Tech investors Polaris Ventures built and released today a really handy new Chrome browser extension they call Polaris Insights. Click it and you'll be shown Crunchbase (tech financial), LinkedIn (employment) and Quora (general Q&A) information about the company behind whatever website you're visiting. It will be of particular interest to journalists, investors and others who take a deep interest in the websites of various businesses but it's a great example of bigger things, of course. Specifically, of the kind of value add that can be built by using distributed social media data to provide context to a given document. It's pretty hot.
Feed reading on the go is an unsolved problem, none of the available options really feels like they've nailed it yet. Feedly, the popular browser plug-in that turns your Google Reader subscriptions into an attractive magazine-style display, has just released an iPhone app that may be my favorite mobile feed reader I've tried. (iTunes link) When I've got free time and am looking for something good to read, I've been launching Feedly for the past few months that I've been testing it.
The app, which sells for $2.99, offers an attractive folder-based navigation that's easy to thumb through horizontally. Sharing, bookmarking, Tweeting and emailing are all very easy to do. There's no limit to the number of feeds you can subscribe to in the app. It uses a popularity metric to surface key items in each folder of subscriptions that you should read if in a time crunch. It's a great little app and well worth a few dollars.
If you're a sports fan, then you know how difficult it can be to keep track of all the games without missing the best ones. Without a room full of screens, it can be all too easy to watch one defensive snoozer while an action packed display of offense is happening on another channel. Or maybe you know the feeling of skipping out on watching a game because you think it will be boring and it turns out to be the one everyone is talking about for the next week.
One startup has decided to make sure you're never "the loser at the water cooler the next day that missed an Instant Classic." With a name your buddy might shout from the other room, "Are You Watching This?!" can make sure you're never that loser and its vision for the future should be exciting for any television viewer, especially sports fans.
What did you do on your last birthday, do you remember the details? I just transported myself back in time to my last birthday, thanks to the Tweets, Facebook messages, Foursquare check-ins and Flickr photos I posted that day, displayed on an attractive timeline from Memolane. Memolane is a venture-funded startup that hasn't opened to the public yet, but if you look around online you can find some invite codes that are still valid. This is really cool stuff.
A new startup called CubeDuel accesses your LinkedIn work history and then pits present and former co-workers in Hot or Not style battles. "Who would you rather work with?" the site asks, assuring you that no one will ever know who it was that voted on the duel. The end result is a leaderboard of the most (and least) desirable people to work with at a given company. It's a lot like the online college beauty contest Mark Zuckerberg got in trouble for before building Facebook (FaceMash) but for the workplace.
It's absolutely perverse and it's likely to be huge. This crude pointing at one or the other person, flash judgements regarding a person's relative desirability, is like a car crash of interpersonal psychology. It's also quite compelling. It gets easier and easier after each click.
At a conference of more than 130,000 people, cell phone service, Internet connectivity and even the sureness that a taxi will be available when you need it is generally in question. Trying to coordinate between multiple people, therefore, can be a rather trying experience...unless you have one little group messaging app called Beluga.
Last week, amidst the insanity that is the Consumer Electronics Show (and Las Vegas on an average Thursday night) Beluga saved me and my friends from an unending and confusing game of telephone.
Nothing beats a good recommendation for a new band to listen to, but a recommendation for a new music blog to read can be a gift that keeps on giving. Extension.fm, a New York startup that provides a browser plug-in that captures all the MP3 files you come across and turns them into a playlist, has just announced the creation of a new experimental Labs department.
First entry into Extension's Labs is something the company calls The Super Awesome Music Blog Finder Thingy ™. Enter your Last.fm username and it will recommend new music blogs that have posted music from artists you've listened to the most over the last 30 days. It's not great, yet, but it could make a pretty great feature once more fully baked.
If you've ever seen New York data visualization specialist Nicholas Felton's Annual Reports on sites like LifeHacker or here on ReadWriteWeb, you probably remember the giggly feeling many of us feel when imagining that the beautiful charts and graphs he publishes were about the minutia of our own lives. Thanks to the New Years Eve release of a new iPhone app from Felton's company Daytum, those visualizations can illustrate your days, weeks, months and years.
In 2008, Felton's Annual Report stated that he took 548 subway trips, 107 taxis, 12 flights, 19 buses, two ferries and 64 visits to the gym that year. His average rate of movement through the year was just under 5 miles per hour and he's got some beautiful graphs to illustrate that. The new Daytum iPhone app makes it easy for you to track and graph those or any other kinds of activities day by day through your own life. It's a very well designed app, too.
GAIN Fitness, a web based personal fitness service built by a team that includes two former Googlers, has launched in early Alpha mode to the public today. The service aims to help users make the most of the limited time to exercise, by recommending personalized workouts built from a list of 400 exercises and based on a user's goals and available time.
The GAIN team includes Nick Gammell, who spent two years doing financial modeling for YouTube and Google, and Robert Bailey, who was the lead visual designer for Google-acquired Picassa. It's rounded out by a Fullbright scholar who can do a one-armed pull-up and a software engineer with a demonstrated ability to lose weight quickly.
Ford Motor Company has just launched its first mobile application: SYNC Destinations, available today for iPhone/iPad and Android users, with a Blackberry version due out soon. The new app provides directions, navigation and traffic information, all of which can be sent from the app to any 2010 or 2011 Ford SYNC-equipped vehicles which are TDI-capable (Traffic, Directions and Information-capable).
In other words, it's your phone talking to your car.
