The ab|inventio Gazette

“Try whozat.com. I learned things about myself I didn’t know. Seriously. And now I’m checking on you.”, wrote Prof. Harry Lewis of Blown to Bits. Prof. Lewis holds an endowed chair in CS at Harvard and was Dean of the College for 8 years.

Plus, the average Whozat user today comes to Whozat? multiple times a week and views tens of pageviews per months.

–Alex

Read Jed’s post here.

abInventio is proud to sponsor and announce the release by Eva Peral of the all-new Pekepedia -The Encyclopedia For Kids by Kids.

–Alex

My mother came to visit, and I took advantage of her gardening knowledge to go plant shopping. By the time we were done, we had visited 4 different nurseries and bought two vanloads of plants. Now we needed compost –in bulk. We were told the place to get it was Whittier. But a Google search for Whittier compost did not find its site –not in the first page anyway. Tried Whozat, and Whozat’s semantic engine, which can tell the similarity between compost and fertilizer, found in and placed it on the very top position.

–Alex

“[Whozat] Da mas resultados que google. Esta lindo…La verdad es que anda muy bien. Encontro un monton de referencias mias sin toda la basura en el medio de google.”

–Prof. Adrian Lew, Stanford University

Translation to English: “[Whozat] gives more results than Google. It’s nice…It really works very well. It found a lot of references without all the garbage found by Google”.

“Whozat worked the best. Whozat hammers it every time. Other people made a mess. I would pat your folks on the back, because we tested thoroughly.”

-Executive at a Fortune 500 company that is a major player in our market

Sarah Barnes from Austin writes about their family trip to Disneyland, where an almost-perfect day was marred by two unfortunate (and unnecessary) problems. First, her daughter Meredith, who has special needs, had a lot of trouble standing in Disney’s famously-long lines, becoming anxious to the point of tears. Second, when requesting a special pass from the park, to help them avoid the lines, she was forced to justify Meredith’s need for it to the park staff, by explaining her condition in agonizing detail. Of course, once she convinced them, she found that the “special pass” wouldn’t actually help them avoid the lines.

“This was not happening. Was I really going to have to parade Meredith into the office so a Disney employee could decide whether ‘the happiest place on Earth’ deemed my daughter worthy of a special pass?

We finally got the pass, but the employee said it would not get us on the rides any faster. She explained that if we showed it to the ticket taker, we’d be allowed extra time to board the ride, but that was it.

I would learn later from the folks at Disney guest relations that it’s a ‘common misconception’ among parents that children with disabilities can automatically go to the front of the line. The special needs pass is just to alert the staff that your child might need extra help and it provides children in a wheelchair a more comfortable place to wait.

For our family, that was about as useful as Tinkerbell without her fairy dust.”

Meredith’s family managed to make due, and it sounds like they still had a great trip. But think how much better QLess could have made that trip by letting them hit all of their favorite rides throughout the day without standing in line at all. Are you listening, Disney?

–Tim