The Seattle-Search.com Blog

When famous Microsoft computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.

As reported by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch,  Amazon then stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It’s a tough task - the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out.

If you’d like to help, go to this task on Mechanical Turk. You’ll be asked to view five satellite images and note any that should be looked at more closely.

Here’s hoping that new web technologies will make helping people more common in the future. When tragedy strikes, people may be able to help in an effective and organized way instead of simply watching events unfold on their television.

Seattle-based BillMonk has been bought by mobile payment company Obopay and will immediately let its users settle their social debts using Obopay mobile payment technology.

BillMonk, founded a year ago by former Amazonian’s Gauraov Oberoi and Chuck Groom, lets people track money they share or owe to friends and others, like shared living costs or restaurant tabs.  San Francisco-based Obopay sells technology that lets people pay for things using a mobile phone.

According to John Cook’s Venture Blog, financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the financial payoff was not the incentive.

“Primarily for us it was the ability to continue to grow BillMonk,” said Groom. “It is a match made in heaven. Both services are so compatible. Put them together and both services become much better.”

When Marchex acquired Openlist in May of 2006, it seemed like an ideal pairing that would give OpenList’s local guides and aggregated content a range of network resources and properties to work with. The combination of local and vertical makes for a great lead platform for advertisers (e.g., NY Hotels, SF Restaurants, etc.).

The result of the partnership has just debuted. ustling hotel and restaurant categories featuring summary reviews have been lanched across the Marchex network.

FrenchRestaurants.com on the Marchex network has been trasnformed with picks like L’orangerie (see the Open View summary down the page).

Prior to Open List integration, the Marchex URL network used to simply offer contextually relevant ads parked at a domain. But Open List search and content (plus maps) have turned them into real sites, which improves their monetization capability as well.