Headup v1.10 – The Beta: New widgets, Topic Pages & Usage Analytics

March 24th, 2010, By talk

During my time here at Headup I’ve come to realize one of the things that characterizes our progress as a startup company, is that it isn’t linear.

In other words, similar spans of time don’t necessarily manifest comparable progress.

Whereas for certain periods the work we invest is manifested in minor evolutions, other times our toil manifests itself as a major revolution.

Today marks the fruition of such a period, & what a revolution it is…

Headup – The News

I’m happy to announce the release of Headup v 1.10 which marks the launch of our official Beta & introduces the following improvements & features:

  1. Headup Snippet – The new slim Headup widget.
  2. Headup Topic Pages – Topic Pages you can customize to display your content & match your design.
  3. Analytics –  Now you can follow exactly how your widget is performing & what are the most popular topics on your site.

Please note this is a Beta, which means we’re still tweaking and testing these features. We’d love for you to try them out, and would appreciate any, and every feedback you have for us. If you run across something you feel is broken or silly, please let us know, so we can fix it.

Thanks!

Headup Snippet – A New Widget is Born

The new Headup “Snippet” is a lightweight widget that displays a short summary & related articles from your site for the topics it identifies in your content. It’s the default widget on this blog & it looks like this:

Headup Snippets - Introducing the Diet Widget

Headup Snippets - Introducing the Diet Widget

To activate Snippet widgets instead of your default Tabbed widget enter your dashboard & select “Snippet” from “Widget Mode” options in the new “General Settings” box:

Want Snippets? Choose your widget type

Want Snippets? Set your Widget Mode to "Snippet"

Snippet widgets are linked to Headup Topic Pages via the “View Topic” button

Headup Topic Pages – All the Freshest Content about your Topics in 1 place

Headup Topics Pages show in-depth dynamic coverage for your topics & offer related activities & topic-to-topic browsing. They can be accessed via Snippet widgets or directly by setting your “Widget Mode” to “Link”.

All the Freshest Content about your Topics in 1 place

All the Freshest Content about your Topics in 1 place

Topic & Usage Analytics

By popular demand we’ve added a brand new “Analytics” tab to the publisher dashboard. Use it to learn how many times your visitors use Headup, for how long, & which topics are the most popular on your site.

Topic & Usage Analytics

Topic & Usage Analytics

A Word of Thanks

As you can see over these past few months we’ve been working intensively on improving Headup & developing exciting new features for your enjoyment, however hadn’t it not been for a wonderful & select group of supportive bloggers, some of which you’ve met here in our weekly blogger interviews, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to check these new features &test their value.

Before I sign off I’d like to take the opportunity to say a heartfelt “Thank You” to Dave, David & Ruhani for all their support. Thanks guys! We couldn’t have pulled this one off & launched our Beta without you…

Headup Widget Update & an Apology

March 11th, 2010, By talk

Widget update

If you’re using Headup you’ll be pleased to know yesterday we published an update to our widgets that improves a few important aspects of how the widget performs on your site.

Freshness

One of the most important changes in Headup’s performance has to do with how often we refresh the widgets that appear on your site. With this new version Headup is updated on your home-page every 2 hours, and on all your other pages, every day.

Maps

Behavior of maps for location related topics has been improved.

Headup now shows maps for location related topics

Headup shows maps for location related topics

Widget Customization

The positioning of your logo in the widget has been fixed.

Data Improvements

We’ve made further improvements to, what our development guys like calling, our “Entity Extraction Capabilities”. Translated into English this means we make less mistakes about what we choose to highlight, and how we refer to it. If you’re the type of person interested in this kind of stuff you might enjoy visiting our website’s spanking new “Technology” section which explain at great length exactly how we do what we do.

Apology

Yesterday we encountered some troubles related to our recent increases in volumes, that caused Headup’s service to fail for about two hours. We’ve spent a fair share of our time since at re-deploying ourselves on a more powerful setup that is better equipped at handling our new loads. We’re sorry for this downtime and hope none of you was overly affected by it.

Major Music Update! Headup version 1.04 release notes

July 9th, 2009, By talk

Organize your music and create playlists NOW with the new ‘Headup Music’!

The Headup Music Player

The Headup Music Player

This new release of Headup was dedicated mostly to improving Headup’s included music player.

Get your update now

Besides giving the player a shiny new skin we’ve improved functionality so that now it enables you to organize your music and create playlists
…oh, and we did some with bug fixes too… ; )

ROCK ON!

Release notes

  • Compatible with the new Mozilla Firefox 3.5.
  • You can now customize the design for highlighted terms.
  • Enhanced special highlights.

New Site

Headup has a brand new website that’s been live for just under two weeks.
Check it out ! We’d love to hear your feedback

Introducing "Headup Music" and "Social Annotations" – Headup version 1.0.3 release notes

April 22nd, 2009, By eitanb

These past few months we’ve gotten a lot of requests and feedback relating to Headup’s music features. So much so that we decided to perform a major overhaul that resulted in the creation of Headup Music – Headup’s very own media player.

Headup Music

Launching Headup's music player

Launching Headup's music player

Headup Music is a player designed to boost the way you listen to music online by leveraging Headup’s semantic web engine. Use it to:

  • Get your regular music fix from a variety of free sources like YouTube, Seeqpod, Blip.fm, etc.
  • Listen to automatically personalized playlists of your favorite artists generated from your Facebook and/or Last.Fm profiles.
The Headup music player interface

The Headup music player interface

We’re very excited about this addition to Headup and would love to get your feedback so please check it out and tell us what you think.

Annotation news – Social Annotation

We’ve made several modifications to Headup’s annotation capabilities.

  • Headup now annotates a wider selection of names and terms.
  • Social annotation:
    • Terms that have personal relevance to you receive a highlight annotation.
    • A tool tip notifying you about the personal relevance will appear when the term is hovered over.
Headup's new Social Annotation shows how the Web relates to YOU

Headup's new Social Annotation shows how the Web relates to YOU

More release notes

  • Improvement of the data provided for companies and movies.
  • Small UI and stability fixes.

What you can expect next…

  • Headup’s next generation user interface is still in the oven.
  • Improvements to the music player.
  • Annotation control – we’re working on enabling you to control the appearance of Headup’s annotations.

…And on to other news:

We’re on a road-trip
Yesterday marked the first day of this years “Israeli Web Tour“, originally launched in 2006 by the CICC in partnership and collaboration with Google, PayPal, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. We were fortunate enough to get invited to this year’s tour and are looking forward to meeting the representatives of the participating industry leaders.

We’re on the air
This evening at 6:00 pm EST we’re scheduled to participate in RSS Ray’s online radio show to talk about Marketing on the Semantic Web.

We’ve moved!
Last but not least if anyone wants to come and visit us, please note we’ve relocated our offices from Tel Aviv to Shefayim.
Less traffic, less smog, more birds, and I can see the Mediterranean sea from my window (if I lean half my body out the window and crane my neck to the point of risking breaking it… ; )

Got something to say?

Comments? Questions? Requests? Declarations of your undying love?

Add’em all in the comments below
… and as always, we try to be responsive on Twitter – @Headup

Until next time… : )

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