with input and advice from a lot of clever people.  We've decided we need to extend and generalise our technology so that it can be used more widely.  That's exciting, but also means a lot of hard work.

That work on our next-generation technology is under way now and we hope to have something to show from it in the next couple of months.  I'll share more details as soon as I can.

For now, we are leaving the beta versions of qubox.com and qubox for Facebook live and accessible, but we're not planning any near-term enhancements to them.  We'd still welcome feedback and suggestions!

Announcing the beta version of qubox.com

Synature is pleased to announce that the beta version of qubox.com, our showcase for our qubox attitudinal matching technology, is now available for general use.  Check it out at www.qubox.com and read all about it at on the qubox blog!

Social search for travel with the Holiday Matchmaker

It's been a bit quiet here lately.

Normally when I go quiet I'm either busy or thinking dangerous and deep thoughts... in this case both!  You can see the first results of busy-ness and deep thinking over at www.qubox.com.  More on that soon!

Mean time I promised to write a bit more about the workings of the Holiday Matchmaker (www.holidaymatchmaker.com) - a social search application that Synature has built for MyTravel's range of package holidays and short breaks.

In my post about the E-lucidator I explained how Synature's attitudinal matching technology measures how you feel about a particular subject.  The Holiday Matchmaker starts with that exact same approach, so we use a qubox to measure your feelings about holidays.  (In fact, there are two different quboxes - one for long holidays and one for short breaks - because the way people think about those two types of vacation is different.)

But whereas the "search results" from the E-lucidator are a set of like-minded people, based on direct comparison of feelings, we wanted the Holiday Matchmaker to give you ideas about holidays.  So the challenge was how to turn that measurement of an individual's feelings into a set of personalised holiday suggestions.  In other words, how to go from a people-oriented view of the world to a holiday-oriented view.

In principal there are several different ways this can be done, but for the Holiday Matchmaker we chose an approach that takes advantage of "the wisdom of crowds".  We asked a large sample of people to complete the holidays qubox and then to give us their ratings for a whole set of destinations.  (The questions we asked were of the form "which destinations would you recommend to a like-minded person for a perfect family holiday?".)  We then do some statistical analysis to turn the responses to this survey into a mathematical model that can predict which destinations are likely to be best for a person who thinks in a particular way.

Our mathematical model in this "attitudinal search" process gives the greatest weight to the recommendations from the most like-minded people, and little or no weight to recommendations from people who think very differently from you.  So when you use the Holiday Matchmaker, the destination suggestions you receive are not chosen by Synature or by MyTravel, but from the opinions of a large panel of like-minded people.  They are based on real experiences and real preferences expressed by holidaymakers who think like you.

This is true "social search" - using your like-minded peers' expertise and opinions as a guide.  And packaged in an easy-to-use format.  Imagine how time-consuming it would be to read through thousands of user reviews on a travel site to identify which destination would suit you best - the Holiday Matchmaker gives you effectively the same benefit in just a couple of minutes!

Holiday Matchmaker!

Check out the "Holiday Matchmaker" at www.mytravel.com for another great example of social search using qubox!

I'll blog some more about this soon...  I promise!

Take a look at the E-lucidator!

If you are an online marketer, one of the best examples of our approach is the "E-lucidator" which we've built for our partner E-consultancy.com.

The E-lucidator looks at how you feel about online marketing, and uses that information to compare you to our panel of "E-xperts".  E-xperts include gurus like Ashley Friedlein and Jim Sterne, plus experienced e-marketers like Obi Felten and Ian Jindal.

Let me explain a bit more about how Synature's approach works, using the E-lucidator as an example.  First, go and try the E-lucidator now!  Go on, just a little click and it will take you only a few minutes.  Then come back here.

Right, you've tried the E-lucidator (you have tried it, haven't you?) and you have an idea how you the way you think as an online marketer compares to our panel.  I'll tell you a bit about how we do it.   

You will have noticed a series of questions.  For example, we asked you whether Web 2.0 was "Evolutionary" or "Revolutionary".

At first sight you might think we are trying to answer the question "What is Web 2.0?".  That's certainly a fascinating question.  I have my own ideas, for a future blog post I think, and you can check out a great article by my friend Ian Thomas at his blog.  But that doesn't matter for the E-lucidator. 

Oddly enough, for the purposes of attitudinal matching we don't care whether Web 2.0 is "evolutionary" or "revolutionary"  - even though that was the question we asked you.  Perhaps it's just as well, as it's pretty clear that Web 2.0 (whatever it is!) is both "evolutionary" AND "revolutionary".

The key to Synature's approach is to understand that what we are asking is how YOU FEEL about Web 2.0.  Whether Web 2.0 is really evolutionary or revolutionary doesn't matter to us for the purposes of the E-lucidator.  You answer to this question is telling us about YOU, and we can compare your answer to those of another person to determine the degree of like-mindedness between you. 

In building the E-lucidator, and in building other qubox applications for our clients, we choose questions that provide information about a person's feelings towards a particular proposition.  It's the measurement of individual feelings about a proposition that let us match like-minded people.