Kwanzoo continues its march out of beta!

We got the celebrity trivia channel up and running. Sports is next, and the NFL and NCAA football channel should be going live in a few weeks.

We’ve got kind of a long pipeline on our staff-written trivia, so we’re still gradually adding new content on the site in movies & TV, celebrity and video games. There’s a steady stream of 150 to 300 new questions in each of our channels every week, the idea being to give people a reason to visit regularly. You may notice the new topics are announced here or on the front page.

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Tags: web, trivia, pop culture

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Tags: Kwanzoo stories by Matthew Boyd
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Okay kids, as I write this, it’s eleven-fifteen Sunday night and I’m watching a Family Guy rerun on Adult Swim, and I just realized something.

Family Guy is performing some kind of really, really subtle mind control on me that keeps me watching it despite the fact that each episode is really only about fifteen minutes long.

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Tags: TV stories by Steve Anderson
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It’s the weekend, and we wanted to share a few of the details on how Search works as you play social trivia games on Kwanzoo. You’ve probably seen the Search box right on top. Kwanzoo lets you search on all of the categories that we support, viz: movie, TV show, actor, actress, director, character and other. Search will pull results for you for all trivia topics that contain the text that you type in. Try typing “Frat” and you will get: Frat Pack and Lothney “Sloth” Fratelli!

We all sometimes mis-spell the word or topic name we want to search on. Try typing Caribean instead of Caribbean in the search box (say you want to play on Pirates of the Caribbean). Surprise! The search comes back with the correct results! This works on Kwanzoo as we have built in support for Aliases.

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Tags: Explaining Kwanzoo by Mani
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Every so often we hear something from you guys that gives us that extra boost! It is what helps us wake up every morning, and go back to building the kind of social trivia site we believe you would want to be on!

Here are some of the comments we’ve picked out that caught our eye!

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Tags: Kwanzoo stories by Mani
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When we first started working on Kwanzoo, we visited a whole lot of trivia sites out there. We still do. There are some good ones, to be sure. But the better ones we’ve seen do not allow users to submit content into their trivia game. And the ones that do allow user-submitted content have at least some of the following issues:

Give me 10 questions on 1 topic. Or don’t give me any questions at all!

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Tags: Kwanzoo stories by Mani
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I was all kinds of amazed when I made the discovery that Natural Born Killers, a work of savagery unparalleled to this very day as far as I’m concerned has a very unusual pedigree. Get this–Natural Born Killers is actually based off an early shooting script by none other than Quentin Tarantino!

At this point my jaw hits the floor. That movie? That horrifying and shocking and morally bankrupt and absolutely incredible adrenaline-fueled carnival ride of a movie is connected to the chattiest waste of time in Hollywood? I was unequivocally amazed.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Tags: Movie stories by Steve Anderson
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Update: Nominations are closed as of Dec 12th 2007 midnight PST. Thank you all for your support!

In the startup world, something new came along today. We had Techcrunch, GigaOm, Read/Write Web and VentureBeat announce that they were seeking nominations for their new Crunchies Awards. They are looking for the best startups from around the world. There are several nominee categories. While we do not know what exactly they are looking for, the one award we would love to get is their Best time sink site award!

And the reason is simple. If you guys feel we are worthy of this award, we are doing our job! If we really had our way, we would be quite happy waking up every day, clicking over to Kwanzoo, and seeing our Leaderboard movin’ and shakin’. See, that would tell us that you guys love the site, and want to keep coming back!

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Tags: Kwanzoo stories by Mani
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It’s always interesting to me, to look back at certain points in time in building a startup business, when some very strategic decisions get made very quickly. Once the decision is made, you try to adapt to the changing dynamics of the marketplace. However, excessive change of course without a rational basis for the change will only lead to thrashing and frustration! A better way might be to move along a path, measure, test and refine on a continuous basis.

We have had some very strategic decision points come upon us this past year. When we got started in the summer of 2006, we started developing Kwanzoo.com as a destination site for playing social trivia games. Earlier this year, Facebook opened up their platform. As we all know, that’s all the rage now. Every week we hear about yet another social application thats been launched on Facebook (and soon, the floodgates of announcements will be upon us of new social applications on MySpace, or Bebo, or Orkut or any other social network).

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Tags: CEO stories by Mani
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Just as Frodo Baggins seems too small in stature to carry such a heavy ring, director Peter Jackson was an odd choice to helm The Lord of the Rings, one of the most complex and well-loved fantasy tales in the world. Most of Jackson’s early oeuvre was comprised of horror and comedy, including Bad Taste and Braindead (released in North America as Dead Alive).

With partner and co-writer Fran Walsh, he created the art house classic Heavenly Creatures, about two teenage girls who commit murder out of their unhealthy attachment to each other. His next project was a mockumentary called Forgotten Silver, leading to a War of the Worlds-style prank in which film goers were led to believe that the story was real.

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Tags: Movie stories by Liz N.
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While we’re all pretty much aware that there is very little that’s actually original in the Sci-Fi Channel Original Picture classification, the Sci-Fi genre has taken the concept of remake to a new and interesting place with the release of Tin Man, a miniseries that promises to blow the doors off the original Wizard of Oz.

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Tags: Movie stories by Steve Anderson
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