PlayCez Android App Hits the Streets, Helps You Find Places to Go

When we chatted with the Indian startup PlayCez last summer, one co-founder promised that the social venue recommendation service would soon get a mobile app. And here it is. The new PlayCez app for Android now joins its HTML5 mobile website in providing listings of nearby restaurants or shops, filtered by how strongly they’re recommended by your Facebook buddies.

Along with the newly-released app for Android – with an iPhone version still in the works – PlayCez’s Ashwani Gaur has other bits of good news about the progress of the service. One major new feature is that it now incorporates Foursquare – not just Facebook – in its venue search algorithm so that you also get the benefit of all the check-ins and tips left on that popular location-based (LBS) social network.

Co-founder Ashwani also tells PO that “we are getting about 80,000 monthly visits” and that the “total registered users are now close to 25,000.” All that, he says, was done organically, without spending a rupee on advertising or PR. That’s a good climb up from the very early 5,000 registered users and 1,000 monthly active users last August.

For all those new users, the startup has been adding new and verified venues, across several major Indian cities, which now amount to “about 20,000.” As was explained to us last year, all that verification is done manually, serving as a double-check on the open-source ‘points of interest’ database that it started out with. New venues mean potentially higher revenue, since PlayCez generates much of its revenue from users who check-in to a venue and then buy a pre-arranged deal from the retailer.

Google+ is a recent newcomer to the social media scene, but Ashwani believes that it’s just making things more confusing for users. He observes:

The problem with tons of local search sites is that the platforms where people search for local information – all local search engines – and the platforms where they talk about them – Facebook/Foursquare/Google+ – are totally disconnected. We believe that the future of local discovery is social and that is what PlayCez is all about.

Download the new PlayCez app for Android from the Market.