Looking back at 2008

2008 had its ups (Beijing Olympics & Paralympics) and downs (Sichuan earthquake, snow disasters and unfortunately many more), but for Linkool Labs, it has been an amazing year! We launched Juice (beta) on the very last day of October and have since been downloaded well over 38,000 times. Our second product, Live Margins (bundled into the Firefox China Edition), launched three weeks later in partnership with Mozilla Online and has also seen massive downloads and activity, even many times that of Juice.

Juice has been written about on well over 800 websites, ranging from personal blogs to TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb (also mentioned in their post ”10 more semantic apps to watch”), The Next Web and Ars Technica.

Here are some quotes from those sources:

The powerful plugin automatically culls information from around the web whenever you search for or highlight a term, making it a handy reference tool that I could quickly get used to. — Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch

Juice is ridiculously easy - and addictive - to use. — Rick Turoczy, ReadWriteWeb

Even the Applications area offers some nice UI polish, as images can be double-clicked to view a larger version in Juice’s sidebar, with links to open the image’s direct URL or originating URL. — David Chartier, Ars Technica

Huge thanks go out to all of our users, partners and friends, but also to Twitter (for helping us keep in touch with users) and Get Satisfaction for making it easy to help our users and exchange valuable ideas.

Which brings us to what’s in store for 2009. We believe that 2009 will be an excellent year for the Semantic Web and also believe that through our patent-pending intelligent discovery engine we will be able to play a significant role in the evolution of the internet. We have many exciting new features and products lined up for this year, that will introduce innovative contextual features to the browser with that same ease-of-use that Juice already introduced late 2008, making it even more easy to navigate the web in an age of information abundance.

Linkool Labs wishes you a great 2009!