Playcez Helps You Discover Hangout Zones Based On ‘Likes’ From Your Social Circle

Have you ever wanted a tool that would suggest places to visit? Places like restaurants, nightclubs, and or some unknown shops. Of course friends can help you out, and there are local search engines like Justdial — but how about a web service to suggests places to go to based on the likes and recommendations of your social circle. Has anyone really done this well yet?

I think Playcez does it, and maybe even more. It is a social recommendation engine that helps you discover new hang-outs nearby in a personalized manner. To understand more about Playcez, we got in touch with one half of the founding team, Anirudh Maitra.

When and why did you come up with the idea of a social recommendation engine?

In mid 2010 Ashwani Gaur, [also a Playcez co-founder] was back from his US project while working with Deloitte and was trying to figure out something in Location Based Services (LBS) as he predicted it would gain mass adoption in the near future. Meanwhile, I was working with Google for a couple of months after my two prior start-ups and was thinking about starting some service for local businesses.

We met through a common friend at Deloitte and started to figure out the idea. The next few weeks were spent in identifying the opportunity and brainstorming.

The inception of PlayCez was the answer to a fundamental question: “How do people decide where to go out to eat, shop or hang-out?”

There are hundreds of local search providers, where a person can go to and search for a place, read reviews etc. They (and Google search) help when we exactly know which restaurant we want to visit. But that is not the case, most of times, when the user just has the basic intent in mind and wants the best suggestions.

We wanted to build a platform, which helps users by suggesting the best places in a locality and specially the places which people from a user’s social circle have recommended.

Since social was an important aspect of our application, we started off with launching a Facebook application. We learned a lot from it and got some valuable feedback from some of our initial closed alpha users.

How is Playcez different from a local search engine like Justdial?

The key differences from a service like Justdial are the following –
We have created an algorithm of ranking places in a locality, based on their web presence and popularity. None of the local search engines do that. They merely list places.
Our system is based on Semantic Web principles. What means is that our search, suggestions and all related features are based on many factors like the coordinate system and ranking of places, while services like Just dial and others work on textual search. It helps us in giving very focused and accurate recommendations to our users.

Our touch points are based on web and mobile applications, as we are focused on personalization. We will never launch call based services like just dial, it’s not possible to do personalization on phone due to privacy concerns (they are run by manual operators).