Sometimes you need a certain app for your mobile device: a photo editor, say, or a task manager. But how do you find the apps you don't even know you need?
Enter
AppHero, a five-person startup that has just secured $1.8 million in financing to expand and enhance their service.
In brief, what AppHero does is process a range of information about your and your online activities, and use that to suggest apps that might interest you, even though it might never have occured to you to look for them. If your Facebook activity suggests that you like hiking, for instance, and your search engine activity indicates you've just booked a vacation, AppHero might put those two pieces of information together and suggest an app which maps hiking trails near your holiday destination. And then, based on whether you choose to go ahead and download the suggested app or ignore it, AppHero refines its future recommendations accordingly.
It's a process that company founder
Jordan Satok likes to call "serendipitous discovery," and it has piqued the interest of several venture capital firms who are providing this round of seed money.
"The financing will help us attract some of the best people," says Satok, "amazing machine-learning experts that we're hoping to join us." (Machine learning, a subdiscipline in the field of artifical intelligence, focuses on designing computers that can improve their performance as they receive new data.) Those experts will help AppHero increase the quality of the recommendations it provides, fine-tuning the algorithms it relies on further. The seed funding may also allow for expansion to other platforms (AppHero is currently available for the iPhone and iPad).
AppHero is currently seeking an engineer to join their team; other job opportunities are expected to follow soon.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Jordan
Satok, Founder and CEO, AppHero