Japan-based Studio Ousia Finally Launches Phroni

Fresh of its recent 70 million yen (about $864,000) funding round, Japan-based Studio Ousia Inc. – the developer of a ‘smarter’ smartphones/tablet browsing experience – has released its product to the public [1]. For those who haven’t heard Phroni’s pitch yet, the service underlines key words or phrases in your mobile browser and allows you to click through and find further information about them (via Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Google, etc).

Currently Android smartphone users can install Phroni as an add-on for Firefox, but the company intends to provide an API soon that will allow other app vendors to integrate Phroni phunctionality into their apps.

I took Phroni for a quick text drive this evening. The installation is straight-forward, and perhaps my biggest hiccup was adjusting to the Firefox mobile browser. But the Phroni links showed up clearly, and I was pleasantly surprised that they were not as intrusive as I expected they might be.

Phoni add-on, note phone is Japanese OS	See the Phroni links? (Angry Birds, Fuji TV)
Click through to view more information	or bring up content from other sources

I was a little surprised that if a notable word occurred more than once in an article, then each instance of that article is linked. I think that this might be unnecessary in short form articles like blog posts, although it might come in handy when reading very long documents on the web.