ReadWriteWeb

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.

TradeVibes, which has up until now been operating in stealth mode, is soon-to-be-public wiki focused around company information. TradeVibes combines an informational wiki with a number of community features aimed at using the wisdom of the crowds to create a company database similar to Hoovers. Though the company is still in closed alpha testing, ReadWriteWeb readers can access the site through this invite link.