Minekey users tell the story about the application better than anyone. Read the following testimonials from passionate users of the Minekey app on Facebook:

In this context we would also like to share a couple of presentations made by our CEO in early June that you may find interesting. The first is a brief story, and the second a detailed one on what users have to say about Minekey. To view the presentations in full screen mode, click the “view presentation” link beneath each, which will take you to the presentations at Slideshare.net. Once there, click on the “Full” link on bottom right corner of the presentations.

Check out Bambi Francisco’s interview with Minekey CEO Delip Andra, aired on Vator.tv.

Delip offers a great overview of how the Minekey Recommendations Widget personalizes the reading experience of blogs and websites.

Last week Minekey was showcased as one of the top 25 start-ups in Asia at Proto.In.

Started by Knowledge Foundation and some India blogcampers, Proto.In is modeled on DEMO, Demo Conference, the premier launch venue for new products, technologies and companies in the US.

Gaurav Bhatia, our VP of Engineering gave a great 6 minute presentation, to an audience composed of venture capitalists, media, bloggers and entrepreneurs. His presentation focused on Minekey’s Recommendations Widget, which makes use of advanced online discovery technology to personalize content for each user, based on what they’ve read before what what’s most relevant to them.

We couldn’t have asked for a better venue to present the Widget. Proto.In is simply the best event in India for showcasing new technologies. As entpreneur and blogger Rajiv Poddar says, Proto.In is “the place soak in the second wave of Indian Entrepreneurship.”

Bouquets and brickbats. Accolades and bugs :-). Well, the past 7 weeks since we launched the service has been quite fascinating and it has been adrenaline heavy times for us all at Minekey. A big thank you to everyone for helping make Minekey better every single day.

Thanks to Vivek @ Startup Squad for such a nice note. Yes – we have fixed the Recommendations Latency Issue. Vivek in nice note states:

“Minekey, the content recommendation service delivered via a widget that I had written about couple of times earlier, is now performing way better - actually, perfectly. Earlier, the widget had issues resolving FeedBurner URLS, which has now been fixed according to the Minekey team. Now the recommendations are working as they were expected to in the first place - take in consideration your browsing tastes and history to recommend relevant articles from select feeds. Each new page view now results in 5 new content recommendations (of course it still depends on how big of an index it is polling against).”

In case, if some of you are still experiencing some latencies for the recommendations to kick in it could possibly be due to certain types of Firewalls on your computers. For eg: Symantec Firewall prevents certain HTTP headers from being sent. Apparently, this is a well know issue documented on the Symantec website. This affects services like Minekey, which need the referring URL info to serve contextually relevant recommendations. Here is the setting suggested by Symantec to overcome this problem. Keep checking out our help section for future updates on this.
Additionally, we also improved some internal code logic and implemented some more optimizations to make things faster and better. We hope you will enjoy the new speed at which recommendations are served. Thanks once again to our users for helping us. We are hungry for more feedback. Keep sending us.

It has been 5 weeks since we launched the beta of the Minekey recommendations service.

Over 500 bloggers have actively participated in our beta program so far and we have clocked an aggregate CTR (Click Through Rate) of 6.35%.

Apart from a small launch event back at IIT Kharagpur, we have kept a low profile to make sure we fine tune the service based on the feedback from the Beta customers. Before we start getting the word out, we want to ensure we resolve all the critical issues and be confident that our service and infrastructure can scale. Interestingly, some of the bloggers have already discovered us and have posted reviews on their blogs. Here are some of them:

http://www.killerstartups.com/WebAppTools/Minekey–Content-Recommendation-Widget-1/

http://startupsquad.com/2007/05/21/minekey-more-details/

http://startupsquad.com/2007/05/18/minekey-tries-contextual-recommendations/#comments

http://www.widgetslab.com/index.php/2007/05/17/minekeycom-recommendations-widget/

Also, we have received some very interesting feedback from the bloggers who have tried our product and the bloggers who would like to try our product but saw some limitations. We are working hard to address several of these issues in the next release that we are putting out in the next few days. Of course, we’ll continue to make more improvements in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.