Angstro tackles people search

"Follow the right people and they'll lead you to the right information." -- Rohit Khare

Startup Angstro, launched today at TechCrunch50, takes on three challenges:

1. Disambiguating people. There are many people named Phil Wolff. Search engines and white page directories are horrible at telling us apart.
2. Finding news about people. It's one thing to find what you write about yourself on your blog or facebook. What do others say about you? How are you mentioned?  
3. Relevance and People Ranking. How do you bring the freshest, most relevant, most trustworthy news to the top?

People search fuels talk.

So does news from your social network.

Angstro could enhance Skype's people search. With Angstro, Skype could highlight opportunities to talk as your contact list updates. More than online availability or mood messages, this observed presence (not declared presence) could trigger discussion.

Congratulations to founders Rohit Khare (of CommerceNet and microformats fame) and Salim Ismail (PubSub and Confabb co-founder and Yahoo! Brickhouse). 

P.S. If your name is also Phil Wolff (or some variation), please leave a comment on my Homonymous Folk disambiguation page.

tags: angstro, tc50, techcrunch50, presence, identity, search, directory

Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype.