Who are we?

Cognase Labs is an innovation group focused on development of promising technological and business ideas currently in the fields of web services and applications, biotechnology and health/nutrition. We also provide investment and policy related services in the same fields.

Rails Developers

Help solve one of the most interesting and challenging puzzles on the internet. You can contribute in your spare time, as much as you like, when you like - no obligations. Looking for innovative and experienced Rails developers for: Facebook apps (to test the POC), UI/usability, and algorithms/math/statistics.

More info here

Affinax is Hiring

The Affinax Project is now accepting equity position applications from web app developers and algorithms programmers. Just to remind you, Affinax is a web technology that can predict a person's future favorites in any domain of life. Yes, you heard that right... We have figured out how to predict a person's future favorites in any domain of life: social, career, products, services, media, locations, etc. And we do it without tracking a user's behavior, without data mining, and without a lengthy registration process. Sound interesting? Be part of the next revolution on the internet. Send your CV, including public app portfolio links, to cognase.com, username "ben". Affinax has offices in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, but is open to remote participation.

Frugality meets Web 3.0

We are starting to send out beta invitations to a new web application We've just created called "SplitStuff" that should help people reduce expenses and save money. It started as something small and experimental, and has grown into something surprisingly useful. It's time to see if others agree. We'd rather not reveal too much about it at this point except to say that it is a very cool synthesis of well-documented traditional techniques and powerful new collaborative social and semantic technologies.

If you've received an invitation, consider yourself lucky, use it and benefit from it. For the rest of you, you can get on the waiting list. :-)

We think there is a big need for it - Stay tuned.

Famous Jews just got more Friendly

We just published the new version of Famous Jews by Heebz. We took the old static site and gave it a bit of database-backed functionality using Ruby on Rails. It now ranks #1 on Google for "Famous Jews".

Technology Highlights:

  • fuzzy autocomplete "search" box - uses n-grams and is very fast.
  • jquery and blueprint "frameworks"
  • list sort with cookie storage and re-sort
  • restful_authentication and rspec
  • served by Phusion Passenger (mod_rails)
  • mod_rewrite (yes, it works fine with Passenger) and RewriteMap to 301 redirect users and bots to the new friendly URLs
  • staging and production environments are on the same Linux VPS, deployed by Capistrano
  • Development using the Netbeans IDE

Future Plans:

  • better design and logo
  • public list sort "voting" via ajax (we already wrote the sort algorithms)
  • upgrade authorization system from role_requirement (for admins, etc.)
  • forum and wikis per category and name
  • photo/video pulling system
  • Paypal API integration for subscriptions
  • tagging system to replace(?) categories
  • spiders to find additional data
  • Facebook App(s)

Any suggestions or requests?

Welcome

Welcome!

We are creating this blog to give an early peek at some of our projects and activities. We may also use this forum to talk about development issues and ideas. Hopefully readers will find something useful in it.

We will try to post context if possible, though we will have to walk a fine line as many of the project under development are not public. We may also call for beta-testers when the time is right and announce new public projects for view.

Enjoy.