VentureBeat

MetaRADAR, a San Bruno, California company, is likely to turn some heads at DEMO when it unveils RADAR, a sleek new interface for browsing media on the web.

While we haven’t been able to get our hands on the product, a quick demo reveals that the company has successfully created a means to browse and share media — news, videos, photos, data from your social networks, etc — in a rapid fire yet seamless experience that gives you quick access to all of the above without requiring you to fuddle with tabs or the like. The company calls it a “MediaMasher.” Take a look at this screenshot below to see what we mean.

A quick glance at RADAR, which works online with AJAX or through a downloadable application, brings the iPhone to mind.

On this example, extracted while browsing Reuters, you see a video playing on the left. This is the media viewing side. On the right, you see icons that represent different categories that you can browse from Reuters’ vast stores of content. The navigation of this content is smooth and intuitive, allowing you to quickly add something to your favorites, share it, or line it up in a playlist. All of this can be done without interrupting the video. In later iterations, uploading content to your social network of choice will be just as simple, the company says.

The powerful element embedded in this interface — and what makes RADAR both fascinating and terrifying — is that, according to its logic, consuming the media on the left is no reason to stop digging for the more media on the right: It is the ultimate tool for the ADHD world.

RADAR is still in its early phases, and in its current form, it’s basically an RSS aggregator and media sharing tool on speed. While it successfully, elegantly, brings all of the chaos under one roof, it is still chaos. Until some geniuses figure out how to change this with highly personalized data feeds, this kind of tool will be a beautiful way to dig through the muck.

But it still is pretty cool.

updated

San Francisco start-up Tiny Pictures allows you to take and send photos to your friends’ phones. The photos can be shared almost instantly and with groups of friends, who can then comment.

The company’s product, named Radar, will get a boost tomorrow, when Danger, which powers the Sidekick mobile device, will announce Radar’s software is available to be downloaded via a user’s carrier. The first carrier, Suncom Wireless, will likely be announced tomorrow. The two companies plan to announce others.

We haven’t written much about Tiny. It received $2.7 million from Silicon Valley venture firm Mohr Davidow Ventures in March 2006. It is one of a handful of companies that automate the photo-sharing process. All you do is take the photo, hit another button to create a message (where you can write in a subject line if you want), and then hit send. It then goes to your chosen group of friends, where they can comment. It also now does videos.

An advantage of being installed on the Danger device is that the user can remain notified in real-time when new photos or videos have arrived or been commented on. Previously, when used on a regular phone, a user would have to switch over to the Radar application.

KyteTV, which is offering real-time transmission of photos over Java-enabled phones, can be considered a competitor — when it launches.