AVUXI Maps Barcelona's Action


    In Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress? AVUXI has got the town figured out, whether you’re looking for a eating, shopping, partying, or popular places to take photos. The startup uses a “heat map” style design to map cities that is currently available as a web application, with a mobile app coming soon. But rather than waiting for their app to drop, we figured we’d bring you show you this company because a few of our readers may be attending the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where AVUXI is currently live.

    “I’ve been doing a lot of traveling and I have trip advisor, Yelp, and all of these applications and I realize I rarely have time to use them, especially when I’m on the move and changing places… Unless I’m really planning something in advance and have time to research I could do it, but in most cases I just don’t have the time. I would just like to be walking and have the same local knowledge as other people have,” says Alexis Batlle, co-Founder of AVUXI and previously CEO of Laika Mobile Connectivity, a mobile payments company from Finland.

    So AVUXI was born, and designed to become sort of like a local friend that would walk next to you and show you where the popular places for lunch are, for example, so you can have the best experience in a new city.

    To do so, AVUXI is mining the big data that’s already out there about movement of people in cities, popular locations, and so on. They bring in info from the traditional stuff, like Trip Advisor and Foursquare for reviews, as well as open data and some other sources – like how smartphones move through certain areas based on certain times. Their algorithms then bring together this information into a heat map based on individual criteria.

    The result is a dataset that is relevent to the time, place, and user. If you’re a 30 year old woman who’s looking for a place to shop on weekends, AVUXI’s dataset can figure out the best places in Barcelona for you. “Our plan is to constantly be adding new sources that we feel adds value and makes it more accurate,” says Batlle.

    Right now AVUXI is available as a web app which leads you to hotel booking, which makes sense because it gives you more information than just price. But they’re working hard to bring this service mobile, as well as expand into more cities. I imagine their most valuable datasets are not global, so they’ll have to do a little bit of tweaking for each city. But London looks like it’s next up on the list.