Shanghai Start-Up Skimbl is a Curated Local Venue Search Engine [INTERVIEW]

Skimbl is a Euro-Chinese start-up, launched just this summer, that’s a sort of contextualised, reviews- and events-oriented search engine. It’s run out of Shanghai, and for the moment, is focused only on this metropolis. Located at Skimbl.com, it curates and aggregates real-time feeds from over one hundred relevant blogs and websites, with an emphasis on reviews, deals, and being useful to the city’s urbanites.

It pulls in pictures from, for example, daily deals site Dianping, and events from local lifestyle site City Weekend. Currently, the site is in English only, and the team is being tight-lipped about a possible Chinese localization. Nonetheless, Skimbl has iPhone and Android apps underway, and an API is in the works too.

Why that name? According to one of its co-founders, it’s a shot at making a word that can be made into a generic verb, as has happened with the phrase “to google” – and so the start-up likes to think of people skimbling for local-area info. Also, so I’m told, it’s a kind of acronym of ‘skim Based on Location,’ which is its founding principle.

Skimbl.com co-founder and marketing guy, Louis.

To discover more, Penn-Olson chatted with Skimbl’s co-founder and marketing director, Louis (pictured right), who’s a 30-year old French guy now based in Shanghai:

1. Why did you launch Skimbl?

After living in Shanghai for a while, we got used to browsing several local websites and blogs to see what’s new and what’s happening in the city. Sometimes it took an hour to find what we were looking for. At this point, we decided – with some friends – to develop an aggregator that gathers information from hundreds of local websites and compiles them on to one platform. And so the Skimbl concept was created.

2. Skimbl is run out of China and Europe. How big is your team? And why did you set-up like this?

Nowadays, Skimbl is only operated from Shanghai. One of our colleagues used to work from Europe but he recently joined us in Shanghai a few months ago. As with nearly every start-up, we are a small team of four people working full-time on it. One great advantage that we have is that we are a group of friends from different cultural backgrounds, with different competencies, working in the same field that we all love: the Internet.

We decided to work from one location for one reason: It is more important to gather an ‘A-Team’ with a synergy of skills and the same state of mind, than working from different locations. We keep looking for talented and creative people who are able to add their competencies to Skimbl.