Announcing the End of Service of Cascaad Reader and Splice

Dear Cascaad users,

First of all, we would like to thank you for your continued support since we launched Cascaad reader back in January 2010 and for following the Cascaad blog. As the title of this blog post explains, we are announcing the end of service of Cascaad Reader, which will take place on the 31st of January 2012.

Why is this?
As you might know, nearly a year ago the Cascaad team embarked in a new and exciting project named CircleMe: A platform that allows you to track, engage and share all your true likes. As this project became more successful, it is consuming all of our resources. Therefore, we are not able to maintain a level of service up to the standard that our users deserve.

What does end of service means?
What it means is that we will be shutting down our servers indefinitely, so Cascaad Reader will no longer be usable. This will affect both versions of Cascaad Reader (Web and iPhone). This will also affect Cascaad Reader’s sister service Splice.

Is this the end for the Cascaad team?
Not at all! The Cascaad team is working hard on CircleMe and we have achieved a remarkable success since our closed beta was launched. We have learned a lot from Cascaad Reader thanks to your support and we are looking forward to you trying CircleMe out!

How can I try CircleMe?
As a Cascaad user you received direct access to the CircleMe private beta. You can create your account here: http://www.circleme.com/users/signup (you will need to use the same email address you used for Cascaad Reader). If you would like to find out more about CircleMe you can watch this short video below:

Once again, many thanks for your continued support and we hope you embark with us on this exciting project that is CircleMe

The CircleMe Team

CircleMe: Private Beta Sign-up is Open!

Hello Cascaad followers!
After a period of silence (sorry, but we were heads down on the development of our new product), today we are thrilled to announce the opening of CircleMe’s Private Beta (www.circleme.com). As we continue in our pursuit to make the web experience more personal to all, CircleMe is a revolutionary solution which focuses on providing useful features to each person, based on what they truly like in life.

CircleMe is a platform that helps you keep track of and engage with all your true likes in one place. On CircleMe, you own your likes. The service lets you import your favorites from other services, add or remove items from your library, and feature in a visually compelling way the things you love for the benefit of others. Rather than catching dust, the likes you “shelve” on CircleMe help you connect with like-minded people, track related news and trade curated recommendations and future plans with your social circles. It’s all about the cool and interesting things you like and the people who share your tastes. Give it a try and start enjoying your true interests!

Here is an image of our landing page to sign-up. Hope you like it, and check it out live as it provides some cool interactive features.

When you visit our page www.circleme.com you will get a chance to sign-up to the invite list. We then plan to start distributing invites for the Beta starting in mid-July. You will also get the chance to get early access by helping us spread the word. Get 10+ friends to sign-up as well, and you will be granted access as soon as we open the Private Beta.

So what are you waiting for? Time to start living the true likes of your life with CircleMe!

Splice Beta launched, along with a new Cascaad website!

Great news! Today, we open up Splice to all interested users.

Splice is a browser extension that allows you to learn more about the topics discussed on Twitter and Facebook, without having to leave those sites. Since we launched Splice in December 2010, we have been getting some very motivating and constructive feedback. Thanks to our early users (and to our awesome developers!), in these first weeks in Private Beta, we were able to work on making Splice a slick and useful product and we are now ready to open it up to all users. If you have not tried it yet, this is the time! Just go to our website at splice.cascaad.com and in few instants you will be able to get Splice downloaded and working for you.
To learn more about Splice, you can also read our latest Blog post just below.

To add to these news, and to start 2011 with a fresh look, we have also revamped our website, especially as we are working on further extending our product suite. Have a peek starting from our new homepage www.cascaad.com. From this starting page, you will be able to access our smart social reader (either for the web or for the iPhone) or our product page for Splice. Furthermore, if you are curious about our new project (sorry, ‘top secret’ for now) and would like to be posted on our progress, leave us your contact info and we will make sure to keep you in the loop.

Here below you see a glimpse of our new homepage:

Hope you are as excited as us on the Splice Beta launch, and if you like what we are doing… please spread the word!

Go and enjoy your streams now! 😉

Introducing Splice, our new contextual discovery product

At Cascaad, we continuously focus on making social media content consumption a enjoyable experience. One important aspect of this experience is enriching content generated on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks to give more content and context to a post or tweet shared by your friends and connections.

To continue on our mission, today Cascaad launches its new product ‘Splice’ in Private Beta!

Splice is a browser add-on that uses semantic technology to automatically extract the relevant entities in your feeds on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites, and overlay useful contextual information so you don’t have to hunt for it. Once the entities are automatically identified in the text, Splice enriches the user experience by providing additional information on that entity, organized in different tabs, depending on the category that the entity belongs to.

Splice’s sophisticated technology permits to identify automatically millions of entities belonging to categories such as people, businesses, songs, products, video games, books, movies and much more. Once the entity is identified, Splice organizes pertinent content into tabs. This content can include the latest news on the topic, relevant tweets being shared in real-time, YouTube videos or even the lyrics of a specific song. Not only a user can learn more about any of these entities without leaving its favorite social network, but s/he can also use Splice to download the song just discovered, purchase a book from an e-commerce site or even reserve a couple of tickets for the closest rock concert of his/her favorite band.

With Splice, discovering new relevant content while surfing the web just gets simpler and more effective!
If you’d like to receive a private invitation to start using Splice, please visit our Splice destination site and request an invite. We will be happy to send you an invitation code as (virtual) space becomes available.

Still have some questions about Splice? Make sure to visit our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page dedicated to it.

We hope you will appreciate our new product; we are certainly excited about it. Furthermore, we continue to work on solutions to make the social media experience much more pleasant and useful. Stay tuned for new launches coming up in the future weeks.

In the meantime, hope you will enjoy Splice!

Cascaad is a Proud Finalist of The TechCrunch Europas Awards 2010

We are very excited to announce that Cascaad has been selected as one of the finalists of The Europas, TechCrunch Europe Awards 2010 for European tech companies.

The Europas finals, will be held on November 19 in London, where all winners will be announced to the press and to industry experts. Cascaad has been selected to participate in the finals for “Best Platform”, and we are honored to have been included in such category with other excellent start-ups. To run for victory, TechCrunch has given everyone the opportunity to vote for their favorite start-up directly on their site, at: Techcrunch The Europas: Best platform startup 2010.

We hope you share our pride in being a finalist at these awards and that you continue to support us in our work. If you would like to vote for us and make us run for victory, feel free to click on the logo below and look for Cascaad!

Michael Burnett joining Cascaad’s board

Lots of great news for our company today.

Not only did we add great new features to our web product, but we are also lucky to get a great addition to our team. Michael Burnett, who was until last week a senior executive at Yahoo!, is joining our board of directors. Michael is based in Silicon Valley and has extensive knowledge of the Internet industry. His experience will be of great value in building up our US presence and in developing Cascaad’s business .

Welcome to our board, Michael!

Launching Cascaad Frontpage, a smart personalized social newspaper

We have launched today at Techcrunch Disrupt the alpha version of Cascaad Frontpage, providing an innovative browsing experience for social streams. Frontpage is a personalized social news brief, composed in real-time from the most interesting links shared in your social circles and displayed in newspaper format.

What makes Frontpage unique is the tight integration with the stream-oriented browsing experience of Cascaad’s web app at www.cascaad.com. Moreover, the new functionality fully leverages Cascaad’s back-end technology which is at the core of its personalized content relevance ranking capabilities. Frontpage automatically retrieves the most interesting content from a user’s Twitter and Facebook streams and dynamically creates a unified newspaper-like display entirely personalized for the user. The pagination is created in real-time, based on the current posts and tweets that have scored the highest on Cascaad’s personalized relevance ranking algorithm. Upon a click by the user, the page can be refreshed, and its layout can dynamically re-format based on the change in content prioritization.

We hope you’ll enjoy Frontpage and are looking forward to your feedback.

Kudos to the team that brought Frontpage live in record time!

Not all personal content ranking algorithms are born equal

There has been a growing attention recently to tools that help us find relevant information among the overwhelming amount of content that floods our social streams, mail inbox, RSS feeds and online channels. Google priority inbox is one example of such tool. The key question of course for users is how effective are such tools at indeed surfacing the items that are most likely to be of interest to a specific user.

At Cascaad, we have focused on the personal relevance ranking of the items in our social streams using sophisticated learning algorithms that combine personal topic relevance with the social scoring of content within a user’s own extended social graph. To our knowledge, we are the first live service to combine both attribute-based and social content filtering methods.

Now, a recent research project at MIT and Xerox Parc shows that indeed combining both topic interest with social voting from trusted sources provides by far the most effective way of predicting items that a user is likely to find interesting.

A great validation for what we have been doing!

Cascaad now integrates the Facebook news feed!

We just released a big upgrade to our Cascaad Web and iPhone apps. The main new feature is the deeper integration with Facebook. You can now access your Facebook news feed from within Cascaad. The feed can viewed not only ordered by time, but also by relevance using our own algorithm that takes into account several factors including the amount of comments and likes received by each status update, its date of publication and whether the message is about a topic that fits well with your own interest profile. So you can easily cut through the noise and get at the most interesting items, whether they come from your Twitter or Facebook networks. And of course, you can post back to Facebook or Twitter, all in one place.

Enjoy!

Tracking The Top Reactions to Ghana Defeating U.S. in The World Cup

Reactions to the Ghana Vs. U.S. World Cup match dominated the globally trending topics on twitter today. Here are some of the top discussions filtered by Cascaad.

TheOnion
BREAKING: Ghana Defeats United States’ Interest In Soccer
41 minutes ago from Twitter

MARLONLWAYANS
U know after the match the USA was like “let’s put on some pads and helmets and play some real football! We’ll whoop ur black ass ghana”!ha
3 hours ago from Twitter

BestAt
RT @abigvictory: If Bush was still in office, we’d invade Ghana now.

sacca

Joking about the game aside, Ghana has an amazing university for training entrepreneurs: Ashesi University College – Governance

Track and discuss the topics you care about on Cascaad.