Krillionology: where local and commerce connect

What's the word

Every organization has its own vocabulary.

Arriving in the bay area at the height of the Bubble I can vividly remember my first impressions. I left the frozen tundra north of the 49th to join high flying Ariba whose parking lot resembled a new car dealership, complete with cell phone-wielding sales guys. Not a week went by when someone didn't drive in with something shiny & new or better yet had it delivered. Favorite test fright... a colleague's new Viper.

Truthfully the materialism didn't bother me, I'd brought my own pick and shovel to this latest gold rush. What really puzzled me was the language everyone used. Product managers spoke about leveraging assets and wanted to benchmark everything. And then came prepone (ref). I'd never come across the word and thought it sounded silly, but more importantly it was used in the fictional context of advancing the release date of software (and that certainly never happened at Ariba). Hearing it, a dev manager sardonically asked if by releasing on schedule we'd be poning the release.

Krillion too has developed its own language liberally sprinkled with search/ad-related acronyms (SEO, SEM, CPM, RPM, PPC) and a few real gems we all enjoy.

By definition, our favorite word, canonical (ref), is in a class by itself ;-) There are canonical URLs (oops URIs), product-identifiers and even a T-shirt. We delight in finding new ways to work this into the conversation, and non-developers get approving looks if we manage to use it correctly from Van and Roger.

Then there is trifurcate (ref). I offered this up one day tongue-in-cheek discussing a UI problem that had, surprise... three solutions. It doesn't lend itself to easy usage and in that sense it's rather canonical.

Paul gave us accretion (ref) in response to Van annexing some of the common space between them with his technical library which had been gathering dust in his basement and now is gathering dust on our bookshelves. As our QA lead, Paul is the team's conscience and he specializes in accreting bugs in Jira.

It will take time for new words to gain the support necessary to rise to the pantheon of usage occupied by the big three, but we have candidates. Joel casually offered vicissitudes (ref) during our last all-hands and judging by the impression it made on the assembly it might rate a T-shirt of its own one day. That is if the venal (ref) fortunes of its rivals don't win out, quietly rendering it moot (which might qualify as mute).

Anyway, if you come across this post and have some good examples of words that define your company let us know. We know this linguistic experience is not canonical.

606Tech has the Krillion 411

606Tech just published a detailed (and complimentary) piece on Krillion today. Writer Kristen Nicole puts the whole story together recounting the common user issues with current search technology. Have a read of her post "Krillion; the next big thing in local search"

Her personal frustration with the wasted hours spent searching in vain for a place to buy that new "insert product here" is palpable. When you are looking for a refrigerator is it really unreasonable NOT to find results for satellite dishes?

Unless you're using Krillion you might just have to buy a satellite dish.

Krillion Launches February 5th

It might seem a little tardy to blog about your launch 30 days later, but we'd like to think we're demonstrating just how reluctant we are to puff ourselves up when there's work to be done ;-)

On February 5th Krillion reached an important milestone that Churchill would have called ..."the end of the beginning" After a year of hard work the team proudly launched Krillion.com. It still bears a "beta" stamp in recognition of the ambitious feature set we're going to build and the challenges ahead, but it stands firmly on it's two feet for the first time.

Our founders Joel and Roger set out to build an answer to a very simple question. "Where can I find this product near me?" It's a question that millions of consumers researching purchases on the internet ask every day, and as Joel delights in demonstrating, no one else answers very well.

We encourage you try it for yourself, and then pay us a visit. If you're in the market for a major appliance (our first category) and want to purchase it locally (as 99% of major appliance consumers do) then check out the site and let us know what you think. You may even come across one of the 275-million local pages we provide through your favorite search engine. Relevance, is a beautiful thing after all.

With the humility that comes from that mile-long feature list we want to build, we are happy to acknowledge the great press we've received since launch from Search Engine Watch, VentureBeat, Search Engine Land and StartupSquad.

Joel and the sales team have their hands full with advertising and syndication meetings, while Roger has us heads down on the next development phase. Exciting times. Don't forget to zip in to Krillion before you zip out to buy that new fridge.