Need to find an amazing Hatha Yoga class in the West Village? Want a press friendly restaurant in Soma. New app SpotOn takes into account existing data like Foursquare checkins, Facebook Likes and more in order to provide choices that are tailored to you and your friends (whether they download the SpotOn app or not).
Friends can also recommend merchants to SpotOn by rating them through its innovative and delightful petal interface, “an entirely different layer of data that did not exist before.
While it does provide user accounts, SpotOn has solved the zero start problem by importing your already existing social graph from Facebook and Foursquare. SpotOn maps take into account which one of your friends has been to a particular venue or who has rated a particular venue highly in order to offer up its suggestions. It can visually recommend places to go based on checkins, Facebook info, similarity to what venues your friends visit, the time of day etc.
“In short, we take your digital preferences, whether it be Facebook Likes, Foursquare checkins or anything else and make them useful in the real world,” says SpotOn CEO Gauri Manglik.
SpotOn monetizes by daily deal affiliate fees, as it already shows users recommendations, it’s only one step further to show recommendations for daily deals near by. But right now the company ia focusing less on monetization and more on product Manglik says.
Daily deals services are a dime a dozen but an app that offers recommendations tailored to your social graph on on all your mobile platforms, not just limited to the Facebook platform, is one to watch.
The app is currently bootstrapped and you can find the NYC version in the app store here.
Q&A
Positive reaction from the judges.
All judges: The difference between SpotOn and 4Sq?
SpotOn: Foursquare is just Foursquare, we are pulling in data from Fourquare, Facebook, Hunch. Spot on is where should I go, where do I want to hang out with/
CD: There’s a lot of noise a lot of apps in the space.
SD: We didn’t have any marketing it the space with Foodspotting and we did pretty well.
Fondu (formerly SpotOn) was a community for sharing bite-sized reviews about places to eat and drink. Users wrote a short review of places they visited and gave it a rating of 1-4 “petals” that got pushed to their followers in the community. After launching SpotOn as an NYC only beta at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in May, the team spent a lot of time refining the recommendation engine and testing with users. Based on extensive user feedback, the team decided to...
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