Kosmix from 2 men who could have owned Google

[Larwee]

This whole thing is a rather long and complicated story so I'm going to leave out a lot of the details.

Most, if not all of you, know about Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Probably not many of you know the names Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan. All four of them went to Standford and knew each other during the 1990's.

In 1996, Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan started a database technology company called Junglee. Some of you might remember it. Also in 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were developing a new Internet search technology they called Back Rub, which became Google.

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell Google to Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan for one million dollars, but they didn't have the money and couldn't come up with it.

Later Amazon.com bought Junglee from Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan for 250 million dollars. In 1999 the 2 of them decided they wanted to buy Google and they had the backing of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. They made an offer of 300 million dollars to buy Google, but Page and Brin now wanted at least one billion dollars. Google wasn't sold and all of you know the success Google has had since then.

Now Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan have Kosmix with which they hope to have a home page for every topic people could think of by combining the concepts of Wikipedia and Google. Kosmix has videos, images, community, widgets and question/answers. They are all organized into what they say are useful buckets, and brought together by a search engine.

The Kosmix interface is something like Wikipedia except that Wikipedia is mostly textual and the technology is something like Google, except Kosmix uses a categorization engine.

Here is a link to Kosmix so you can form your opinions of it Kosmix