With ‘Save To Pulse’ Bookmarklet And Chrome Extension, Pulse Enters Instapaper’s Turf

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

Alphonso Labs, the fledgling company behind Pulse, a nifty social news reader for iPhone, iPad and Android devices used by roughly 5 million people, aims to pose a challenge to simple bookmarking tool Instapaper (and a range of other bookmarking and ‘read it later’ apps).

The startup is today debuting both a bookmarklet and a Chrome add-on that enables users to ‘save stories to Pulse’ with a mouse click. Extensions for other browsers are ‘in the works’, I’m told.

Saving to Pulse of course means you can bookmark interesting stories you find on the Web in order to read them later on your Android or iPhone handset, or your iPad.

No other bells and whistles at this point, but it’s a clean and functional bookmarking app.

It’s also clearly pretty much what Instapaper does (quite elegantly, I might add), but more than anything it is a welcome addition to the Pulse service that will likely not affect Instapaper usage all that much – I see myself using both alongside each other, actually.

Like Safari’s new ‘Reading List’ feature, none will kill the other. As Instapaper creator Marco Arment once wrote, the market is big enough for multiple modern-day bookmarking services to thrive.

Company:
PULSE NEWS (ALPHONSO LABS)

Alphonso labs is driven by a vision of creating the best news reading experience on mobile devices.

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Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content. We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them. Instapaper...

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Forkly Enters The Soon-To-Be-Stuffed Mobile App Taste Space

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where... ? Learn More

Remember last year when it seemed like everyone was doing a location-based mobile app? One of the original players in that space, Brightkite, eventually got overshadowed by newer rivals. Now two of its founders are back with a new mobile startup, and once again they’re entering a space that is quickly getting crowded: food.

Specifically, Brady Becker and Martin May have just launched Forkly into the App Store. While we’ve known about the company for almost a year, and known generally what they were doing for several months, it took quite a long time to get to this point. Now it’s here: an app for sharing and discovering food and drinks.

If this sounds familiar it’s because you’ve heard of Foodspotting, the popular food picture app that now has a million downloads. Or maybe you’ve heard of Nosh, the new “Instagram of food” from a founder of Google Voice that launched recently. And those are just two competitors. There are many others, and trust me, many more coming in short order.

But to its credit, Forkly looks very solid. Unlike Foodspotting, which focuses mainly on pictures, Forkly focuses more on ratings (Nosh focuses on both). You can “like” an item, “love” it, say it’s “okay”, or “not for me”. Forkly then uses this information to build up a “taste graph” for each user. This is then used to serve up other items you may like.

Or you can see new items served up to you in a social feed. And you can easily flag something to note that you “want it”. And you can write short reviews, etc.

There is also a gaming element in that users become “influencers” for recommending foods and drinks that others like.

Forkly also smartly offers tools for food bloggers, restaurants, and brands to use the service right off the bat. These could end up being the key stand-out features in the space. You can read more about that in their post.

So will Forkly be able to do what Brightkite could not — be the breakout of red-hot field? Considering that half of the competition hasn’t even launched yet, it’s way too early to tell. Being early didn’t help in the location space (in fact, you could argue that Dodgeball, which eventually led to the creation of Foursquare, was way too early), but it could here as startups race to get the most foods and ratings in their systems.

You can find Forkly in the App Store here.

Forkly makes it ridiculously easy to match your taste buds with the food and restaurants around you. Capture and share your tastes while dining out, and Forkly will help you...

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