Via Techcrunch, Eric Schmidt is backing a new start-up, Slice, that aims to organize and track your online purchases by querying purchase data from your inbox. I gave it a shot earlier this week, and found it to be surprisingly accurate and useful. I generally don’t use online life organization tools (e.g., Mint), but I found this to be a bit different.
Instead of simply helping you to analyze your own purchasing behavior, it helps you anticipate and track outstanding items that are either en route or have been held up for some reason. So rather than log onto various sites to track your orders, you can just log into Slice, which has already identified the tracking numbers for shipped items from your inbox, and see the scheduled delivery date for each item, as well as notifications such as a delivery failure.
I’m sure Eric’s interest in all this is to have a different view into “our” purchasing behavior, but I think I’m okay with that.