You find yourself traveling abroad or in a strange city and need to work out where you are and what’s around you. What do we all do? It’s a familiar process. You take out your smartphone and open multiple apps: Foursquare, Yelp, Maps, Wikipedia, Trip Advisor, etc. The list goes on. After perusing multiple channels of information, you’ve basically lost plenty of time at your location instead of just getting the information you need and enjoying it.
So instead of searching, you should just be able to find out about a place. Enter Phind, the Wildcard startup pulled out of Startups Alley to pitch on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY (selected by a combination of audience votes and editorial curation).
The Phind team says its app is like a “Shazam for places”: it uses the simple act of taking a photo to reveal information about a place. By taking a photo, Phind draws on images online associated with that location and via image recognition immediately pulls in information from Foursquare, Yelp, Wikipedia and Trip Advisor in a simple tile format inside the app. Facts, history, restaurants nearby, you name it.
You can even click on a restaurant, get the menu and the pricing and then call the establishment. It’s also integrated with Uber so you can go there immediately.
Phind also announced today a partnership with Viator (a Trip Advisor company) allowing users to get tickets to tours and attractions.
Judges asked about the business model in terms of getting advertising on the platform, which the team said could be an option in the future. And are they worried about Google? Google Goggles is focused on recognising an object as opposed to a location, was their answer.
They also have a patent pending on the technology around the location.
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Co-founders Rishi Jhunjhnuwala and Reneta Jain, based out of Los Angeles, have raised a “friends and family” funding round and are now looking to raise a seed round to scale up. The Phind app is available for download here.