New Personalized Recommendation Engine Helps Millions of Users Discover Their Next Favorite Place
Boston, MA –December 1, 2010 – WHERE, Inc., North America’s leading location media company, today announced the launch of its new local discovery service that empowers and inspires people to discover their next favorite place. WHERE is currently available on the iPhone, Android-powered devices, and where.com, with release on BlackBerry and other major platforms expected by year’s close.
WHERE makes it easy to find the right places to eat, drink or play by offering personalized recommendations and high-quality guides from local experts. WHERE also helps consumers save money through deals from local businesses. With this latest release, WHERE re-affirms its mission to be the mobile and online destination that millions of people use daily to answer the never-ending question, “where should I go next?”
“Our goal is to own the ‘pre check-in’ space,” said Walt Doyle, Chief Executive Officer, WHERE, Inc. “It’s time to fundamentally change how mobile users discover the world around them. WHERE’s unparalleled Recommendation Engine and fun, user-friendly interface enable the best possible local discovery experience.”
With WHERE, users are integrally involved in the discovery experience. The more places they save as their favorite places or places they’d like to go, the better WHERE’s recommendations become. WHERE’s proprietary, self-learning Recommendation Engine takes a ‘user-centric’ approach to local discovery, intelligently inferring user intent and delivering personalized recommendations to match a user’s preferences.
WHERE’s Recommendation Engine uncovers hidden connections between places through latent semantic indexing, identifying relationships between those shared characteristics and a user’s tastes. Users can also get recommendations via more than 20,000 local guides curated by local experts, which cover everything from top burger places in Boston to the best yoga classes in San Francisco.
“WHERE is like that awesome friend who knows what you like to do and always suggests a great new place to check out,” said Nataly Kogan, Vice President of Consumer Experience, WHERE, Inc. “Sometimes you’re in the mood for a particular type of food and are looking for nearby options. Other times, you’re feeling bored with the usual routine and want to try something new, but don’t know how to search for it. Our goal for this newest version of WHERE is to help consumers find great places to go whether they’re looking for something specific or just want to venture out and try something new.”
“We’re really excited about the additional features we’ll be rolling out in the next several months to further enhance our users’ local discovery experience,” Kogan added. “Seeing where your friends want to go or what their favorite places are is a great way to get recommendations so we’ll be making it easy to experience WHERE with friends. Targeted exclusive deals – say, at a place that’s on a user’s “want to go” list – are coming soon, as well as the ability for our users to become local experts by publishing guides to their favorite spots around town.”
This newest version of WHERE is currently available on Android-powered devices and the iPhone with updates for all other major platforms to follow shortly. Users can instantly sync their mobile account with their web account at where.com.
About WHERE
With a mobile audience and reach of more than 50 million consumers in North America, WHERE is North America’s largest location-based media company. The WHERE consumer service helps more than 3 million mobile users discover, save and share local places on their mobile device by recommending the most relevant content and integrating money saving special offers from local merchants. WHERE Ads™ is the company’s hyper-local search and display ad network, delivering unparalleled real-time reach and relevancy for both national brands and local merchants. Underlying both the consumer service and advertising network is a sophisticated relevancy engine that uses location and a variety of contextual inputs to match consumers with relevant places, offers and discounts. WHERE, Inc. is a privately held company based in Boston, MA. For more information please visit where.com/about. Follow WHERE on Twitter at twitter.com/where and on Facebook at facebook.com/whereapp.
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