Forget about checking-in to venues. Apparently, the new thing to do is to check-in to whatever you’re doing — like watching television shows, or reading a book. It’s something that Hot Potato offers, and they’re in the process of being acquired by Facebook. It’s what GetGlue offers as well, and they’re already seeing over 4.5 million ratings and check-ins a month now. And today, the service is announcing a new exclusive partnership with HBO.
Starting on August 1, when you use GetGlue to check-in watching one of HBO’s hit shows, you’ll earn exclusive stickers designed by HBO. If you’re aware of Foursquare badges or Gowalla pins, it’s the same idea, except based around content. The three shows HBO has selected for this promotion are True Blood, Hung, and Entourage — three of their hottest shows. → Read More
If you want to add social smarts to your browsing experience, Glue by Adaptive Blue just got better. Glue is a Firefox add-on that uses semantic technology to understand the subject of the page you are on and shows you via a bar at the bottom of your browser whether your friends have commented or liked the item anywhere on the Web. Glue works for movies, books, games, restaurants, wines, stock charts, and more. (It is very product oriented).
The big new feature being rolled out today is product recommendations. Every time you click on the “like” heart, it recognizes what you are liking (movie, book, wine) and recommends other items in the same category based on your previous likes and those of your friends. You can now share your likes with your friends on Facebook as well (via Facebook Connect) or Twitter (which you could do before). → Read More
Glue (formerly known as BlueOrganizer), now boasts its own API. Glue is a contextual social networking layer powered by a Firefox browser add-on which startup AdaptiveBlue added to its semantic browsing technology platform late last year.
This provides third-party developers with a way to connect to and tap into the databases and semantic recognition engine the company has been building over the past few months.
Glue essentially leverages information that already exists inside Web pages, and enables users to interact with things like books, music and movies from a toolbar layered on top of the pages in a frame when browsing with Firefox. It tells you more contextually relevant things about what you’re browsing, and also lets you interact with friends or unknown people who also visited, liked, or purchased those things. → Read More
Semantic search applications are finally starting to gel this year. Tonight, Adaptive Blue is releasing the latest version (dubbed Indigo) of its FireFox add-on, Blue Organizer. Put simply, Blue Organizer lets you surf things instead of Web pages. It recognizes when a Webpage that you are browsing is about certain classes of things: books, movies, music, stocks, recipes, restaurants, blogs, wine, clothing, electronics, celebrities, musicians, hotels. And it creates shortcuts to other Webpges about that same “thing” (or object). If you are reading a book review on a blog, for instance, Blue Organizer will let you jump directly to the page on Amazon about that book, or AbeBooks, Alibris, Barnes & Noble, eBay, and more. You can also go to a custom Google page that only searches book reviews for that book. For each different class of things it recognizes, you get a different set of contextually-relevant options. Blue Organizer was developed by Alex Iskold, a frequent contributor to ReadWriteWeb. He raised $1.5 million from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures back in February 2007, and is going to try to raise a B round soon. Baked into Indigo is semantic search technology that acts more like a discovery engine than a traditional search engine. It is limited in what it can recognize, but it does recognize certain things and concepts and matches those with other Webpages about the exact same thing. You never have to go to a search engine, you just have to surf the Web and hop from concept to concept. The software can make inferences about entire Web pages, text inside those pages, and links inside those pages. When it recognizes that a Web page is about a book, a movie, a recipe, or some other thing, the Blue Organizer icon at the top of your browser changes to an appropriate image (book, movie reel, chef’s hat) to indicate that it has identified an “object” on the page. And it offers a series of appropriate links, such as the Amazon page for a book or a list of reviews, as well as other links based on the way you use the Web, such as “Save to Delicious,” “Share on Facebook,” or “Digg This,” options. The software studies your Web history to surface links to Websites you already frequent. And Adaptive Blue has created a customized Google search engine for each class of objects it recognizes for → Read More
AdaptiveBlue has announced that their SmartLink Feeds for books, music, movies, and stocks are now “viral.” The new SmartLink Feeds from the companies flagship Blue Organizer Firefox Add-on now include a “Grab Me” button that allows anyone to copy a list of favorites and place it on their web sites and social networking profiles. SmartLink Feeds can also be customized in appearance, content and users can also plug in their personal affiliate ID to monetize traffic to participating sites. AdaptiveBlue will also now publish and update popular SmartLink Feeds to enable anyone to paste them into their own sites without having to be a regular user. SmartLink Feeds include the New York Times Bestsellers, Netflix Top Rentals, Amazon Hot Gadgets, iTunes Top Albums, and Wine.com Top Wines. See our previous coverage of AdaptiveBlue Smartlink here. → Read More
At Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session, 12 young startups (well, 13 if you count the fake one planted to keep the audience on their toes), pitched their products to an audience at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with punditry by Kevin Werbach and Michael Arrington and supporting color from Josh Kopelman, Julia Hanna Farris and Paul Kedrosky. Here’s a look at the 13 companies: adap.tv AdaptiveBlue AggregateKnowledge CastTV Critical Metrics Jangl Pando Networks SodaHead Spock Wize ZapMeals ZenZui Zing Adap.tv – They’re like adsense for video, tying contextual text ads based on the content of a video. When videos play, Adap.tv digs up relevant Amazon products and Looksmart ads to populate an ad bar on the bottom of the video at key moments. They use tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations to find out what the video is about. AdaptiveBlue – Makers of the Blue Organizer, a Firefox bookmarking and tagging add-on that parses web pages, adding contextual information where appropriate. For instance, if you go to a web page about a band, Blue Organizer’s right-click menu will show you more info about the band drawn from sites like Odeo or Wikipedia. The plugin also has smart links that let you easily push the link to services like Digg or LibraryThing. More coverage of the recent feature additions here. Aggregate Knowledge – One of the more established companies at the event, they work with online commerce sites to provide personalized recommendations by looking at user’s collective behavior. They just closed a large round of financing and are rumored to be profitable after a little over a year in operation. CastTV – A video search engine that pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. The service performed well in our earlier review. They recently raised a $3.1 million round of financing from DFJ. Critical Metrics – A music recommendation service that aggregates music reviews from around the web. Each song includes an audio and optional Youtube sample and purchasing options from services like Yahoo Music, iTunes, or Rhapsody. Jangl – They specialize in anonymous phone communication. A Jangl is a real phone number lets people call you with knowing your real number. The first time someone calls you they have to leave a message and request permission → Read More
The Union Square Ventures funded Adaptive Blue has released a new version of their well regarded Blue Organizer Firefox add-on. The new version has a range of additional features that provide an improved semantic web experience. We’ve covered Adaptive Blue previously. Blue Organizer has grown since we last wrote about it to 600,000 downloads with what Michael Arrington called a very impressive add-on. The new version builds on what is already a quality product and delivers an even more compelling user experience. The biggest change in the new version of Blue Organizer is “smart links”. Toolbar and in-page pull down menus are supported with an improved contextual engine that delivers results based on data pulled from the page being viewed. The options provided have evolved; where as previous versions provided only static lists of external links, the latest version of Blue Organizer dynamically personalizes link options based on browsing history. For example if you used Facebook and De.licio.us regularly but didn’t use Newsvine, Newsvine would not be listed. Adaptive Blue also enters the widget market. The new “sharing links” feature allows users to embed semantic links into any webpage, include bookmark style lists in a sidebar or just embed a traditional widget. Affiliate programs are fully supported with no revenue sharing; if a user includes their affiliate code for programs such as eBay and Amazon they keep 100% of any associated revenue. The new version of Blue Organizer is an appealing package. Power users are supported through right-click support. The semantic engine provides one click dynamic short cuts to useful information that is bound to be a time saver. I installed the new version of Blue Organizer in preparation for this post and I can’t see myself uninstalling it any time soon. → Read More
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