How This App Is Making Networking Less Work A one-stop networking tool called Discover.ly shows people their email recipients' social-media updates in one sidebar.
By Matt Villano •
This story appears in the February 2015 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
As we've all heard, it's not what you know, but who you know. Discover.ly wants to supercharge your ability to get to know people. The San Francisco-based company launched in October 2014 with a free eponymous app that works within Gmail to show all your email recipients' social accounts and updates in a sidebar. The goal: to leverage commonalities among social media networks and make it easier to discover the personal hook that drives successful networking.
Discover.ly founder Theodore Summe says he built the technology to streamline the networking power of social media. "The idea was that we have access to social data, but it's all siloed in respective social [sites] and platforms," he says. "We save time by showing users the needles in the haystack in one place."
The technology requires users to download a browser add-on for Google Chrome. With this, users can access more information about common social media connections with the people they email. For instance, Discover.ly enables users to see mutual Facebook friends with a particular colleague on LinkedIn, or see Facebook and LinkedIn information from Twitter contacts.
