After the article about andUNITE the German blog IT Frontal published an interview with Bernd and Christian, two of the founders of andUNITE. The interview ist not only about what andUNITE is all about but also about how everything started and what some of the future ideas are like. You will also find a few notes about the philosophy, the idea and the use of andUNITE.
Thank you, Thomas Sprenger, also for the inspiring talk about “swarm intelligence” and related topics.

At the German Weblog “IT Frontal” Thomas Sprenger from Pironet published an article about andUNITE. He puts andUNITE in an overall open search context and sees tools like andUNITE as a threat even for Google (wow, really??). In fact: We believe that we actually enriche Google and other search engines with a service they themselves don’t want to provide. The future lies in both: bot based search à la Google, Yahoo! & Co and whatever kind of “social” search à la Wikia Search or andUNITE. What we especially care about is the knowledge which sits deep inside the people’s brains and which can not be found on the Web. Here it makes sense to bring people back into search and let them talk to each others about their questions, problems or common interests. THAT’s what andUNITE is all about. We don’t realy care about bots…

The dutch news site NUzakelijk published an article and a video/interview about andUNITE. The interview was recorded at The Next Web 2008 conference in Amsterdam.

Thanks to our Cambridge MBA supporter Ed Aruffo we came up with a nice, “emotional” tag line: “Find a warm body besides cold links with andUNITE”. This is what obviously got stuck in the minds of the Next Web 2008 attendees and bloggers. (Ok, this post is kind of late, but we still had to mention this…)

Ernst-Jan Pfauth wrote on his blog post: “The German guys from andUNITE have a really good idea: they want to match people by their search terms. Co-founder Bernd Storm van‘s Gravesande told The Next Web Blog: “Christian Schmidkonz and me were both frustrated with the boring and lonely process of web search. We thought that it would be always more useful to be able to ask someone who knows something about a problem or question instead of browsing though pages and pages of more or less interesting search result links. We thought that the value of a search term must be much higher than just being used for retrieving links from a database.” Of course this arouses some doubts about privacy. Well, don’t worry about that, since you can also remain anonymous. But are you sure you want to hide your identity? Since the guys not only promise you interesting search results, they also stated that you might find ‘a warm body besides cold links.’”

Finally, andUNITE also made in on TechCrunch, probably THE TechBlog in the US (this is why we added such a BIG Logo to this post…). Under the headline “Europe is searching for its Silicon Valley” Erick Schonfeld posted a longer article about his impressions from The Next Web 2008 in Amsterdam where andUNITE was also present. It’s great to be able to represent our hometown, Munich in Germany, in such a blog entry. We still don’t really understand why there was no other start-up from Germany at

Nur noch als Ergänzung (und dann reicht es aber auch erst einmal): Hier einige weitere Medien, in denen über andUNITE in den vergangenen Tagen berichtet wurde. Wir sind natürlich gespannt, was die kommenden Wochen und Monate an Aufmerksamkeit bringen werden. Immerhin sind wir inzwischen auf dem Radar von sehr, sehr, SEHR großen Internetunternehmen gelandet und sprechen auch mit diesen. Jetzt fehlt nur noch die sehr, sehr, SEHR große Presse - obwohl wir natürlich auch auf die bereits bestehende Sammlung (die hier in dem Blog in Ausschnitten dokumentiert wird) stolz sind.

Wir kommen mit dem Dokumentieren gar nicht mehr nach: Jetzt ist andUNITE also auch auf dem Suchmaschinen-Superblog “Alt Search Engines” gelandet. Folgende Beschreibung von andUNITE wurde dabei veröffentlicht:

“andUNITE turns search engines into meeting places. By using andUNITE you will be able to see immediately during your normal Internet search at Google, et al who else searched for the same search terms as you did – no extra steps needed!

In this way, other users can help you directly, or, if the search engine results are of no help to you, perhaps you can help others. andUNITE is a unique, award winning Web service where you can find people with similar interests based on search terms. You can sign up anonymously and you always have full control of the privacy of all of your search terms. andUNITE is already fun with only two people and you don’t have to fill in just another profile page since the profile is created automatically by collecting your search terms.

Add andUNITE to your browser search box or install the toolbar for the full functionality including the “social layer” on top of the search result pages and see how exciting it can be to share your search terms with friends or anybody.”

So, jetzt ist andUNITE also schon wieder auf einem englischsprachigen Blog gelandet. Auf dem Blog von “The Next Web” wird ausführlich über uns berichtet. Unter der Überschift “andUNITE.com uses search info to match people” wird auch einmal recht ausführlich auf die ganz frühe Startphase von andUNITE eingegangen. Und als Schlussfolgerung schreibt der Autor Ernst-Jan Pfauth: “I think andUNITE is a promising project. It’s not a coincidence that they won a first price at an entrepreneurship contest from the German Federal Ministry of economics and technology. The jury thought that their idea in fact is an innovative approach to the so-called ’social search’. Judge for yourself tonight.”