<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Bored out of your mind? Hungry, but unsure of where to grab a bite to eat? There are dozens of apps that you could use to find restaurants, bars and activities, but newcomer Picksie hopes to tackle location-based discovery on the iPad for lackadaisical types by determining what you can and want to do, right here, right now.Picksie takes into account your location, tastes and preferences, the weather, the time of day and the day of the week to return personalized recommendations for what to do. \nThe iPad-optimized web-based application, developed by Ishi Systems, is launching at DEMO today. An alpha version of the product will be available today in New York and San Francisco.\n\"Right Now\" Recommendations\n\n\n\n\nThe application takes a map-centric approach to discovery, and will pinpoint nearby venues and activities \u2014 using colorful and descriptive icons \u2014 based on your personal preferences and environmental context. If it's raining outside, for instance, Picksie won't recommend venues that are outdoor-only. Picksie will also only highlight places that are actually open at the time of your search. \nYou can select a venue in Picksie to view more details and see why the place in question was recommended to you. You can save a place to your favorites, give it a thumbs up or thumbs down, and help build out a venue's place page by adding tags, reviews, or uploading your own photos and videos. You can also book a reservation through OpenTable. \nPicksie's recommendations take into account what you explicitly like through your in-app behaviors, which means the recommendations will get better over time. The application also works to find other people that have similar tastes and will propose options that they like as well.\nPlan for the Future\n\n\n\n\nPicksie is very much about \"here and now\" recommendations, but if you'd rather plan ahead, it can accommodate for that as well. Simply specify a later time, date and location to fast-forward to the future. \nLoopt Pulse for iPad was built with a similar purpose in mind, but Picksie focuses more on the user's preferences over what's trending in a city at any given time. In that capacity, the application does a better job of helping you find something you want to do right now or at a later time with very little effort.\nPlace Data and Picksie's Plan for Expansion\nPicksie product manager Saju Thomas explains that Picksie licenses its data \u2014 instead of going with open source options \u2014 in the cities where it operates to ensure the highest quality data. This means that at launch, you'll probably notice that Picksie is light on neighborhood events like farmers' markets and street fairs. Thomas asserts that the company is constantly on the look out for top-notch, curated data, and has plans to enhance the types of places and activities Picksie recommends over time. \nPicksie is also working with Meetup to surface those events in the application.\nPicksie is self-funded through parent company Ishi Systems, but has plans to go after a round of financing at a later date. The service will expanded to other cities in the U.S. over the next 18 months.\nImage courtesy of Incase, Flickr"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/09/14/picksie/>