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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

Didn't he say when he formed this group that he wanted to work on big mobile problems? And that he didn't want to do just another photo app... this seems pretty uninspired to me. It looks good, but in the end it's just another Get Glue, it doesn't really make my life easier.

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Well...I think you are looking at it wrong.

This could be a Trojan Horse (whether Kevin knows it or not yet) into big data mining, and personalized recommendations.

Imagine, you have an app that send you customized ads/offers based on your actual real world history.

For instance, if you liked this sushi dish at this restaurant in San Francisco, maybe you will like a similar dish at another restaurant when you are travelling in Texas. That's insanely powerful.

Haha - yes I was thinking the exact same thing - though I was refraining from posting it as I prefer to see if Kevin would have come up with it without prompting.

Now they can just say "uh, yeah that was our plan all along!"

A lot of things could be insanely useful if you skip the extremely difficult step of gaining traction first. No restaurant would be interested in even participating if there aren't a lot of users, Kevin Rose or no Kevin Rose.

Possibly, but I'd say if you know the places a person goes to - that's enough information to figure out what they like. Foursquare wins there with check-ins and tips (which tell you which dish to order)

This was also Color's pitch:

"The company has six patents pending and sees itself as "much more of a research company and a data mining company than a photo sharing site.""

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/color_ceo_the_tech_just...

The difference though is that Kevin isn't pitching that. Kevin is pitching the consumer benefits, which is being able to rate individual items and explore other items you might like.

If I were living in the US and had an iPhone, I would likely use this. Definitely sounds intriguing.

hunch says the same thing. In fact most mobile check in type , location based apps all live off this premise.

"well do data mining" is the new "well have ads" for unmonetizable businesses. Then again the data mining is probably just for ads anyway, so maybe it's just more of the same...

Yes, he did. I wanted to wait and see what he would come up with - and while oink seems interesting, I don't think it could be considered "big mobile problem" solver.

I'll need to give it a try though first.

What are the big mobile problems in your estimation?

PageRank for every single thing in the world curated by your friends. Sounds like a pretty big problem to me.

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