This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, for our RSS feed, click here.
I’m a big fan of research tools, but I rarely do any research on a mobile browser because the experience is just not a pleasant one. Simple tasks like word selection or copy/paste can be tedious on a mobile device. But Japanese startup Phroni aims to help solve this problem, by converting multi-step tasks [1] and cutting the process down into one.
Currently what Phroni does is to analyze the text in your browser and convert certain words phrases into Wikipedia links, which you can use to explore more information. After that, you can further explore via the toolbar across services like Twitter, Google Images, or YouTube.
Phroni claims a high-accuracy machine-learning engine, for which they have filed patent. And since the service is analyzing the content of pages, they are also planning to insert relevant ads into pages, with different advertisers and affiliates. Phroni has already experimented with this model, and have collaborated with a partner in Japan.
For now Phroni will be an Android Firefox mobile add-on, but later on it will be an API for iOS and Android apps.
The team is made up of Ikuya Yamada, who says he has been a programmer since his junior high days. He is also the former CTO of Fractalist, which IPOd in 2006. Also on the Phroni team is Yasuhiro Watanabe, an experienced venture capitalist in the Japanese IT market.
One of the judges was a little skeptical that this hadn’t been done before. And some questioned the business model. Mr. Yamada emphasized that his service can get a lot of users via the API, as opposed to the just their stand-alone app.
The service is currently in private beta, and if you’d like to check it out, you can visit Phroni.com
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This is explained as a seven-step process at present: 1. hold finger, 2. swipe, 3. remove finger, 4. copy keyword, 5. open search, 6. paste keyword, 7. select link. ↩