It's painful to do the copy/paste + google workflow to find related content on a mobile device. (Do you even think it's a real pain?)
And our solution:
(As a quick background, we have a technology that extracts concepts, people, locations and organizations from text. Our solution is currently based on that tech, but we are open to everything. Feel free to check out the demo: http://www.factyle.com/speedread)
So, the solution :)
1) Tapping on the text would automatically select the person (Barack Obama), location (New York city), phrase (atomic reactor). -- A small menu would appear with options: "Related articles", "Google search", "Images", "Wikipedia
2) An optional meaning bar at the bottom of the screen with people (matched with their twitter+linkedin account) and the most important concepts. Tapping on a person or concept would yield the same options as above: "Related articles", "Google search", "Images", "Wikipedia. (the bar could also be used as a navigation tool)
(Another note: given textual context, we are able to match people to their twitter accounts with a very high confidence rate. This is not magic :) We also hope to extend the algorithm to linkedin & facebook, but it's harder)
Thank you so much for your feedback. We are struggling right now to find our customers and validate our assumptions. Any help is greatly appreciated
Thanks, Marc & Temo
Our current vision is a place where you can follow both what people say and what others say about them. There would also be an automatically generated "profile" page for each individual and we are thinking of adding social features such as badges (yeah, I know everybody is doing it :), but for instance you could get badges as you read more news about someone, slowly becoming his or hers uber fan). Such badges could be displayed on the profile badge, rewarding people for being awesome fans. It could also be a place where you interact with the person, post messages, send tweets, rate up or down, etc.
Here's the link to our internal alpha prototype: journal.factyle.com. It's not ready for public consumption! Just to give you an idea!
We also released a few iphone apps to experiment with mobile -- check out our sports app for example: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sports-stalker/id382283655?mt=8.
Do you think it can work as a consumer product? Would you use it? Is it doomed?
Thank you so much!