Networking App SocialRadar Helps You Work Any Room

Michael Chasen is pitching me his new app, SocialRadar, and it sounds a little creepy. “I want you to walk into a room and know how you’re connected to everyone in there, because all of that information is in the cloud,” he says. “If you go an event, it will tell you, ‘There’s 12 people here you know. Three are friends, four are coworkers, two are people from college, one is a guy you ran into on the street, and three are friends of friends. And one just got a promotion, and another one just got married.’”

It sounds creepy, but it also sounds supremely useful. Because who among us wouldn’t want that leg up when trying to navigate a room? And who among us hasn’t wondered if our smartphones could serve as a digital icebreaker? (SocialRadar also enables chatting within the app.) “No one to date has successfully integrated location data with social data,” says Chasen.