Firefox’s distribution in China to bundle a localized adaptation of Juice

For Chinese users eager to see a more comprehensive, seamless integration of Firefox and Linkool’s technology, here’s some good news: a localized adaptation of Juice is now bundled in the latest Chinese-language Firefox distribution, to be publicly released by Mozilla Online today. This Firefox release marks the first time that third-party extensions are bundled into an official Firefox release, and we at Linkool are proud to be a part of this historic milestone in Mozilla’s history!

This localized adaptation of Juice, branded “Live Margins”, is the result of nearly half a year of tireless collaboration between the folks at Mozilla Online, the China subsidiary of the Mountain View, CA-based Mozilla Corporation, and Linkool Labs. Live Margins’ backend is fully supported by Linkool’s proprietary intelligent discovery engine and keyword management system. At the User Interface-level, Live Margins offers many of Juice’s exciting features, including Magic results, drag & drop ease of use and intuitive media storage.

Live Margins is specially localized for the China market with different content sources, a different User Interface language (in Chinese), and tailored applications. To cater to the China market, Live Margins takes full advantage of Mozilla Online’s local partnerships and culls rich content from popular Chinese language sources, including Baidu (search), Youku (online video), Yobo (music sampling), Dianping (restaurant review), Sina (stock and music) and many others.

The partnership between Linkool and Mozilla Online aims to be a shining example of innovation in the China market, fostering the development of a vibrant Firefox developer community and encouraging Chinese web properties to open their content to a wider audience through public API access and increased platform interoperability.

To check out Live Margins - Go to mozillaonline.cn

Thirsty? Start squeezing now!

Folks - the wait is over; we’re releasing Juice into public beta today!

Juice, our intelligent discovery engine, has been in private beta in the past two months. With helpful feedback from our private beta users, we have tweaked our user interface and our backend system with the goal of creating the best, most fulfilling experience for all our users.

Now that Juice is in public beta, we welcome everyone to go to grabjuice.com to download and try out Juice. When you have a spare moment, please also check out our brand-new, absolutely rockin’ webcast that will give you a quick start guide on Juice.

We value any and all feedback! If you have ideas on how to improve Juice, don’t hesitate to drop us an email.

Happy squeezing! Related: (Grab the Press Kit)

The Juice perspective

Web 2.0 is a revolution that enables the development and evolution of the Internet - not merely as an information repository but as an information-based community that fosters creativity, collaboration, and sharing.

This revolution not only sets off an explosion of information creation, creative collaboration, and sharing, but has given birth to a plethora of web services, each hosting and delivering targeted, topical information related to certain aspects of our lives. Nevertheless, only a few services and their respective communities have become so integrated into our online experience that we devoutly spend time on them. Often enough, we simply don’t remember those services even when they can be most helpful to us.

While search query provides an effective means to find the links to these services and the information they host, it also requires extra clicks, especially when the desired result is not on the first page of search results. For certain search queries, e.g., “Gone with the wind”, do we verily need over four million search results? Or will we be better served if we obtain targeted results from service leaders for each Internet category, e.g. Wiki encyclopedic content, Youtube videos, and e-commerce offerings from Amazon?

Juice’s Magic is a mash-up of rich content from these service leaders. Through Linkool’s intelligent discovery engine, Juice identifies distinctive attributes for the keyword “Gone with the wind”: the name of a movie; an old movie; a book etc. Based on matching the keyword “Gone with the wind” with these attributes, Juice assembles a summary from Wikipedia, a list of video clips from Youtube (with comments from viewers) and shopping options on Amazon.com, and then displays the assembled mash-up as Magic. Juice is therefore bringing services and information closer to us even as the breadth of available services and information becomes more profound.

Magic is not designed for all types of search queries. For example, for the search query “who is Microsoft’s executive leader”, Juice may not find any distinctive attributes, and therefore, may not know what rich content to display. What Juice is designed for, however, are keywords that are clearly attributable. For example, if the search query is “Steve Ballmer”, Juice assembles Magic with a biographical summary from Crunchbase, some user-uploaded videos on Youtube featuring a passionate Ballmer, and news items about the CEO. Juice also provides a plain-vanilla search engine result for “Steve Ballmer” to complement Magic and make the information discovery experience more complete and fulfilling.

As the Web 2.0 revolution brings forth more structured rich content as well as web services that allow easy access to the content, we see the benefits of not just intelligently matching keywords with the content, but also assembling and then displaying the content. Our research on the technical and usability aspects of such an experience is reflected in Juice and the Magic it provides.

Juice is now in private beta!

We have just sent out emails to our private beta testers; the email contains an unlock code necessary to download and install Juice. If you have not received a private beta invitation from us, but wish to test Juice now, go to grabjuice.com and apply for a private beta invite code. Please bear in mind the following:

Juice is in private beta only. We expect to let the general public in as soon as we’ve ironed out the kinks and fine-tuned the service.

Our private beta is (currently) only available for Firefox 3. We expect to add support for more browsers soon.

Help us improve Juice. We probably didn’t get everything right the first time. As such, this beta is private so that you, the private beta tester, can help us improve Juice before we let the general public in. Send us an email or contact us over at Get Satisfaction. Your help is very much appreciated!

Good luck to all our private beta testers! For the actual general release date or other news, subscribe to our feed to get the latest product updates!