Let’s face it. It’s a new era and we’ve almost been thrust into it too quickly. Today’s phones have far surpassed what any of us expected they might eventually do and, with all the apps, those awesome little standalone programs that specialize in doing one thing, it’s easy to get carried away with getting them… and finding them.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s investment group, Innovation Endeavors, has invested a $400K seed fund in Quixey, a startup that specializes in finding that one app – you know, the one that you know does this one particular thing, but can’t find it because you don’t know its exact name.
We can all agree that apps do indeed make life easier. There’s one to deposit you check by snapping a photo, one to find the nearest sushi joint, and so on. They do it all. But currently, if you don’t know the name of the app, it’s difficult to find among the innumerable apps in the marketplace. Quixey alleviates the problem by allowing the user to search by what you want the app to do, such as “edit photos”, rather than by its (possibly obscure) name.
Quixey is revolutionary, and will most definitely be used by many. It’s a better, easier way to search for what most of us want. So is it surprising that the CEO of Google, arguably the world’s best search engine, is investing in just that – a search engine?
The startup is still in private beta, and has been built entirely from the start to specialize in app searching. So far, what you do is type in what you would like the app to do. For consistency, let’s use the previous example, so you would enter “edit photos”, and Quixey produces a list of applications that do just that. Then, you just filter it by platform, and voila! It currently supports Mac’s iOS, Android, browser extensions, Windows and Mac apps, iGoogle, and more, so there’s little risk that you won’t find what you need if the app is out there.
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