Recommendation engine Qloo emerged earlier this month from private beta to launch a mobile application that helps consumers discover new things based upon their entire spectrum of tastes. Leveraging a proprietary and patent-pending cross-domain recommender engine, Qloo takes clues from a person's current interests to provide personalized discovery across eight cultural categories: music, film, TV, dining, nightlife, fashion, books and travel. Qloo breaks the mold of single-track recommendation engines that only consider one aspect of a person's interests.
"While single-track recommendation engines can suggest films based on your movie ratings, or music based on the songs you've thumbed up or down; Qloo gets to know the whole you, which is something we've found really matters when suggesting something new to do," said Alex Elias, CEO of Qloo. "By understanding who you are culturally, Qloo helps you spend less time deciding and more time doing."
Qloo's exclusive approach caught on quickly with tastemakers and celebrities, earning fans including Cedric the Entertainer and Danny Masterson. They were part of a group of 25,000+ tastemakers who contributed more than a million inputs into Qloo's private-beta, setting the foundation for the public launch of the Qloo app. Cedric and Masterson have since made investments in the company and have been joined by other entertainment and tech investors in a $3 million Seed funding round that was also announced today.
The Qloo app dives deep into each of the eight verticals, offering context-specific recommendations and suggestions for any occasion or mood. For example, within the dining category, users can find suggestions for "date night," "brunch spots," or "out with friends," all based on their taste. Within books, members can discover personalized suggestions for topics such as "biographies," "books for the coffee table," or "fun reads." Each Qloo recommendation is unique to a user's complete taste-profile, and the app grows smarter with each cultural insight the user adds.
Core features of the Qloo mobile app include:
- Get Qloos - Users can discover new personalized recommendations based on their current taste across eight categories. Swiping new qloos right or left to give them a thumbs up or down trains the app to give better suggestions. Every suggestion on Qloo features comprehensive details so users have everything they need in one place. Using the Qloo app, members can instantly play songs, watch movie trailers, buy books, look at menus, make reservations, order delivery and much more.
- Give Qloos - Users can quickly and easily create a gallery of their favorite things -- top five favorite movies, restaurants, books and more, and based upon all of this information, Qloo delivers novel, personalized recommendations.
- Discover People - Users can find people on Qloo who share their taste in music, film, food and beyond, opening up an entire universe of new recommendations and galleries that they are likely to love. Qloo automatically suggests like-minded TasteBuds based on the user's entire spectrum of tastes. Users can follow their favorite tastemakers to keep their finger on their pulse of new Qloos.
Qloo plans to release an Android application by the end of the year, followed by a tablet version. Although users from across the globe can use Qloo, people in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London will be able to leverage hyper-local recommendations right away. More cities will be added on an ongoing basis.
The Qloo iPhone app is available now to download for free on the Apple
App Store.
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