Ms. Houston (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

And I Will Always Google You Google just released its year-end zeitgeist list and Whitney Houston was named the most searched person and term of the year. Gangnam Style clocked in as the second most searched thing of the year and the now-pregnant duchess Kate Middleton was the second most searched person in 2012. In terms of New York's search history, Hurricane Sandy took the number one slot and was followed by "MTA" and then "NY Knicks" (The new Brooklyn Nets didn't manage to crack the top 10). In terms of restaurants, Nobu was the most searched place to eat in New York, but Daniel and Chef's Table didn't fall too far behind.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Tumblr Tumblr is instructing its users to tag their favorite posts "#TumblrGiftGuide." The Tumblr team then will troll through the entries and reblog the best entries onto the official Holiday Gift Guide Tumblr. A look on the site shows a knit skull and a case for an iPad with cute typewriters all over it. No GIFs are currently on the site or for sale anywhere in the world.

Just Disrupt It Nike has announced a partnership with TechStars Oregon's branch to create an accelerator called the Nike+ Accelerator. The company plans to host ten companies for a three-month mentor-driven accelerator experience in Portland. The companies have to make products that integrate with Nike’s fitness-tracking Nike+ technology. But how will they get to test any of the equipment if they're coding all day long?

Cooler To Look At Than Macy's Christmas Windows NYU's winter ITP show takes place this weekend. Projects made by students in the two-year graduate program will be on display. Some of this year's entries include an app that lets you find hungry friends to eat with and a site that lets you capture a friend's reaction to a YouTube video. Cue up all of those videos where something jumps out and scares you.

Zuck Saves The Children Citizen Schools, a NYC nonprofit, has partnered with low-performing middle schools and volunteers from companies like Google and Facebook, to organize an after school program that encourages kids to learn more than just what goes on in the classroom. This Friday at Bronx Writing Academy, a middle school, the students will show off projects that include solar-powered cars and video games they programmed themselves. Software engineers, designers, and programmers from Facebook who’ve been teaching all semester will be there to watch their proud pupils.

And It's Just Like Honey We could all use a couple discounts this holiday season, so thank God for Honey, a Chrome extension that automatically scans the web for discount codes and then instantly deducts money from your total bill at checkout. It works with a ton of websites including Amazon, Nike, and Sephora. After a big boost from Reddit, the extension has been downloaded about 60,000 times. Honey said in a press release sent to Betabeat that "at just 7,000+ installs, Honey had saved consumers $30,000." That's a lot of extra gifts that you can buy for your mom.

I'm Feeling Very Lucky The search technology startup Q-Sensei Corp just announced the end of a Series A-2 funding round led by Verizon Ventures. $1.175M was raised which raises the total of its seed and Series A funding to over $5 million. Richard N. Nottenburg, the former CEO of Sonus Networks and graduate of NYU Poly, also now joins Q-Sensei's board.

Be My Benefactor Recent college graduates who want to achieve their dreams while still battling their impossible mountains of debt now have a new solution. Pave, a company that matches up the young and hopeless with backers who want to help the youth achieve their dreams through mentoring and/or cash sponsorship. In turn, when prospects turn a profit, they reward their backers with a percentage of earnings. It's like turning your poor post-grad life into a Kickstarter project.

Ms. Rother. (Lalisio.com)

Enterprise search is a tough market. But with the release of an upgraded search platform tailored to cash in on big data, plus a snazzy new Brooklyn office, Q-Sensei has big plans and even bigger ambitions.

Created in 2007 from the merger of a German and an American company, Q-Sensei's primary product is an enterprise software platform, designed to help businesses sort through their vast amounts of internal clutter. But despite picking up a couple of industry awards, the company has largely flown under the radar. Enterprise work just isn't as flashy as consumer offerings, and besides, Europe has been the team's focus thus far. 

But now the company is making moves here in the states. Q-Sensei has just released a new version of its technology, somewhat predictably dubbed Enterprise v2.0. The new-and-improved offering incorporates ontology-based data processing, which is meant to make it faster and easier for businesses to develop new search applications.

CEO Ute Rother explained the changes to Betabeat: “We have developed an extremely fast and flexible system to process data, even big data.” The search engine not only serves up results, but also determines possible filtering opportunities, “so people can, in a very personalized way, very quickly drill down and get away from the clutter and get the items they’re most interested in.” Ms. Rother also drew attention to the technology’s ability to calculate related items in real time. All that allows companies to get a contextual view of all their own data, whether statistical data or project emails.

The company is betting on this next-gen search engine as its competitive advantage, billing it as a big data solution. And Q-Sensei is certainly going to need some sort of angle, because enterprise search has plenty of incumbents. For the open-source-inclined, there's Apache SOLR/Lucene. Then there's Autonomy, purchased last year by HP for a cool $12 billion, and Endeca, which Oracle picked up for just over $1 billion.

To crack the market, Q-Sensei isn’t limiting its focus to a particular niche--Ms. Rother insists the company’s technology has universal enterprise applications. Rather, her team’s strategy revolves around partnerships. “Our focus is to team up with IT service providers or solutions providers, and then we offer our high speed data processing and advanced search capabilities to sell to their customers or to integrate into their existing solutions so that they become even more valuable,” Ms. Rother explained.

One of those partners is a New York based firm called AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, which consults on exactly what you’d expect from its name. The two companies are currently working on a test project for a major news organization, though Ms. Rother refused to name names. She also hinted at two more soon-to-be-announced deals, though again, no names.

The plan is to establish an American foothold as quickly as possible through this kind of work. To that end, the company recently opened a new office in downtown Brooklyn. It wasn’t just the much-discussed startup-friendly vibe that attracted them, but also the fact that, as Ms. Rother told us, New York is a “hub for data rich-companies,” exactly the market their technology is designed to serve