Last week at SXSW I met Discoverful, a three-month-old travel-picture-sharing site that allows users to snap images and share their experiences around the world with their friends. Like Trover, the app is pretty and designed to highlight places instead of people, but as its founder Robert Mao explains in the video below, Discoverful relies on data to set itself apart.
Mao left his job developing recommendations engines at Microsoft Research to create Discoverful, and he hopes his background can help make Discoverful stand out from the crowd of attractive apps, as well as help provide a revenue model. The app is pretty, and no one has really won the travel space yet (like Foursquare has won in location or Facebook has won at social networking).
So, perhaps Discoverful’s design combined with data is the key to getting users not only to try it out, but to turn to it as a valuable resource every time they’re thinking about visiting, or actually visiting, a new place. See what you think. Sorry, Android fans, for now it’s iPhone only.
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