Don’t Search, Phind — Snap A Photo, Pull In All Info About A Location, Then Book Stuff

You find yourself travelling 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 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. Or, make that Phind, the Wildcard startup pulled out of Startups Alley to pitch on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt New York (selected by a combination of audience votes and editorial curation).

Phind is like “a Shazam for places” (which is how they describe it). Their iOS app can be downloaded here.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/phind/id898016251?mt=8

The app 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, the pricing and then call them. It’s also integrated with Uber so you can go there immediately.

Today Phind also announced a partnership with Viatour (a Trip Advisor company) allowing users to get tickets to tours and attractions.

Cofounders Rishi Jhunjhnuwala and Reneta Jain, based out of Burbank California, have raised a ‘friends and family’ funding round, and are now looking to raise a seed round to scale up.

Judges asked about the business model in terms of getting advertising on the platform, and that could be an option in the future.

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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