Ex-Microsoft Vets Release Spindle -- A New App That Transcends Search Beyond the Keyword & Into the Real World

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - Nov 15, 2012) -   Spindle Labs, Inc., whose mission is to make valuable social content more discoverable, today announced the release of Spindle 1.1 in the iTunes App Store. In a related announcement, Spindle Labs, Inc. has also raised $2.3M in total funding from Polaris Ventures, Greylock Partners, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Broad Beach Ventures, Project 11, Ray Ozzie and Raman Narayanan.

"We believe that social content represents the greatest untapped opportunity on the web today," said Pat Kinsel, Founder and CEO, Spindle. "The social web is now the most dynamic and authoritative source of news and information. While the typical person sees updates from their roughly 250 friends, Spindle goes beyond the friend list to uncover the most relevant and valuable updates from the billion other people, businesses, and organizations sharing every day."

The premise and promise for Spindle is simple: The context now provided by our mobile devices and social networks can compose a far richer query than any keyword search ever could. By harvesting the social graph and leveraging signals such as location and time of day, Spindle has built a fundamentally new technology that knows what's happening around you and delivers you great content.

"What we're talking about is the ability to understand and assess how interesting and useful any piece of content is to any person at any time and place. Because Spindle is constantly improving its understanding of your context, the opportunity to expand the universe of local queries is endless," added Kinsel.

"Spindle is reimagining search to be social, mobile, and contextual at its core. With a billion people and organizations sharing online, Spindle has an enormous opportunity to connect people with content that can satisfy any interest or inform any decision. They've created an entirely new class of search relevance, evaluating an endless stream of content with technology that leverages today's new signals: social, location, and context," said Dave Barrett, General Partner, Polaris Ventures.

"My favorite mobile apps are the ones that give you super powers -- Spindle's done a ton of work on both the user experience and the big data back end to let you see all the things that are happening around you right now," said John Lilly, Partner, Greylock Partners.

Currently available in Boston and San Francisco with other major cities soon to follow, Spindle combines the power and flexibility of search technologies with location, time of day, the structure of the physical world, the social graph, and attributes of each social update to answer a common query -- "What's happening around me?" Currently there exists three types of local discovery that try to answer this question:

1. Place Lookup: i.e. Google Maps
2. Social Recommendations: Foursquare, Ness, Yelp, etc.
3. Licensed Event Data

Yet Spindle is about more than just surfacing great content and venues. Unlike other tools that just reshuffle a static list of businesses, Spindle is reinventing local discovery with real-time content evaluation. Spindle evaluates what every business is sharing to determine what's interesting and relevant now. Its recommendations are always fresh, always dynamic, and often surprising.

Other Spindle features worth noting include:

• User Profiles & Sharing: You can now see your own activity and discover your friends' activity. You can tell friends where you're going, let them know when there's something happening in your current location, or point people to something cool you discovered via Facebook, Twitter, SMS and email.
• Filter by Theme: You can choose a filter like Shopping, Restaurants or Nightlife to find just what you're looking for without the extra 'noise.'
• Favorites & Likes: Add spots to your Favorites list and Spindle will tell you what's happening at just those places. Like posts to save them to your profile and share with your friends. Discover your friends' Likes in the activity feeds and on Facebook.
• Place Search & Location Selector: You can now search for a specific place by name to discover what's happening there, or use the map to zoom in on activity in a specific location.

The Spindle app is available now in the iTunes App Store -- Click here to download.

About Spindle Labs, Inc.
Headquartered in Boston, MA, Spindle Labs, Inc., builds new search technology to help people discover social content they couldn't otherwise discover. Through the Spindle app consumers can find the most interesting updates from businesses and organizations around them, helping them to discover what's happening right now. Spindle was founded by Pat Kinsel, Alex Lambert and Simon Yun, all former engineers and managers from Microsoft's New England Research and Development (NERD) center in Cambridge, Mass. For more information visit www.spindle.com.