Linkool Labs

5 awesome Firefox add-ons for journalists

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:36:00 +0800

5 awesome Firefox add-ons for journalists

Back to School: 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions for Students

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:02:34 +0800

Back to School: 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions for Students

On Software lists Juice as #1 in "5 great add-ons for new Firefox users"

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:17:15 +0800

On Software lists Juice as #1 in "5 great add-ons for new Firefox users"

Advanced Online Research Skills

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:16:00 +0800

Advanced Online Research Skills:

Colin Meek uses Juice for research! We’re happy to have him on board.

Hi Twitter! Great news; we already provided you with Twitter...

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:27:37 +0800

Hi Twitter! Great news; we already provided you with Twitter Search early on in our 1.0 release, but starting today, Juice also includes a “Share to Twitter” feature, that allows you to easily share your discoveries on Twitter.

Juice 1.0.2 is now available over at grabjuice.com. Next to Twitter support, the new version includes support for: Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks, Windows Live, Technorati, Newsvine, Yahoo! buzz, Slashdot, FriendFeed, LinkedIn and Facebook. Happy times!

Juice now includes Magic City Guides. Search for any large city...

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:32:00 +0800

Juice now includes Magic City Guides. Search for any large city in the US and we’ll hook you up with the best places to see, eat or stay (courtesy of the amazing Yahoo Local API). This feature is still experimental and only covers a limited number of cities. What do you think?

1,000,000 Juicers are go!

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:16:48 +0800

This morning, our stellar browser add-on, Juice, skyrocketed past the one-million-users mark. Thank you! To all one million users out there: we hope we can keep up and improve on the promise of delivering the best possible browsing experience.

Our new Juice 1.1 BETA includes a very cool scrapbook feature...

Sun, 31 May 2009 09:10:00 +0800

Our new Juice 1.1 BETA includes a very cool scrapbook feature where you can drag and drop any content from the web into the Juice sidebar and store it there. We think you’ll find this feature incredibly useful, whether you’re doing online research or just sharing cool stuff you’ve found on the web with your friends.

We at Linkool Labs call this… a “Drop”. Creating a Drop is super easy. Click the “Create a New Drop” button to get started. Type in the title of the Drop, and then simply drag and drop anything – a chunk of text, an image, a video, a link – towards the sidebar. You can edit dragged snippets of texts, or add comments to your Drop by inserting, wherever you wish, additional text snippets. Once you are done, you can (one-click) upload the Drop to the Jurl cloud, or share it with your friends on Facebook!

Your friends can now enjoy the rich and beautiful Drops you choose to share with them, and by clicking the “snap back” button next to each snippet in the Drops, you and your friends can easily locate the source where you originally retrieved the snippet.

Direct download link: Install Juice 1.1 BETA for Firefox

Share your discoveries with a single-click. The new Juice...

Sat, 30 May 2009 02:54:00 +0800

Share your discoveries with a single-click. The new Juice includes exciting new ways to share interesting information with your Facebook friends.

Here’s what you can share:

Magic content – whenever Magic appears, click the “Share” button located at the bottom-left corner of the Juice sidebar.
Images – inside the Image Widget, double-click the image and hit the “Share” button.
Videos – after placing your mouse pointer over any video item in the Video Widget, click the drop-down button and then select “Share”.
Search results – after clicking a search result, a “Share” button will appear immediately below the entry allowing you to instantly share the link with your Facebook friends.

For Share to work, you do need to authenticate with your Facebook profile. Haven’t done so yet? Click the orange Profile button inside the sidebar and Juice will help you with the necessary steps. After clicking any of the “Share” buttons (text will update to “Shared” upon completion), hit the button again to see the result on your Facebook profile page.

Juice adds a bit of real-time flavor. Search options now include...

Fri, 29 May 2009 22:53:30 +0800

Juice adds a bit of real-time flavor. Search options now include Twitter, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.

Tried this yet? Juice does not require you to change your search...

Fri, 29 May 2009 21:34:00 +0800

Tried this yet? Juice does not require you to change your search engine preferences in order for you to search in the sidebar directly.

Prefer keeping Google as your default? No problem, we’ve got you covered! By adding the command “juice” (or “j”) in front of any search query in the browser’s search box, the search will be directed to the sidebar instead of the main window. This way, you get to search without leaving the website or altering any preferences.

We won! Linkool Labs won the Microsoft-award at the prestigious...

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:41:00 +0800

We won! Linkool Labs won the Microsoft-award at the prestigious CHINICT 2009 conference. After zipping some champaign, we went right back to work on our upcoming 1.1 release (tried the BETA yet?).

In our new release, we’ve added a direct link preview feature...

Wed, 27 May 2009 14:53:00 +0800

In our new release, we’ve added a direct link preview feature for some of our partners’ websites. For example, you can now drag and drop product links on any Amazon page to get Instant Magic for that product; and company, product, executive/entrepreneur links on a TechCrunch page to get Instant Magic from CrunchBase. Other websites for which we enabled Instant Magic include: Wikipedia, Yelp, Last.fm, and Twitter.

We’re especially excited about our preview feature for Twitter! When you drag and drop any Twitter username, you’ll get a Instant Magic result with the latest updates from this user, as well as the user’s Twitter profile via the infobox.

Awesome news! We just launched both Juice 1.0 and Juice 1.1 BETA...

Mon, 18 May 2009 12:00:00 +0800

Awesome news! We just launched both Juice 1.0 and Juice 1.1 BETA for Firefox. Watch the screencast to see what’s new. Both versions include a brand new user interface, our second generation intelligent discovery engine and integrate seamlessly with Facebook.

Want Juice? Grab it today at grabjuice.com. You might want to try the 1.1 BETA version, which also includes advanced scrapbooking features and storage in the Juice cloud. (Grab the Press Kit)

Looking back at 2008

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0800

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!

Wow; just wow. Big thanks to our viewers and Vimeo - 38k views.

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0800

Wow; just wow. Big thanks to our viewers and Vimeo - 38k views.

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

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0800

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!

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0800

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

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0800

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!

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0800

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!