Can Zook beat Google?

I got to know about Zook, from my ex-coaluge few days back. I tried the service on my handset here in the UK. The site looks easy use and up to some extent gives answers (as promised). But amazingly my query for movies in Noida returned no result but a Tomcat error( I suppose some debugging was going on at that time).

Anyways the main question here is am I looking at comparing a search engine with an
"answer engine"? This would be unfair to some extent. Also,the question arises for the answer engine that, is that everytime I am "searching" something, am I looking for a an exact "answer"? Sometimes yes and sometimes no.

I listened to the interview of Sameer Sisodia (co-founder Zook) on Kiruba's show, had some good perspectives on the concept of choices and answers. I am intrigued, isn't web 2.0 and the "mobile 2.0" about choices produced by community based knowledge bank rather than anwers provided on the based of yellow page database. I really want to know why is Zook not calling itself mobile based yellow page?

There is another perspective of the market realisation. Given that fact that Indian telecom operators are still offering internet over GPRS and the handsets availble in the market are not that mobile-web user friendly, how much can Zook capitalise in this kind of market with paying hefty amounts of revenue shared with the operators?

I appreciate they have given an SMS based querying capability to the service. But if
the service just returns yellow page results, it's no good.

But Sameer mentioned in his interview that they are trying to build a new community around. It will be interesting to see the commnutiy interplay around Zook.

I suppose with the dimishing returns( not that musch diminished), everybody is trying to get into the mobile webspace including giants like Google,MSN etc.

Congratulations and Good luck to Zook's team for an innovative service, it will be good to see a big sucess in mobile webspace.

Here is the podcast from Kiruba's show for Sameer's interview.

http://www.podtech.net/home/3820/sameer-co-founder-of-zook-on-challenges-of-mobile-search

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EarthQuake in UK 27 February 2008

I was sitting on my bed working on some presentation and all of a sudden I felt the bed is shaking. Then I realised actually my room was shaking. The tremors very quite
explicit and I felt them for approximately 2-3 seconds.

I felt as if somebody is shaking my house. I live in Hatfield(Hertfordshire), then I rushed look outside, but surprisingly no body was on street. I thought to find relevant details online but on success. I heard one of my flatmates talking loud in the corridor as he felt that too and he was trying to find out whether it was true or not. We both tried to find related news on BBC, but BBC was busy enough in Obama's election campaign. To my surprise when I switched on to SKY, they had the breaking news.

Facts about EarthQuake in UK 27 February 2008
(Data Courtsey:Usgs.gov)
Earthquake Details
Magnitude: 4.7
Date-Time : Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 00:56:45 UTC
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 12:56:45 AM at epicenter

Location: 53.321°N, 0.314°W
Depth: 10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program
Region: ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM
Distances: 50 km (30 miles) S of Kingston upon Hull, England, UK
70 km (45 miles) NE of Nottingham, England, UK
80 km (50 miles) E of Sheffield, England, UK
205 km (125 miles) N of LONDON, United Kingdom

Location Uncertainty: horizontal +/- 6.8 km (4.2 miles); depth fixed by location program
Parameters: NST= 50, Nph= 50, Dmin=291.4 km, Rmss=1.02 sec, Gp= 54°,
M-type=body magnitude (Mb), Version=7
Source: USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)


Event ID: us2008nyae

Here is the link of the website where I got the information from:

USGS EventId:us2008nyae

According to the TV news sources, people have felt tremors in various parts of UK and everything looks fine.