MLOVE at Europe’s largest Tech Conference.
Together with the lucky winners Felicitas Hackmann and Robin Patin MLOVE made its way over to the Dublin Web Summit to check out over 250 incredible and 100′s of international investors and media.
In between the latest innovations and apps, Candy Behunin found an idea which might truely simplify the way we manage our contacts and relationships today: Brewster. Here is Candy’s app review and interview with founder Steve Greenwood.
Brewster – the new mobile rolodex for people in our lives
With an average of 1,000 contacts, managing relationships in our life should not feel like work. It should feel natural. It’s important to spend more time with the people we care about, doing things that matter!
Steven Greenwood, founder of Brewster wants to simplify how we access our social phonebook of contacts from our past to the present and from personal friendships to professional networks.
The app aims to improve the quality in which we keep in touch with everyone we meet and have already known.
Brewster has been Steven’s passion project for over seven years and they launched it to Europe at the Dublin Web Summit. Brewster is your personalized address book that understands your relationships. It simplifies communication channels and understands them in a high resolution way.
Named after the street Steven Greenwood grew up on, Brewster is a service focused on understanding the relationships in our lives to help us all discover who we’re looking for. It brings together everyone you know and how you know them from your iphone contacts, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google and more to create personalized profiles that are merged in one easy to access platform that is up-to-date and private.
It connects all the dots as your relationships evolve
Use Brewster to access everyone you know in a whole new way while permanently replacing the age-old A-to-Z contact list, otherwise known in ancient times as a phone book. Brewster is as dynamic as it is personal. It helps you quickly see who’s trending in your life or who you are losing touch with. It allows you to search people by anything – a name, a city you’re in, even favorite band – with quick access to the people you contact most. Just like magic, it connects all the dots as your relationships evolve!
After I downloaded the app, I thought it had beautiful aesthetics and it does immediately link up my entire network from work to school, to friends, and even foursquare.
Such an app has great potential to simplify our social networks and manage our relationships indeed.
I definitely saw a strong resemblance to Gabi, an app in Berlin that provides a similar approach but only for FaceBook friends which is one of the most heavy traffic social networks for most of us. If Brewster can truly master the algorithms for accurately tracking our communication with friends, connect our interests and serve as a Google search for our relationships (via word categories such as movies, music, vacations, hobbies, etc…) this could very well be a powerful social tool to complement other networking platforms. We do need separate services to sort out who we meet in general, but when you need a particular contact on the go, Brewster seems like it want to help you find that info faster and put you in touch at the tap of a few buttons.
I like how Steven says it tells you who you contacted, how you contacted them and when you contacted them last. Sometimes we just forget how we know the people we know and if we really know them? I often meet so many people that they normally fall into three categories: met in person, met online, met via an email intro/referral.
What I have learned tapping around on Brewster is that we still need to teach it a bit of course.
It asks us to place people on our favorites list, and other content areas, and it does suggest groups for you based on the app’s algorithms, but I think there are still areas that could be sharpened when it comes to the accuracy of its predictions.
I have a good feeling Brewster does want to really help improve these things for its users, because Steven tells me,
“My mom is a relationship therapist and she has always been good at what she does. It made me really curious about human behavior in regards to how we manage our personal relationships.”
He also mentions how his mother is quite an inspirational figure in his life and has been an influential role in the passion he has for people, life and connecting it all together. Since he has been working at this app for nearly 7 years, it is clear he is in the game to stay and I am sure we will be hearing more from Brewster now that it is available in the US, Europe and moving its way over to Asia in the future.
Read Fred Wilson’s blog post review of Brewster, here.
Website: https://www.brewster.com
Initiator: Brewster, USA
