O Rummble najpierw przeczytałem na TechCruch a potem otrzymałem zapytanie czy nie chciałbym przepytać szefostwa tego startupu na okoliczność ich planów i ekspansji…
Temat geolokalizacji jest bardzo modny – poza Foursquare i Gowalla również takie duże misie jak Google i Facebook chcą nam zafundować możliwość odnajdywania swoich kolegów i koleżanek, którzy nic innego nie robią tylko całymi dniami siedzą w knajpach i piją kawę. Podobno można na tym zarabiać i wszyscy wierzą, że to właśnie będzie „Następna-Wielka-Rzecz” w usługach mobilnych. Jak na razie z geolokalizacją jest jak z Twitterem – fajne, modne ale nie bardzo wiadomo jak to monetyzować (ok, są pierwsze próby ale jak na razie przełomu nie ma)..
Ciekawie na tym tle wygląda startup Rummble, który zamiast nam dawać informację „gdzie Basia piję kawę” sprzeda nam informację gdzie w okolicy jest dobra kawa albo pizza. Albo buty albo siłownia. Zapytałem się więc Andrew J Scotta CEO Rummble o co tak naprawdę chodzi i czemu myśli, że wygra z Facebookiem czy Googlem?…
AK74 – Rummble is ” location-based social recommendation service”. Simple definition but what exactly it does? Can I use Rummble to tell me where in my town I can find best burger?
Yes precisely that; Rummble is designed to tell you where to go next – it is a personal recommendation service for the physical world. It allows you to rate and share your favourite places, from bar or restaurant to the best spot to take a photograph, best picnic place or your favourite tourist sites.
AK74 – Check-ins are cool. Gowalla is hot. Foursquare is getting attention. What Rummble can offer to get users? Why should I use your service instead of others?
Rummble is all about personalising the physical world for you. As you checkin and rate places, Rummble learns what you do and dont like and builds you a „trust graph” of people, both friends and people you don’t know, who you trust for different types of places.
Your friends don’t always give you the best advice and Rummble means you can get recommendations from 1000’s of people, while trusting that you share similar tastes.
AK74 – You are using other location-based services to get content and finally generate recommendation for Rummble users. What about being banned from your sources? Gowalla and Foursqaure can easilly shut down your whole bussinnes?
Our recommendations are generated with in Rummble. The only data we take from Foursquare and Gowalla are aggregating their check-ins from Twitter. As with both Twitter and Facebook, it is in the interests of these other LBS startups to propagate their content to extend their reach and make the data useful to their users.
Both Foursquare and Gowalla are more game orientated and so we don’t feel we compete directly with either – Rummble is all about giving you the best recommendations for where to go next.
AK74 – Aggregating check-ins from other services that are publicly shared on Twitter through its mobile apps doesn’t seem like rocket science. What is your secret weapon? Algorithms?
Although re-publishing a check in is pretty easy, making sense of a tweet is actually very hard. Natural lanugage processing is difficult at the best of times, but with only 140 characters and the use of slang and shortcuts, it’s extremely hard to extract accurate meaning.
Rummble uses NLP and other algorithms to work out what venue a tweet is referring to and the sentiment (good or bad) being communicated. It is imperfect but it does mean that if users want they can Rummble (checkin or create reviews) simply using a geo-located tweet, which we think is pretty cool!
AK74 – In your opinion – future of geolocalization. Apple, Google or Facebook will be the winner? Or can we expect „the next big thing”?
Geolocalization is an inevitable path, which will infiltrate every aspect of online and mobile services in the same way that social networking has. Location itself transforms the services we, and other start-ups, can offer- but it is just another dimension and data element of a bigger picture.
Other aspect of the internet being mobile are important too – the fact it is always with you, the personal nature of the device and that you will ultimately spend much more time using these services because you don’t need to sit at your desktop or laptop to do so. As for the next big thing, it’s already here: it’s Rummble of course! ;-)
