AdaptiveBlue gives you more options while you surf
AdaptiveBlue, a Livingston N.J. company, gives you a browser plug-in that allows you to research and organize more easily from sites within Firefox.
The company said it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Union Square Ventures in New York.
If you right-click on a book title, for example, AdaptiveBlue’s software provides you a little menu with more information about the book and other options. It lets you do a search for the book on Amazon (or, if you prefer, other book sites) or find out more about the author via a Google or Yahoo search. Or you can tag it at delicious, or share it with your friends. Or if you’re on a site with music titles, you can right-click on a title and get more info on the title and author (see example below for Norah Jones).
The product is useful, however a plethora of plug-in companies exist now. It’s going to be hard to rise above the noise, even if AdaptiveBlue’s product is more advanced, extensive and cleaner than most others. It requires a download, yet says 340,000 people have downloaded it already.
Besides music, and books, AdaptiveBlue gives you similar research and organization options for 18 other categories, including wine, apparel, TV shows and blogs. If you’re on a blog site, you can find out more about the blog, subscribe to it, save it to Delicious, etc. Some features are nifty. If you’re looking at a movie title, AdaptiveBlue gives you an option to put the title straight into your Neflix account cue.
AdaptiveBlue does this by doing a semantic analysis of a Web page you are on, and then giving you options based on the material it finds. It plans to make money from a revenue cut from business it sends to its affiliates such as Amazon.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
