Blinq Enhances Your Favorite Messaging Applications With Extra Information

(AsiaTimes.ga/Tech) A new mobile application called Blinq is launching today into public beta to add a layer of contextual information to your favorite mobile messaging applications. Founder Yossi Ghinsberg, who’s better known for his adventures in the Amazon (not Amazon.com, but the actual unchartered wilderness), described Blinq as “more of a hack than an app,” saying that people are tired of trying yet another mobile application. Blinq offers something different, he says.

Instead of delivering a full mobile app experience you launch by tapping an icon, Blinq is designed to augment the apps you already use. Your normal behavior doesn’t have to change.

Once installed, Blinq appears as a small white dot that pops up inside mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Skype, and SMS, for example, alerting you to new information about the person you’re communicating with. This additional information is pulled from a variety of other networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.

Blinq shows you status updates, photos and other recent activities, but its algorithms focus on highlighting the more important content. That is, if your friend recently posted two updates, one about what they had for lunch that day and another, more heavily liked update about a major life event, Blinq would only alert you to the latter.

The idea for the app, explains Ghinsberg, stems from his longtime interest in the concept of digital identities. He found that information about people was scattered around the web, and it was hard to access it when you needed it.

“We’re looking at the integrated, whole person instead of the fragmentation that’s caused because of the different platforms, the different channels and the different networks,” he says.

After teaming up with a technical co-founder Gal Bracha in 2013, the two first experimented with a larger solution, but realized soon that what they had built was too complicated and required that people change their habits. That didn’t work.

Right as they were accepted into the 500 Startups accelerator program, the team pivoted to build Blinq instead.

“We took the big idea, and reduced it,” says Ghinsberg. “Blinq is just a small white dot.”

While the app itself is consumer-facing, the concept could also work in business use cases where it could serve as something like a lightweight CRM tool. In that case, it wouldn’t be all that different from something like Rapportive or FullContact’s solution for Gmail. Those add-ons also aggregate content from a variety of networks in order to include personal and business information alongside social updates in Gmail’s sidebar.

Blinq just does this for mobile messaging apps.

The app that’s live today on Google Play is more of an MVP, meant more to test the how the market responds to the idea, the founder notes. That means the app may be buggy, and Blinq’s servers might be slow at times. But if successful, Ghinsberg says that the concept could be ported to other services beyond messaging.

Since its debut a couple of days ago, the company’s servers have imported over 250,000 contacts, and overnight, added half a million more followed by another million just last night. The team hasn’t publicized the app yet, but it has a few thousand downloads already.

The plan is to port the Blinq experience to iOS in the future, but there, the app will likely have to make some changes. Today on Android, the app works at the notification level, and is more deeply integrated. iOS, by its nature, will require more of a standalone experience, though Ghinsberg says he has some ideas about how to work around that.

Blinq has raised just under half a million in an advisory round from angel investors and 500 Startups, but will be looking to raise a million more starting next month.

Twitter Expands Its Alerts Service To The UK And Ireland To Push Out Critical Info From The Met Police And 56 Others

Twitter Alerts a service that Twitter launched in September for emergency, relief and charity organizations from the U.S., Japan and Korea to send out critical messages to opted-in users is getting more international. Today, the newly public company is turning on Twitter Alerts in the UK and Ireland.

Some 57 Twitter accounts across the two countries have signed on so far, mostly in the UK. They include all 47 UK police forces, An Garda Síochána in Ireland, the London Fire Brigade, the Mayor of London’s office, the Foreign Office, and the Environment Agency who will now send alerts on their latest critical news, with the information appearing as highlighted tweets, SMS notifications, and push notifications if you use Twitter’s iOS or Android apps.

For all of these, users have to opt-in, and the idea here is that the organizations doing the alerting will be limiting their messages to important ones. “While participating organisations choose what information merits a Twitter Alerts designation, this feature is intended for crisis, disaster and emergency communications,” Twitter notes.

“Getting fast and accurate information to the public in a major incident or terrorist attack really could make a life-saving difference,” noted Commander David Martin, who oversees emergency planning for the Metropolitan Police Service, in a statement. “Using social networking sites, including Twitter, gives us additional ways to talk directly to the public. Twitter Alerts means that our messages will stand out when it most matters.”

For now it seems like the only way to sign up for alerts for particular organizations is to visit Twitter’s Alerts pages to browse and add accounts there are no “alert” buttons on the accounts themselves.

As we pointed out in September, Twitter Alerts was borne out of “Lifeline,” a service that Twitter created to help with the relief effort after the 2012 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. For a platform that has been building up its credibility as the go-to place for people to get real-time information about what’s on TV, Twitter Alerts is a way to show that you can use the same framework for potentially more urgent purposes.

Same means, different ends, and in the end, all controlled by Twitter which cannot be said for some of the other “alerts” services that have run over Twitter in the UK in the past. Last year, for example, around the London 2012 Olympics ticket sell-out furore, several accounts popped up offering users alerts for when tickets would get released for different, previously sold-out events, but Twitter took many of them down.

Since last year, Twitter has been trying out a lot of different features as part of a philosophy of innovate through experimentation, from new features in its Timeline to new looks on its apps. Some of these go on to become full features, and some fall by the wayside. The fact that Twitter Alerts is now expanding beyond its original footprint, and playing to Twitter’s intent to continue to grow internationally, is a sign that it might be one of those that is here to stay.

Although a spokesperson declined to comment to me about where Twitter Alerts might go next, I noticed that when you signed up for Alerts to come to your phone, you were given a specific lists of countries from which you could register your phone. This could be a list of where Twitter may be looking to launch this service next.

Alerts complements some of the other products Twitter has launched in recent months that use notifications to flag information to its users a way to help shape the service and promote people to interact more on the platform. EventParrot and MagicRecs use direct messages sent to those who follow the accounts with details respectively of big events, and users and tweets seeing surges of momentum. Twitter labels both accounts “experiments” for now.

While both MagicRecs and EventParrot are personalized to your own profile as it exists on Twitter (it essentially alerts you to what’s going on in your own defined Twitter sphere of influence), Alerts is positioned a bit differently.

The service is more like a dedicated one-to-many broadcast channel for those who have opted in to receive it, providing the organizations with a way to highlight certain public tweets for those who want to see them. Given that many people follow hundreds or thousands of accounts, and unless you are a power user who combs the site for all the latest news, there are changes that you will miss things; this is one way of you making sure you do not.

For now, Alerts are free both for consumers and NGOs and emergency organizations to activate and use a reminder of how Twitter has positioned itself as the town square for the connected world. But as Twitter builds these out, and measures what kind of response people have to the different features, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same basic concept applied to paid and sponsored pushed alerts, too.

Wikipedia Tests SMS Access to Site for People Without an Internet Connection

One of Wikipedia's biggest goals is to expand its reach. That may sound strange coming from one of the biggest sites in the world. But even if everyone on the internet used Wikipedia, there would still be more than four billion people out there who can't reach it because, obviously, they don't have an internet connection.

Almost everyone though has a phone. In many places, it is the only piece of technology people own.

Wikipedia has been working on getting more information to people using basic phones or who only have access to the mobile web, via the Wikipedia Zero initiative.

Wikipedia Zero is a stripped down version of the site (there are no images, for example) that is offered for free, i.e. it doesn't count towards mobile data caps, in partnership with carriers.

Now, Wikipedia is pushing even further by making it possible to access the information even without an internet connection.

This partnership with Airtel will help provide Wikipedia access to 70 million new users in sub-saharan Africa, starting in Kenya, Wikipedia announced.

One exciting aspect of this partnership is that we are reaching a group of people we’ve never been able to reach before: mobile phone customers who don’t have internet access, it added.

We are testing a service to allow access to Wikipedia articles via text message. It can work with any phone, even the most basic feature phone. You don’t even need an application, it said.

The system is not particularly hard to use. Users send a message to a fixed number and submit their query. They then get the option to choose between the pages that fit their queries.

Once they select a subject, they get a list of the section headers in the article for that subject. They'll then be able to select any portion of the article that interests them. (GNN) (Yoogle)