TripFlick, a new travel app (for Android users) wants to be your personal travel guide think Lonely Planet-meet-Tripit, says its founder Nishant Johri.
It launches in Singapore this week and the Singapore-based start-up nFlick wants to launch it in 100 cities within a year.
Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph
The TripFlick app generates personalized itinerary and delivers semantically rich information about sights, based on user interests, profile and location.To provide meaningful recommendations, the context of site is also taken into consideration, such as travel route, mode of transport, opening & closing hours, time and weather conditions. The back-end recommendation engine combines advanced recommendations and hybrid multi objective genetic algorithms to build highly personalized itineraries.
Q: Who are your key customers?
Anyone who travels is our prospective customer.
Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?
Several travel apps are marketed in different forms, however no system provides semantic recommendations specific to a tourist's interest. If we analyse the competitive landscape, there is a lot of buzz about systems like Gogobot and Wanderfly that essentially provides travel recommendations based on user's social network.
Another space that is crowded by many paid and free mobile applications is occupied by Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, Triposo, Guidepal etc. These apps are content focused and provide categorization of various places of interests. Yet another space is dominated by two key players Tripit & Worldmate these apps are focused on generating user friendly flight and travel itineraries.
There is an empty space in this landscape. No player exists in the area of personalization of travel information and generating context-aware smart itineraries. TripFlick does that. It is like a cocktail of Lonely Planet and Tripit with added intelligence.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?Travelers face a problem with overwhelming information, when they plan their trip or explore a city. Loads of irrelevant information is pushed to them which is purely based on other users ratings that leads to sparse data and recommendations. There is no system to address the problem of how to give recommendations to mobile users that go beyond simple predefined lists of interesting sites near-by.
TripFlick personalizes all the information and makes it relevant to a specific user.
Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Self-funded and MDA (Media Development Authority) grant
Full story:
www.webintravel.com//news/wit-startup-tripflick-launches-in-singapore-think-lonely-planetmeettripit_3102 
