With 100M users, Truecaller starts making call suggestions
The well-funded Swedish app is now using algorithms to suggest who its users should call, based on their call history, as well as time and place.
This car gadget links your smoking engine to the right mechanic
Mechanic Advisor is launching its own connected car device that plugs into your vehicle’s on-board diagnostic port and helps you interpret that scary check engine light when it starts blinking on the dash.
Airbnb wants to recommend trips to users before they even start to search for them
The amount of data that Airbnb has about users and their accommodation preferences has grown to the point where the company believes it can start recommending trips to them before they have to search through the listings.
Yummly brings its recipe-crunching tools to the grocery store with a new iPhone app
Yummly’s first mobile app doesn’t just port its semantic food search engine over to iOS. Rather, the company has designed its iPhone app to be used in the grocery store rather than the kitchen.
Ness updates its iOS app, a personalized dining guide for you
The subject happens to be dining, but what Ness is up to is really about maximizing the accuracy of personalization.
Consumers could pay higher switching costs in a data driven world
A conversation with a payments processing company that offers small businesses a side of data, got me thinking about how data may change your customer service experience and maybe distort markets.
Foursquare takes on Yelp with 10-point rating system
Foursquare has said it’s gunning for Yelp and Google and now it has a 10-point rating system that shows how it will compete head-on in the local search and recommendation space.
Making a billion Facebook users pay off
Can Facebook do things with a billion users that it couldn’t do with half that number? CEO Mark Zuckerberg is dropping hints, but so far, they’re just hints.
Friendster founder launches social-news app, but will it fly?
Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has launched a news-filtering service called Nuzzel that is powered by social-networking activity. But while his previous ventures have been early to the market, his new offering suffers from the opposite problem — the market is already saturated with similar services.
Wine site Snooth builds a virtual sommelier for Springpad
Snooth is making wine recommendations on every recipe that Springpad users clip. Rather than hire an army of sommeliers to suggest pairings for the countless recipes on the web, Snoot has built an algorithm that deconstructs recipes and matches them to their ideal wine profiles.