Poolâs new app turns your screenshots into something useful
For years, your phoneâs Camera Roll has served dual purposes. In addition to helping you revisit special moments, it has also served as an archive
For years, your phoneâs Camera Roll has served dual purposes. In addition to helping you revisit special moments, it has also served as an archive for all sorts of things you find online, like recipes, fashion inspiration, travel ideas, interesting quotes, funny tweets, product recommendations, and more. Today, a new app called Pool is arriving to help you finally make sense of this digital clutter. Image Credits:Pool To get started with Pool, you simply give it permission to access your photos, which are moved into categories it calls âpools.â The pools created in the app are entirely dependent on the products, places, or things that youâve saved over time, making them specific to you. The app is one of many reinventing bookmarking in the AI era. Startups like mymind, Fabric, and Raindrop help users organize links, images, or other saved content, but Pool focuses specifically on screenshots and then uses AI to help users rediscover and act on things they intended to revisit later. Image Credits:Pool Once imported, Pool is able to track down the original link associated with a given screenshot.
For instance, if the screenshot was of a product you were thinking of buying, it would link to the retailerâs website. If it were a recipe you saw on Instagram, it could pull up the ingredients and instructions the creator had shared. And so on. The idea, explained Pool co-founder Maxime Junique, came about because both he and his co-founder Piet Terheyden had faced the same problem: they would screenshot things they wanted to remember, but then could never find them again. âIt sounds pretty obvious, right now, when we say it, but itâs something that we do so naturally â you donât notice it, necessarily,â said Junique. The founders, who met years ago in a co-working space, asked their friends about the issue. The friends agreed that they would often screenshot and forget things, too, like design ideas or other types of inspiration. Image Credits:Pool The app was actually the first product to emerge from Spinoff Studio, the foundersâ product and design studio, around three years ago. The first version was built in Lisbon over a couple of weeks while the founders lived out of a van, cranking out the landing page, website, and initial build.
But they soon realized they needed to build some products that made money first, so they pivoted to B2B SaaS and shelved Pool. The studio went on to build other products, including the CRM software Waitless, which was acquired last year. What brought Pool back to life was the maturation of AI. Suddenly, its core idea of making sense of personal, largely unstructured datasets seemed feasible. âWe were like, it seems like a perfect time to go after this idea,â Junique told TechCrunch. âAnd it also seemed to us like itâs a super untapped, unexplored data set for AI. Everyone goes after emails, bank transactions, chat logs â all of those productivity-first datasets. Who is going after this really, deeply emotional data set we all own?â Image Credits:Pool Poolâs app also treats your screenshots like memories, meaning some of them are more relevant at the moment, while others disappear over time. For example, if you screenshot the barcode to an event ticket, it could disappear later on after the event has taken place. Meanwhile, if you screenshot a flyer on Instagram about an upcoming event, Poolâs AI agents can help you find where to buy the tickets and link to the ticketing site.
