Yesterday we shared with you Circa, the new iPhone app designed for mobile devices that lets their journalist’s provide a news reading experience that is without the “fluff”. On a mobile device keeping the reading experience as minimalistic as possible while not losing any of the important facts makes absolute sense. But, what about if your on a desktop? The reading experience surely is different and the opportunity to take in content is a very apparent opportunity.
Summer is a free Chrome extension that lets you learn more about the people you find interesting, around the web, while keeping you on the page where the person was mentioned. As a content enrichment platform, using a smart NLP algorithm, the browser add-on recognizes objects (such as names, companies, etc.) in the articles you read. Summer gives you a social snapshot of the people mentioned in a sidebar widget to give you context to what you’re already reading.
Through the extensions sidebar tool, you can click on a person that was mentioned and read their biography, view relevant YouTube videos, and find other useful links to learn more about the celebrity, politician or other publicly recognized individual. This comes in really handy when you’re reading something and you ask yourself “who’s that?” The usual following actions would call for copying the name pasting it into your favorite search engine and finding more details; Summer takes away the need for additional tabs and navigation keeping everything inline. The video below shows it in action.
Currently supporting 60+ sites such as TechCrunch, Forbes, ESPN, The Wall Street Journal and my other prominent news sources, Summer helps you avoid searching well established public figures while keeping you in context of what your already reading. If you install the extension, when visiting sites like this one or this one, just look out for the blue brackets and browse the relevant people being shared. You can grab it here for Chrome.
Although a wonderful addition for those doing research, how do you think Summer could be better? Should there be more insightful information? Maybe an inclusion to AngleList or more in depth information about companies could be useful?