A crew of Twitter alumni is right now launching a brand new shopper social app, Rex, aimed toward serving to individuals share their private suggestions of locations to go to — like eating places, bars, museums, and different companies, even trails and parks. Utilizing a mixture of AI and pc imaginative and prescient applied sciences, the app goals to make it simpler to get began sharing your suggestions by scouring your telephone’s Digital camera Roll for pictures from favourite spots, which you’ll be able to then add to curated playlists which can be shared with buddies and followers.
Based in 2021 by former Twitter product supervisor Aliza Rosen, who beforehand led the initiative to alter Twitter’s character restrict from 140 to 280, Rex has been in energetic growth for just a little over a 12 months and a half. Immediately, the app is formally exiting beta testing and being made obtainable to the general public.
The startup can also be saying its increase of $3.96 million in seed funding from Accel, Khosla Ventures, and different traders from Twitter, Snap, and Pinterest, together with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, by way of his fund Future Constructive.
Rosen says she was impressed to construct a social suggestions app as a result of she’s at all times been eager about journey planning, at the same time as a child.
“I simply cherished the method of eager about new locations to go — whether or not that was a far-off vacation spot or within the metropolis that I lived in and the encircling space,” the founder explains. “I’ve at all times simply been tremendous fascinated with discovering new locations,” she says, however notes that it’s typically troublesome to really do the analysis to find the very best spots.
“Discovering locations for any given circumstance that meets our wants and preferences might be actually laborious…that is the expertise I’ve confronted,” Rosen continues. “The web is simply inundated with opinions, scores, suggestions, and weblog posts from strangers whose tastes we don’t know.” Plus, she provides, the crowdsourced mannequin of apps like TripAdvisor and Yelp now feels antiquated in comparison with the social merchandise individuals use right now that ship customized, curated content material in an environment friendly means.
Picture Credit: Rex
These ache factors led to the event of Rex — an app that goals to sort out the issues related each with discovering new locations and sharing your individual suggestions with others.
Utilizing Rex is so simple as the startup guarantees. You stroll via just a few preliminary steps to supply Rex with permission to entry your contacts and pictures in your telephone after which its know-how begins working to find what doable suggestions could already be hidden away in your Digital camera Roll.
Rosen assures us that the crew is taking steps to make sure the app nonetheless respects customers’ privateness when doing so, nonetheless.
“I’ve two privateness engineers on my crew who got here from 1Password and they’re obsessive about safety,” she notes. The corporate doesn’t retailer customers’ pictures by itself servers — it’s solely storing the metadata domestically on customers’ units. Solely when a consumer chooses to make a suggestion is the information then saved on Rex’s servers, Rosen notes.
Picture Credit: Rex
To find out what suggestions you will have to share, Rex has developed a proprietary ML mannequin educated on pc imaginative and prescient of photos. The mannequin appears for photos of locations, particularly, and matches that with photograph metadata to find out if the place could also be one thing value sharing — like a photograph of a dish at a restaurant, for instance. It’s additionally taking a look at different alerts, just like the coordinates of the photograph and timestamps, then tries to place collectively a greatest guess as to when that image was taken.
Once you discover a photograph that represents a spot you’d prefer to suggest, it’s solely a few faucets to share it with your folks. You examine a field, enter some textual content about why your need to suggest the place, and publish. The spot might be added to “playlists” you curate, as nicely — like these on your hometown or different cities you’ve visited, or by different themes, like delicacies. These “rex” are additionally printed to a world feed the place you’ll be able to see the suggestions from others.
Your folks’ ongoing suggestions can be found in a world feed, however what’s most useful is the app’s map view which helps you to truly discover your folks’ suggestions round you. That means, if you’re visiting a brand new metropolis and even your individual, you’ll be able to scan to see what locations close by your folks have advised are well worth the go to.
“In a world the place we’re inundated with one-size-fits-all content material, blogs, and lists, Rex delivers sign amidst all of the noise by serving to us uncover locations and experiences validated by individuals we already belief,” stated Rex backer, Amit Kumar of Accel, in an announcement. “Mining the digicam roll seems to be a very good means to do that; it already comprises an especially dependable sign of the place we go and what locations we like. Nobody else within the area has tried something prefer it, which means no suggestions are fairly as curated or private as Rex.”
Rex is a free obtain on the App Retailer. The app will not be but producing income via advertisements, subscriptions, or in-app purchases.