The ab|inventio Gazette

Google ‘the funded founder unmasked’ and you’ll get results about Scientology and a host of other subjects, but no information on the founder of thefunded.com, the site where entrepreneurs rate and review VCs. Whozat the same expression, and the first photo that appears, right in the search results page, is that of Adeo Ressi, the entrepreneur in question. In fact, his name appeared right in Whozat’s concept cloud. I recommend his site to any entrepreneur thinking of getting VC funding.

–Alex

Read his enthusiastic blog post about Whozat here.

A new study conducted on behalf of Capital One finds that, when faced with a long checkout line, 24% of consumers say that they abandon their purchases, and walk out of the store.  Capital One is trying to promote their PayPass product, to reduce the transaction time at checkout.  But rather than hurrying customers through the checkout process, why not let them continue shopping while they’re waiting to checkout, instead of standing in an infuriating line?

–Tim

With pageviews yesterday up 170% from the day before.

“Whozat is AWESOME!  Great job.  Thanks for including me.”

Philip Vaughn
UBS Financial Services

HoundWire suffered the first outage in its history tonight. At 8:14 PM, our Ops team detected the service was down. A rapid diagnosis process ensued. Power: operational. Servers: operational. Routers: operational. Internet connectivity: Down. The problem: a hound had inflicted multiple bite wounds to a cable. It is perhaps fitting that if HoundWire went down, it did so due to the work of a hound. The cable was quickly replaced, the hound properly disciplined and banned from the premises, and HoundWire went back into operation at 9:30 PM.

–Alex

“I’m very excited by the newest iteration of Whozat. I showed it off to some techers who proceeded to waste a few hours looking up all their friends, which is really saying something since techers are generally resistant to the charms of socially-minded apps. can’t wait to see where it’s going”.

Now those who know Jon know he’s not prone to exuberance, so this really means something to me. Check out REPcloud, the reputation engine that Jon was key in building.

I was looking the other day for how long it took to travel from Los Angeles to Oklahoma in a train. I Googled train los angeles oklahoma, and none of the results visible on my screen gave me the answer. None of them pointed to Amtrak. I Whozated the same query, and the very top result pointed to the page on the Amtrak site with the relevant train schedules.

–Alex

Whozat in the blogosphere again.

Just based on user referrals –no marketing. Request your invitation today!

Whozat queries tripled in the last 24 hours, up more than 100% from the previous average.