Finding the right restaurant for that special evening or even the perfect boutique clothing store for an afternoon of binge shopping isn't always easy. In days of old, tourists would rely on a hotel concierge to provide information and recommendations on the best places to visit and eat from. Today, with a model geared more towards on-demand services and one-touch apps, it's only natural that a variety of companies are competitively developing new digital concierges to guide everyday personal commerce. The question is who will end up on top; able to effectively streamline hyperlocal business marketing? Is it going to be a "disruptive" startup or an established player?
Or perhaps neither? Arlington, Va.-based Dante Consulting is hoping it's the latter.
Dante Consulting is a well-funded, roughly 50-person software development firm located in Arlington, Va. They’ve spent years selling to corporations—rather than to small businesses or directly to consumers—offering things like cloud data migration tools and software development consulting. But that direction is beginning to change. The firm is in the process of rolling out their first consumer-facing product. This new piece of software is a free smartphone app called Ouli.
Ouli was made, CEO Pierre Malko tells me, because there is a lack of connection and information shared between people and their local merchants and restaurants. The Ouli app, explains Malko (pictured above), is not a deal service like LivingSocial or Groupon, but rather the app acts as a personal concierge that leverages a users' geolocation—tracking is done using Internet-connect beacons, positioned in high volume retail areas, which send and receive signals from smartphones.
Originally launched in early February, about 1,000 people are currently using the app to find restaurant and merchant recommendations in Arlington, according to Malko.
"We're not a bargain finding app."
The plan is to expand to cover D.C. and Alexandria, Va., in the near future. But Malko said he doesn't want to rush the expansion, because as a platform Ouli really needs to familiarize itself with a given neighborhood. When a person uses the app often, Ouli will begin to intelligently aggregate and understand previous decisions so that it can recommend the best fit for an activity—whether it be an anniversary, birthday or happy hour.
The app, aside from using geolocation, makes smart decisions by analyzing previous behavior and the experiences of other users. When a person logs into Ouli, they choose a type of event to attend or activity to accomplish and then the app offers a few recommendations. Instead of populating a long and confusing list of options, Ouli will give a limited but "extremely tailored" set of recommendations. And that's Ouli's speciality, Malko explains, promoting recommendations that will ultimately translate into conversions for both the user and merchant because they are so good.
The list of options may be influenced based upon a deal, promotion or daily offering that a vendor has posted, but it is not solely dependent on price saving. As Malko reiterated, "we're not a bargain finding app."
From the merchant side, these vendors are able to communicate with Ouli users through push notifications when a deal arises or a daily special becomes active. The notification can also be customized based on geographic proximity or certain buying patterns. For smartphone owners, most push notifications require you to opt-in.
Ouli defines these push notifications as "personalized offerings." And all of this is charged on a by performance basis. Which is to say that merchant partners only pay Ouli a fee when a consumer physically visits them to take advantage of a suggestion.
"The fees are flat to maximize the ROI for our partners," said Malko.
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