In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray tries to impress Andie MacDowell by learning her every likes and dislikes and pushing all the right buttons. Of course, to do that he had to die every day and begin all over again in the same place, same day and same scenario! Life would suck if that’s how much effort it took to impress anyone, even Andie MacDowell!
Apologies for the spoilers, but I have always had a hard time socializing and absolutely abhor small talks which makes me crave a Jarvis like AI/PA to take care of all the talking points while I just move my mouth! Jarvis is a product of the Present Phantasmagoria and hopefully, a Future Factory, but you can download the Refresh app to really get some smarts in your pants right away!
In 2004 Bhavin Shah was working at LeapFrog, an educational toy company. LeapFrog was approached by the US government to work on a humanitarian mission educating illiterate women in Afghanistan about prenatal care through LeapFrog toys. As part of the project, Bhavin visited Afghanistan with US Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. During the trip, Bhavin was introduced to the “briefing book” that Secretary Thompson’s staff produced for him each day. The briefing book made the Secretary brilliant in every conversation; he always knew what to say. Bhavin believed everybody deserved to be equipped with such a dossier, and after teaming up with co-founder Paul Tyma, the technology to make it possible is now available on an app!
Bhavin has over a decade of experience building companies and assembling great teams. Through his work as co-founder and COO at Gazillion Entertainment and in product and business development at LeapFrog, he’s taken companies from inception to scale in education, toy, and video game industries. Bhavin has a B.S. from the University of California, San Diego and an M.A. from Stanford University.
Paul is a computer theorist, architect, and developer who received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University. He’s a former Googler, built and runs the Mailinator email service, and is a recognized Java author. He also has an awesome blog!
Leveraging Social Networks
Refresh generates insights about the people of your interest by gathering their social feeds and intelligently calculating context based on your location, schedules or a simple manual search from the app. It is available for iPhone, the web, and Salesforce. Says Paul, “Our insight engine accesses social networks and public internet data to create the most detailed digital dossier about a person you’re about to meet, or one you’re selling to. Initially, our investors said it wouldn’t be technologically possible to build digital dossiers, but we now have a fully functional product that delivers completely on that promise!”
These dossiers are created in real-time and Refresh ensures that the data is up-to-date. The company is mostly targeting professionals and salespeople and that is evident in their push for integration with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) services like Salesforce. But nobody is stopping you from installing the app on your phone (Apple devices preferably; Android support is coming soon) and impressing your date with informed, sophisticated albeit potentially creepy conversations — just don’t go overboard with your newfound powers!
Refresh for Salesforce app is $20 per user per month while the iOS app is free. You can try the web app over at https://refresh.io
