Investigating BYOMS with Kozoru Founder John Flowers
Kozoru spent its last two years in Kansas developing the byoms [build your own mobile search] project.

Kozoru's founder, chariman and ceo John S. Flowers answered my 20 + questions which I submit to you here in the full text of the interview.

I'll follow up with a more concentrated post (pithy quotes out of context etc... ;) that has my thoughts and more questions.

I'd like to extend a personal thanks to both John Flowers and the inexhaustable Justin Gardner for taking time for this interview during the hectic ramp up to the hard byoms launch on June 5th.

And now for your pleasure I present an interview with John Flowers:

> +++kozoru in general+++
> help me understand your purpose as a company - namely who's paying for your existence and why?

Flowers: This should be obvious from the recent press, but the short version is we were funded by both the state of Kansas venture arm and local angel investors. We do not have any traditional venture capital in the company, even though I've raised VC before.

Our mission was to make search easier and I believe byoms is a step in the right direction to accomplish this goal.

My secondary mission was to create a company in Kansas that would bring something back into the community where my son was born and where I now live.

>> +++background/team+++
>> What is John Flowers' professional background?

Flowers: I created several companies, the most public of which was nCircle Network Security (one of the largest privately-held network security companies in the US). Until now, with kozoru, I suppose. I was also the chief architect at InQuisit, a personalized news-delivery system, acquired by Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com).

>> What in his background best prepared him for the challenges at Kozoru and with the byom project?

Flowers: Previously, at nCircle Network Security, we built very large-scale systems which ran on very inexpensive servers. Many deployments handled millions of pieces of data and had to aggregate them. Before that, InQuisit was all about personalization and helping users get relevant results to complex queries (InQuisit was acquired by Ask Jeeves, now Ask.com). And, like most people, I've been thinking about the problem for most of my adult life, as have many of the developers working at kozoru.

>> who are the people in the team behind the byom project?

Flowers: Check out:
http://www.kozoru.com/archives/2005/05/the_research_te.html
http://www.kozoru.com/archives/2005/05/the_commerciali_1.htm

>> what in the byom team background makes them suited for the project?

Flowers: We have people who've worked with large distributed systems and natural language problems. But beyond those disciplines our team is comprised of musicians, writers, actors, filmmakers, auto moders, illustrators, etc. Of course, they all know how to code too, but I really believe it's these secondary intelligences that allow them to think beyond the traditional search box and come up with something as compelling as byoms.

>> who do you see this working particularly well for - who's the target market from a user perspective?

From Justin [Justin Gardner, Kozoru Communications Manager]:

> Three groups.
>
> First, your classic early tech adopters that have to have the latest and greatest. These are the tinkerers and the dreamers and they like to know what the future is going to look like.
>
> Second, your business road warriors that harness technology because they have to keep ahead of the next person. This tech will appeal to them in particular because most of them have a Blackberry or Treo as their mobile phone, and QWERTY keyboards are much more efficient for searching on IM.
>
> Third, and probably most importantly, is the IM generation. These 12-25 year olds live on IM. Just ask any parent and you'll hear how their kid has four or five IM windows open on the computer every night chatting to their friends. Now imagine if one of those windows had a byoms in it to help them with their homework. This group represent the future of search and they use IM voraciously. This is ultimately the audience we built this system for, although they may not be the first to use it.

I also believe people like us will use it, as I've been doing for months, as a part of my daily routine. It's amazing how often you take advantage of a technology if it is always with you, available to answer questions as they come up in your day-to-day life.

>> how would you describe the kozoru development approach? What do you think of Agile development?

Flowers: Every startup has to be agile and rev products quickly. If you look at Flickr and other technologies, they started out as something other than how they ended up, but they kept their core ideas and mission intact. We've followed a kind of mantra where we are willing to change our interface based on feedback, but the underlying technology has remained largely the same.

>> +++inspiration+++
>> what was the inspiration for the project? was it the MakeBot as described by Battelle?

No. That was just a handy post [Justin] referenced to make our point. And I think what's important is that Battelle was looking beyond just the MakeBot, and wondering how IM could be best harnessed for search technology. We feel we've created something that addresses those future thinking pointers.

My inspiration was more of "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash). Although the idea has been around for a long time. Even Howard Rheingold, in talking about kozoru and byoms, mentioned the idea of intelligent agents [intelligent agents defined --ed] answering questions for a user, wherever they are.

>> +++where byom fits+++
>> is this a side project for Kozoru (like an oh-neat-we-can-whip-this-out project) or a main project; how long did it take?

Flowers: The creation of the byoms technology took two years. We've converged upon several technologies; chat, natural language response (for which we filed a patent), mobile IM and search. This convergence allows us to break a lot of barriers and do something we believe is new and interesting to users.

>> how does byom fit into your larger goals for kozoru?

Flowers: byoms is the beginning of a much larger strategy to create a mobile search platform that can be used on any phone, with any messaging client, including SMS.

>> +++cash+++
>> are there existing structures in place to monetize this?

Flowers: Like Google before us, we've decided to build a technology first and ask questions about monetization second.

>> how do you plan to monetize this in the short and long term?

Flowers: Through partnerships, which I cannot discuss at this time.

>> +++creative/direction questions+++
>> Can I create feeds out of my friends' blog feeds in MySpace? If so, what would queries/results look like there? If I'm doing searches about who's dating who could I have a new outlook on my friends?

Flowers: You can create a byoms feed out of any publicly accessible data source. Any information in any non-pictographic language will be assembled into the kozoru Natural Language Response engine/technology and relevant results will be displayed based on questions or keyword queries.

One of my favorite byoms, just because it is so bizarre, is the Match.com (or even the CraigsList Personals) byoms. Typing something like, "interesting asian bondage" gives back relevant results. Several people at kozoru have created byoms for things like car parts for a "karmann ghia" or even motorcycles.

However, because we're based on language, we can only answer questions that are explicitly (or sometimes implicitly) in the corpus we're searching.

>> Also - why just make this mobile? Why not make a eurekster-style search function too? Can you make me a eurekster-style addon for search engine lowdown?

Flowers: We could easily add this functionality. We don't believe the market wants to browse to a specific site to ask questions. We believe -- based on a great deal of feedback from users and focus groups -- users want their search to follow them around and be available wherever they are; on a mobile phone, at the library - using a chat client, at a friend's house.

Ironically, one of our Board members, Ridgely Evers, is also on the Board of Eurekster.

>> If I owned a local brick and mortar could I create a searchable product inventory feed for my own byom?

Flowers: byoms are completely customizable, with keyword inclusion and "anchoring" of information. They are also infinitely hackable and we expect users to find ways of creating byoms we haven't even thought of yet. Users are smarter than we give them credit for and are capable of creating something amazing, if they are given the right tools and technology.

>> how well does this work for local searches? what if I'm just searching for directions or an address? is this more of a general info application or does Kozoru know how to make direction/address results too?

Flowers: We see byoms as more of a platform where people can figure out ways to create their own local search. So in that sense, there are definitely ways to do it. We've placed that power in the users hands.

However, because we haven't been exhaustive in our testing of every possible way to create byoms, some sites do better with the byoms technology than others.

Wikipedia is an example of a site that does great with it. Also, you may not want to mix two sites that aren't related in a very common sense way. Another example of this is mixing possibly wikipedia.org with espn.com. That mix might not give you the best results. However, maybe you're just looking for baseball trivia, so you could just include the word baseball on the keyword include list. That could be a compelling byoms feed. But in another context, with different expectations, it may not be. So it really is up to the user's expectations.

A few days ago, Justin created an acronym byoms feed, and it's pretty good. It's not perfect, but we get an answer in seconds, with multiple meanings for many acronyms. LOL doesn't just mean Laugh Out Loud.

>> Also will I have the ability to see what the searches were on my byom? Because that would be very interesting and help me to understand what kinds of information mobile searchers are looking for.

Flowers: There are possible privacy issues at stake when opening this kind of functionality, but we're considering a way to do this that doesn't violate a user's trust. As a site publisher (or blogger), this information could be valuable in helping you determine what articles you should write about, because you'd better know your readership and their interests.

>> Is Kozoru a natural language search engine, and if so, will searchers of the various byoms that spring up have to alter the search style they're used to already, I mean, will users have to go from 2-3 phrase queries to natural language queries?

Flowers: We like to think of kozoru more as Natural Language Response and less as natural language [questions]. You can ask a question, sure, but we do equally well with both keyword queries and questions at bringing back a highly relevant, authoritative answer. Not just snippets or keyword results.

>> +++who's your daddy?+++
>> Any interest in this from the big players? AOL, Google, etc... Be as vague as possible in your answer please. Just kidding. Be as specific as your ndas allow.

Flowers: People get it, which is very cool. We're in discussions and cannot talk about the details.

As a side-comment, isn't Google everyone's "daddy" right now? :)

Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |