Adaptive Glue

That's my nickname for our most recent investment, Adaptive Blue.

Brad explains on the Union Square Ventures website/blog why we made this investment and the vision that we expect that Alex Iskold and his team will deliver on in the year ahead.

I've had the Blue Menu/Blue Organizer Firefox extension for at least three months now and not a day goes by that I don't right click on a webpage and watch Blue Menu work its semantic magic to connect me to what I want to do.

My favorite trick is when I am in last.fm listening to neighbor radio and I hear an artist I like, I click through to the artist page and then right click, popup Blue Menu, and navigate to YouTube videos for that artist. This is what it looks like:

That's why I call it Adaptive Glue. It's semantic glue for the web. And we (Alex and the investors) have a lot of ideas how this technology can be taken way beyond a browser extension and into the mainstream.

This may be the first time you are hearing about Adaptive Glue on this blog. But it certainly won't be the last.

Comments

[P-Air]

This AdaptiveBlue widget really solidifies the idea that innovation has a fine line between success & failure. It reminds me of the nuanced enhancement that Google's AdSense brought to the GoTo business model that made all the difference. I say this because there's an entity extraction technology company called ClearForest (NY-based so you've probably heard of them). They make a free plug-in named Gnosis. When I ran it against this post, it was able to highlight names people, products, companies, and industry terms (it did miss some, like Brad's name for instance). When placing my mouse over any of these highlights, a pop-up appears w/the choice to search Technorati, Google or Wikipedia. It would have been easy for them to include links to Amazon or other merchants when highlighting a product, or even list 4 tags (which isn't really that hard for such technology). But they didn't do that.

AdaptiveBlue on the other hand was able to articulate and frame a sensible value proposition that made what is on the one hand a feature of ClearForest's offering, a standalone business for AdaptiveBlue. Kudos to Alex & company for seizing the essence of the value here.

BTW Fred, while I love the Answers.com stuff, while typing this post, on two occasions the widget popped up blocking the field. It was a lil' annoying. Just an FYI.

[Fraser]

Congrats!

wrt P-Airs comment, yes, kudos to Alex & team for identifying the potential value and focusing on it. Increasingly, with web 2.0 technologies, that's the rub.

Also, kudos to USV for realizing it as well.

And this is an interesting change....

"This may be the first time you are hearing about Adaptive Glue on this blog. But it certainly won't be the last."

[Andy Brudtkuhl]

I am still confused as two what AdaptiveBlue actually does.

[Alex]

Fred - congrats on your latest investment!

By the way, I see that you have FoxyTunes installed in your browser, so there is an alternative way to search for YouTube videos of what's currently playing in your Last.fm player, and also in Pandora, iTunes, Winamp, Rhapsody Online and more than 30 other media players and music services. While listening to music with your Last.fm player and FoxyTunes - just click on the little 'search' icon next to the currently playing track title and choose 'Videos' :)

-Alex
FoxyTunes