Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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Visit Yoono, originally added to eHub on Oct 12, 05.

eHub Interviews Yoono

Thanks to Laurent Quérel, CTO Yoono for this email interview posted December 13, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Yoono: Yoono is a tool for collaborative searching, sharing and exchanging information. Its particularity is bringing together functions which are more or less already available on the web but are scattered Yoono includes Social Bookmarking functions, search functions to identify similar web sites and experts, an RSS reader and a RSS creator (press review function which will be available soon).

Our approach sets itself apart from competing products because our Social Bookmarking and search functions are not based on tags. We use the classification of bookmarks at the structural level to determine the relationship between sites. We thus avoid the problem of tags - synonyms, spelling and language.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Yoono: Yoono was born from my need to reduce the time I spent monitoring and exchanging my finds with colleagues or friends. Today search engines index sites by keywords. This technique has been well understood by many web users in companies, which bend the search results for their profit. This clouds the results and does not reflect the real audience of web sites. With yoono our idea was to index the human searching and selection on a large scale to get better performance, particularly on precise themes. We looked to systemize the word of mouth principle which we have all used with friends or colleagues to find reliable sites on a particular domain.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?

Yoono: A full time job for the last year and a half.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Yoono: 4 people full-time.

Laurent Querel, CTO and founder, 34.
Graduated from EPITA (computing and engineering college, France), he received a postgraduate diploma in Artificial Intelligence (Paris). He began his career as a development engineer with Fi System, integrating specialized services on the Web. Promoted to technical consultant, he became a recognized expert in distributed architecture and application servers. In 1999 he joined the founders of Iomedio as CTO. In this role he participated in the design of software for companies who publish directories on the web. In 2004 convinced a new generation of web services would emerge, he created yoono to give the internet back to users.

John DUGDALE, founder, 42.
Physics graduate from Nottingham university (UK). He began his career with Marconi Defense Systems as development engineer. Specialist in user interfaces, he participated in the design of several specific software applications. He was cofounder of Iomedio and headed ergonomics of the software, web directory publication. Co-founder of yoono, he places particular importance on user experience emphasizing ease of use.

Nicolas LEHUEN, founder, 30.
Graduated from the National Institute of Applied Science (INSA, France), Nicolas started his career as software developer then project head at Fi System. In 2000, he joined UBICCO, a subsidiary of Fi System as R&D manager specializing in mobile internet. He designed and managed the creation of a data exchange platform to mobile platforms. In 2002 he joined Pascal Josselin at The CRM Company to develop a solution for managing a multi-channel marketing campaign. He is a specialist in Java, Python and XML, he participates in several open source projects. He translated the Java dictionary for the publisher Eyerolles in 1999 and has spoken in conferences on programming and new technologies.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Yoono: All functions should be accessible in 1 click.

Our best example is undoubtedly the function of 1-click search which allows users of yoono Firefox extension to discover similar sites to the one being browsed simply by clicking on a button in the toolbar. The usability of our products is one of our major concerns.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Yoono: Delphi for Windows.
XUL/XBEL/Javascript… for the Firefox extension.
Java, SQL database and in-house indexation system for the server platform.
XML/HTTP for communication

eHub: What are the most requested features from your users/community?

Yoono: A client version for Mac and Linux.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Yoono: Yes for the moment our users are mostly in France. We are very soon enlarging our tests to other countries.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months? The next 2 years?

Yoono: Very soon we think we will be able to deploy a version of our service for the general public. The beta version, distributed to expert web users puts us on a learning curve whereby we can define the best service for the general public.

In 2 years we hope to be the new model for community services and become indispensable parallel with the main classical search engines.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Yoono: We are more and more besieged with information every day, and this will become more and more the case with the generalization of information feeds as we see in the integration of RSS readers in future browsers.To be able to process it new tools must be integrated more integrated and ergonomic will appear. Yoono is a precursor in this sense. To impose this vision is certainly our biggest challenge.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Yoono: A good relay in the United States.

eHub: Do you have a business model? If so, what is it?

Yoono: The same business model as search engines: mainly based on sponsored links which will be integrated contextually with search results and the results of the alert functions.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Yoono: Initially we have targeted web experts in France. In one month several thousand users have already downloaded the application. This seems encouraging to us…

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Yoono: Probably the design and ergonomics of the windows application.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Yoono: The web will move more and more towards community services as we are starting to see with the current burst of services related to blogs, tagging and the Web2.0 ... The current generation of search engines has treats mechanically a very large amount of information. The new generation of engines will take the human dimension into account. Not only by integrating ways of personalizing searches like some search engines, but also by harnessing human capacities for sorting and selection in order to improve the search results. Today this is a reality with yoono, we index sites which have grabbed the attention of users who have classified them accordingly.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Yoono: Much too much, even if I have managed to reduce my web watching time to one hour per day since yoono has been in operation. We still have several innovations to bring in the treatment of news feeds.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Yoono: I always have a notebook under my pillow, my nights are short…

Thanks to Laurent Quérel, CTO Yoono for this email interview posted December 13, 2005.

Visit Yoono
Originally added to eHub on Oct 12, 05

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

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