Today marked the launch of a new firm backed by Union Square Ventures, Brewster.
Brewster aims to make managing your contacts, across all of your social platforms, an easier and more enjoyable experience. I downloaded Brewster this morning, and connected it to my gmail, twitter, linkedin, and iphone contacts. About fifteen minutes later I received a push notification telling me my contacts had been aggregated.
The app seems to know a good deal about me already, just by pulling data off of my social networks. It suggested my favorites, which are fairly close to my favorites on my iPhone. One thing that I’m unsure of, is how it decides which photo to pull. Take my mother for example, I have a photo on my phone that I LOVE of her, and on Brewster her photo is empty. Also, the default photo it choose for me on my personal profile page is my twitter. I’ve deliberately left out my Facebook because I’m trying to wind down my usage of that network. From my preliminary perspective it seems to me that Brewster chooses the photo to display based upon what method of communication you use most.
I certainly see Brewster as being a time saving device for me in the future. Rather than having to jump around various social media outlets I can text, tweet, email, or call a person all from this one app. In future iterations I’d really like to see a Rapportive style contact builder, so that once I connect to someone via email it suggests I follow them on twitter.
Over the coming weeks I look forward to using all of the features of this app. Fred Wilson, in his blog post said, “this is an address book that can handle a search query like “knicks game” or “sushi tonight” or “band of horses concert”. We are always querying our brain with questions like that. Now we can ask our address books those kinds of questions.” I expect that this feature will come in handy.
The team for Brewster consists of 15 individuals, according to the NY Times, who have been working for the past two years. Brewster is led by Steve Greenwood, a former McKinsey Consultant who worked on Drop.io until it was acquired by Facebook. Fred’s blog post talks about Steve’s massive spreadsheet where he kept detailed records about how he met people. I’m guessing its passion like that which led USV to lead a Seed round.
Good luck to Steve and all of the team at Brewster.
The Brewster U.I.
