AdaptiveBlue’s semantic plugin gets funded

By Vivek | February 20th, 2007 at 11:17 am ET         

AdaptiveBlue, startup behind the cool Firefox extension BlueOrganizer that launched last year in September at DEMOfall, today announced that it has closed Series A round of funding. The financing was lead by Union Square Ventures. Financial terms of the funding were undisclosed.

Yesterday was the first time I gave a real try to BlueOrganizer after a session with Alex Iskold who is the founder of AdaptiveBlue. I was amazed at the BlueOrganizer ’s semantic relevancy engine built out into the extension that lets you get done with lot of things faster. Consider you are on IMDB.com, checking out movie reviews to add your Netflix queue. Regular tedious process is to search in IMDB, copy the name of the movie you like, and than paste/search the information at Netflix once more. BlueOrganizer gives you a simpler option for this. Just go to the BlueOrganizer right click context menu, and the app smartly recognizes the site you are on and gives you an option to add the movie to your Netflix queue right away. Such contextual hookups from  BlueOrganizer come up for each of the sites you visit everyday spanning hundreds of small to big categories. In the background BlueOrganizer works with as many APIs and search URL manipulations possible to drive down on the number of clicks needed for everyday tasks.

Best part about AdaptiveBlue is its focus on maintaining privacy around user data and still be able to provide personalized results unlike Google which has its own set of issues. The privacy part comes into play when you want  to quickly get your list of personalized sites for the contextual linking in BlueOrganizer without storing your browsing history on a 3rd part server. All you need to do is, hit the “Personalize” button in the BlueOrganizer’s settings, and it goes through your browsing history, looks at the frequency of the sites you typically visit, runs some more analysis, and automatically loads your personalized site list. All the while, none of your browsing history related data ever gets moved over to AdaptiveBlue servers. Seems like a simple but smart solution to me.

There is lot more to BlueOrganizer which you can discover once to start playing with it. Personally I think I would be using frequently from now on.

Links:
AdaptiveBlue