Alfred App Gives Personalized Restaurant Recommendations

It’s a merger of two of the trendiest start-up topics in the new iPhone app Alfred: restaurant recommendations and data mining.

Alfred, built by the Stanford PhD-led team at Clever Sense, aims to learn what types of restaurants and bars a user will like based on comparing a few of their inputted favorites to analysis of existing reviews from around the Web.

Clever Sense CEO Babak Pahlavan says he’s hoping for a “Rosie from ‘The Jetsons’” type experience, or perhaps “Pandora for the real world.” The premise is “Teach it what you like, then put it on cruise control.”

Alfred is all recommendations and no direct search, so users will have to be in a sort of lean-back and explore mode to enjoy the experience. What seems most useful is that you could teach the app about your local favorites and then get personalized recommendations when you travel to a new city.

Alfred was actually the dummy name for a test version of the app, but it’s gotten enough traction (20,000 downloads over the past weekend) that Clever Sense is throwing out the intended launch name, Seymour. That’s still incredibly small potatoes next to market leaders like Yelp and Google Places and even Foursquare, but unplanned growth is at least a good omen.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Clever Sense has 10 employees and $1.6 million worth of funding.

(Alfred, by the way, is already the name of an Mac application launcher app, which could potentially be confusing.)It’s a merger of two of the trendiest start-up topics in the new iPhone app Alfred: restaurant recommendations and data mining.

Alfred, built by the Stanford PhD-led team at Clever Sense, aims to learn what types of restaurants and bars a user will like based on comparing a few of their inputted favorites to analysis of existing reviews from around the Web.

Clever Sense CEO Babak Pahlavan says he’s hoping for a “Rosie from ‘The Jetsons’” type experience, or perhaps “Pandora for the real world.” The premise is “Teach it what you like, then put it on cruise control.”

Alfred is all recommendations and no direct search, so users will have to be in a sort of lean-back and explore mode to enjoy the experience. What seems most useful is that you could teach the app about your local favorites and then get personalized recommendations when you travel to a new city.

Alfred was actually the dummy name for a test version of the app, but it’s gotten enough traction (20,000 downloads over the past weekend) that Clever Sense is throwing out the intended launch name, Seymour. That’s still incredibly small potatoes next to market leaders like Yelp and Google Places and even Foursquare, but unplanned growth is at least a good omen.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Clever Sense has 10 employees and $1.6 million worth of funding.

(Alfred, by the way, is already the name of an Mac application launcher app

Original Link: http://allthingsd.com/20110718/alfred-app-gives-personalized-restaurant-recommendations/

via my6sense