Going Out Is Social, Why Shouldn't Local Discovery Be? | The Hoppit Perspective

Choosing a place is very social. Think about it. You decide where to go with other people. You desire to read reviews from people like you. And, you want to go to places that can be enjoyed by the entire group.

But social place searching is hard to do, and the existing players in the market struggle to be social.

For example, let’s pick on Yelp. Yelp struggles to be social because it is impossible to run a search query that accounts for the preferences of multiple users, even though we rarely eat or drink alone. Yelp also struggles to instill trust in its review system because users don’t know the taste of the reviewers – and how can you trust a user that you don’t know?

The same goes with CitySearch, Ness, and Alfred. All these technologies are set up for individual restaurant searches. But every time I eat, it's with other folks.

At Hoppit, we believe that the future of place searching is social, and we designed Hoppit with that consumer psychology in mind. Hoppit is pioneering the concept of social place searching; our search engine and complex algorithms can take into account the taste of multiple users. We're striving to always have an answer to the question - "What should we do tonight?"

Next time your group is trying to decide where to go, check out Hoppit.

Local Discovery: Designing The Next-Gen Recommendation Engine | Hoppit

This post is dedicated to Hoppit, a new social place recommendation engine that recently launched in NYC and Chicago. Hoppit fosters local discovery - defined as the discovery of new restaurants, bars, shops, and activities around you. Throughout the past few years, I've seen interesting shifts in the local game. However, none have hit the nail on the head. There was still something missing.

Let's talk about Yelp, then Hunch, then Bizzy, then Google + Alfred + Ness. In that order.

Yelp got out there first, of course, providing the aggregated star ratings of local places. This directed people to good places, but Yelp didn't really provide any recommendation engine. It didn't return unique results for unique people. So, those people looked elsewhere.

Then, Hunch attempted place discovery - even though it was part of a much more grandiose mission of personalizing the Internet. The Hunch taste-based method said a lot about local innovation. They were the first to consider, "Should I trust people just like me? Can I base an recommendation algorithm off of human taste and psychographic data?" Definitely intriguing, but it misses a vital component - the actual attributes of the places themselves. We can't do taste-matching alone, because then we miss all this valuable place data.

Then came Bizzy, with an interesting thought. "Hey, if two people like the same place, then they're a good taste match." Again, interesting thought, but misses the boat. Two people can like a place for very different reasons (i.e. ambiance vs. food).

Finally, the market has been met with a slew of new "gene-based," Pandora-like place discovery players. Specifically, Google Places (formerly Hotpot), Alfred and Ness have built algorithms designed to isolate attributes of places. Then, if you "like" a place (or 5-star a place), they can spit back another place with very similar traits. Now then, this is the most compelling algorithmic approach yet; they're getting really close to the Nirvana of local discovery. BUT, it's still missing something.

It's missing what Hunch had. The taste-mapping element.

Gene-based approaches will never optimize place discovery, because everyone who 5-stars a restaurant will get the same results. It's still not tailored for each unique user.

By combining consumer taste-mapping with a gene-based approach, we can now sense which unique human tastes will like which unique place genes. And that is how Hoppit is designed. When a person specifies their tastes and psychographics, Hoppit immediately knows which places to point them to. Even more, the moment that same person likes (or 5-stars) a place - or several places - Hoppit can further customize its database of places for that user, based on the attributes of the places rated.

It's our belief that the best algorithmic approach to local discovery needs to encompass both taste mapping and place genes. Only then can we drive the right person to the right place at the right time.

Meet Hoppit.

Kudos to eBay's Corporate Strategy Team. GSI + Where + Magento = Awesome

eBay's GSI Commerce acquisition, followed by its Where.com acquisition, followed by its Magento acquisition (today) - are the fruits of a very intricate Corporate Strategy. And that strategy will have VERY interesting implications for the future.

Let's take this one step at a time.

1) eBay acquires GSI Commerce. This, in my opinion, is genius. It gives eBay the ability to rival its chief competitor - Amazon.com - by giving them an immediate global logistics network. It also gives eBay the experience to serve mid-size to large retailers in a MUCH more a effective way, as GSI has many notable large retailers. Up to this point, they had been getting beat silly by Amazon in the mid to large size game. GSI's shipping infrastructure levels the playing field.

2) eBay acquires Where.com. Again, great acquisition. Where.com has reach into 120,000 retailers - both large and small, and therefore is a significant participant in the Local Commerce space (which everyone is trying to win right now). What can eBay do with Where.com? Oh, I don't know - only give its ENORMOUS retail base access to intelligence on local markets in real-time. This is huge - especially for retailers with both a brick-and-mortar presence and an eCommerce and mCommerce preserence.

3) eBay acquires Magento - Magento, being the open source eCommerce platform with 90,000 SMB retailers and 1,000 large Enterprise retailers. Magento, also being the first open source mCommerce platform - not to mention the company which recently launched Magento Go, hosted eCommerce for SMBs and emerging businesses. Magento, the company that has Apple's verison of the app store, but for eCommerce retailers - an eCommerce app store, basically. This acquisition gives eBay an incredible retail reach and great additions to its technology portfolio.

So now we have eBay + PayPal + GSI + Where + Magento. Wow. Imagine the possibilities! eBay is well positioned to do many significant things -

• Amazon, beware! The eBay marketplace can overtake Amazon as the market leader. eBay can now offer sellers so many tools and technologies and sophistication (a la GSI and Magento), as well as more channels (Magento and Where.com).
• So. Many. Synergies. GSI and Magento retailers can take advantage of lots of PayPal innovation in the payments space. Where.com can also provide a lot of intelligence layers to GSI and Magento retailers.
• Local, Local, Local. eBay is eCommerce + mCommerce + global + social - and now local. Here's a little forward-looking note: watch out for eBay to rise up as a leading hyper-local services provider for retailers. In the future, eBay can help you reach local consumers in real-time.

So, all in all, I'm quite impressed with eBay's corporate strategy group. Kudos.

Now the only thing is - execution. Which is quite the tricky beast.

Best of luck, eBay.

-Steve