IntoNow has just launched on Android after six months on iOS during which they amassed over a million downloads and were acquired by Yahoo for 30 million dollars. So what does IntoNow do that’s so magical?
The headlining feature is that it can identify (they call it tagging) what movie or tv show you are watching by “listening” to it for about 20-30 seconds. I’ve played around with it for a little bit and I’ve certainly been impressed thus far. When you hit the green tv icon in the upper-right corner the app tags the TV episode or movie and pulls up abbreviated data from IMDB. You can press the IMDB area at the bottom of the screen for the full IMDB page. Those of you with cable or satellite are probably saying, “So what? I can basically do that by hitting the info button on my remote.” Right you are, so it’s a good thing that IntoNow has a couple more tricks up its sleeve.
Once the app has tagged what it is you are watching it automatically does a “check-in” like GetGlue or Miso, if you are familiar with those apps. As with most check-in apps you are able to share what it is you are watching beyond IntoNow by connecting it with Facebook or Twitter. You do this by hitting the settings gear in the lower-right corner which allows you to add a comment if you like or just select whether you are sending to Facebook and/or Twitter when you hit the share button. You can actually use Facebook to sign into the app right from the start if you like.
The rest of the app centers around three tabs, “Activity,” “Popular” and “Profile.” The Profile tab displays what you have recently watched as well as what you watch most frequently. This is also where you can start tracking your friends on the service via the Twitter and Facebook integration or just searching for them by name. The Popular tab, I’m sure this is going to blow your mind, displays the most popular shows or movies among your friends or everyone on IntoNow. Finally there is the Activity tab which is a feed of what people have checked into most recently and again you can choose to view just your friends or everyone.
The identification feature is cool and makes for a solid “gee whiz” to show off to people, but I suspect they’ll need a little more than that to woo users of GetGlue (you’ve gotta love those stickers) or Miso. I’m not sure how regularly they have such deals, but IntoNow had a promotion for a free 20 ounce Pepsi Max if you tagged a specific tv ad. If they can build more partnerships along those lines that could certainly be a solid hook.
They recently added a host of new discoverability features to the iOS app which will hopefully make their way to the Android app sooner rather than later. The new feature analyzes your tags, your friends tags and people that have tagged content similar to yours and then suggests things that you haven’t tagged that it believes you will like. It will even build you a calendar listing what you might want to be watching at any given time.
IntoNow is free in the Market and should work on anything running Android 2.1 or higher. They are off to a strong start averaging 5 stars on 31 reviews at the moment so I’m not alone in my early positive impressions of the app. If you like GetGlue or Miso I think it’s at least worth a brief fling to see what else is out there and if you haven’t tried one of these apps before this is definitely an interesting take on it. If you do give it a go let us know how the listening feature works for you and what you think they should do to compete with the existing check-in contenders.
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