Yovia will unleash its social media optimization (SMO) powers for two new projects of WorldWideBiggies, former Nickelodeon executive Albie Hecht’s production company that’s so far best known for The Naked Brothers Band.

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NY-based semantic search engine Hakia is announcing a new round of funding today in the amount of $5 million bringing the total funding to $21 million to-date. The new investment comes from current shareholder Prokom Investments S.A. Hakia notes that the new funds will be instrumental to hakia.com as it builds a semantic advertising platform and a European datacenter.

We've written about Hakia before including their demo at the NY Tech Meetup which I have embedded below.

I stand firm that hakia is a better solution than Mahalo and could actually be stronger than Wikia Search hopes to be. It's unfortunate that they haven't found the right avenues for promotion and buzz generation so far. I also think they need to figure out marketing messages for the technical people and for the mainstream users.

Yesterday, after a bit of investigative journalism, we posted some of the domain names that Jakob Lodwick noted in a blog post on his Tumblr site. We tried to figure out what the name meant but came up dry. Today we know what the name Norbum means. I can only hope they are fooling with us.

Norbum.org went live today with the following message, "Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name “Norbum”? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com.  We’ll post the best ones to Norbum.org."

Can I get a WTF from the congregation? They show about 10 photos of what appear to be homeless people from photos on Flickr. I guess they wanted to start with something on the site upon launch but the message notes that you should email the photos to a tumblr account.

So if this is real, you are supposed to take photos of homeless people around the world, send them to Norbum and then Karp and Lodwick will decide which ones they should publish to the site. Since the photos are being sent mostly via mobile I imagine, there will be no attribution (the Flickr photos have non-commercial licenses from what I can tell). 

Do you all believe this is real? I can't believe that two intelligent people and successful entrepreneurs would use their creative juice to just post photos of homeless people unless of course there is more to the site that we can't see yet.