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A New View through Viewzi
July 2, 2008

One of my roles in the Meetings Industry is to seek out and explore new technology and innovations.  As true for many entrepreneurial ventures, some of these new inventions succeed while many fail.  Each new product or service impacts the marketplace.  They also provide insight on market preferences; what the market can and cannot sustain and what is truly useful in contrast to those things that are just cumbersome.  All these new inventions, successes and failures, have one thing in common – they influence what works and doesn’t work in our industry.  They often establish new buyer behaviors.

One new technology I discovered at the recent Interactive Austin 2008 conference is Viewzi, currently in its beta stage.  Viewzi touts itself as “a new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place.”  When you perform a search on Viewzi you are presented with 15 or so “views” in which your results are categorically placed – views like ‘TechCrunch’, ‘Amazon Tech View’, and ‘Web Screenshot View’.

Each view has its own design (along with a credited designer).  Visually, the presentation of information is all about sizzle.  Viewzi performs as an aggregation of various search engines and can be more ‘form over function’.  For example, the ‘3D Photo Cloud View by WHITE’ is visually stimulating, but awkward to efficiently navigate after clicking on a few ‘key words’ provided from your search.

Will Viewzi become one of these new technologies that is useful or just cumbersome?  I am willing to wait and see where they are after the beta stage.  Nevertheless, it does give a new perspective on what search engine features might look like in the near future.  I will say this about Viewzi: it is cool.  Check it out for yourself.

Posted by Stephen Nold on July 2, 2008 | Comments (0)