By Rodney H. Brown
Today Microsoft Corp. announced the names and functions of their long-anticipated (for good or ill) mobile phones that had previously only been known as Project: Pink. The two flavors of Microsoft Kin phones — in an unintentional nod to Massachusetts’ Theodor Geisel, Kin One and Kin Two — were rolled out in a flashy show on the West Coast, and the Redmond titan made it clear the phones were aimed at a younger, socially connected audience.
The Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two
Sound familiar?
Last week, I wrote about Clearway Technology Partners Inc. of Medfield, which is about to launch this summer Clearway Insight. That product is a cloud-based way to store items of interest to you — links, pictures, etc. — and then share with your friends also using Insight. You do so by simply dragging a link, picture or document to a spot … er, diamond … that sits at the bottom … sorry, top … of the computer screen.
Now, Insight also allows you to make multiple connections between not only a stored item and another connected user, but also between any number of stored items themselves. And because of all of the connections, it makes searching for data you may have dropped into Insight significantly easier and faster than using the search feature on Windows, or Spotlight on a Mac. So it is planned to be much more robust that Microsoft’s phone OS-based Spot, but the similarity is surprising.
Clearway, for its part, moved up the planned launch of the beta version of Insight to last Friday, the day our coverage hit the web. The company is restricting the beta to 100,000 users (a hopeful restriction, that) so if you want to get in on the action, visit their website and sign up.
Who knows, perhaps the Kin phones will train a whole generation of users on how to store data the Clearway Insight way. At least, that is the way Clearway would like to see it, I bet.
Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a 
The patent was issued this week, based on a September 2006 patent application. I’m not a patent examiner, of course, but as I was reading, I couldn’t help but see similarities to what other companies have been doing for a long time. For example, one potential application cited in the patent would have the system make suggestions or recommendations “with respect to books to read, movies or plays to see and/or places to visit” based on “a user’s determined interests and correlations of other users’ interest.”
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