Name: SpotOn.it
One-Liner Pitch: SpotOn analyzes your Google Calendar and asks about your interests in order to recommend events and activities that may change up your daily routine.
Why It's Taking Off: The web app makes targeted event recommendations based on your interests and schedule.
There's no shortage of calendar apps to help you manage your schedule, but a new online service is taking a slightly different approach.
SpotOn.it analyzes entries in your Google Calendar to determine your daily routines and then suggests events activities taking place during the hours when you're usually free. The service uses learning algorithms to find out things like when and where you usually have dinner and also prompts users to provide a few key personal details to improve targeting.
When you first sign up for the service, SpotOn syncs with your calendar and then asks about where you live and work, what your relationship status is and what areas you're most interested in (for example: sports, music, learning and more). After that, it refines those interests a bit more by showing a handful of sample activities and asking you to indicate whether you find each to be fun or not.
Once that's done, SpotOn will start sending out event invites â€" which range from wine tastings and restaurant openings to comedy shows and art shows â€" by email and through a dashboard on the website. You can accept the invite, adding it to your calendar, or add it to your wishlist to consider later.
"We use analytics on how you spent your time before to give you recommendations for how to spend your time in the future," Smita Saxena, the company's co-founder and CEO, told Mashable. The goal, she says, is to help you "break out of your rut."
Saxena struck on the idea for SpotOn after graduating from Stanford's master's program and feeling like she was struggling to find new and interesting things to do in her free time each week. Like most people, she relied on a mix of blogs and websites like Yelp for suggestions, but she wasn't satisfied with the results.
"You still have to do all the work of figuring out when it is, where it is and does it actually fit in my schedule," she says. "It's very different having things pushed to me and suggested to me in an intelligent way."
She founded the company in July with her fellow Stanford alum Charles Feng and worked on building it up through Stanford's student accelerator program StartX. SpotOn debuted in private beta in the Bay Area in February and launched in five cities earlier this week, including New York, Boston, Chicago and Austin.
SpotOn plans to introduce apps for iPhone and Android in early June, and to eventually monetize the service by releasing paid APIs to companies to better personalize content that they advertise to customers.
The startup has closed a seed round from several notable investors, including Munjal Shah, the founder of Like.com, and David Bettner, one of the creators of Words With Friends.
Image courtesy of SpotOn
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