Give it a Whrrl: Service blends Net, friends' advice
— -- The Internet is handy for finding restaurants, stores and nightclubs, but word-of-mouth recommendations still rule.
Jeff Holden, 39, co-creator of a new service called Whrrl, hopes to marry the two. The goal: create a social discovery experience that combines the power of the Internet with the dead-on trustworthiness — and fun — of getting recommendations from friends.
"This is personalization for the real world," says Holden. "We're trying to help people find and discover things that there is basically no way to do today."
Early start at Amazon
Holden spent almost nine years at Amazon, arriving in 1997 before it was a household name. He met founder and CEO Jeff Bezos by chance in New York City at investment firm D.E. Shaw, where Bezos then worked. After Bezos left to start Amazon, he invited Holden to join him.
Holden says that when he decided to leave to start a company, Bezos was supportive. "He said, 'Let me know when you figure out what you're doing; I want to invest.' I was very flattered."
The business became Pelago — and Bezos has invested.
The Seattle-based company, using a patent-pending technology, has devised a way to use the Internet to answer common, but general, questions. (Example: "Where can I go to have fun tonight?") Search engines tend to respond to such vague questions with a mishmash, much of it irrelevant.
Holden says Whrrl's technology solves that problem. The magic ingredient is decidedly low-tech: personal recommendations.
With Whrrl, recommendations are used to form a personal "community" — friends, family and other approved contacts — for each user. The result is a list of recommendations tailored to the unique tastes and preferences of each user. "We light up your world by having your friends touch a place to illuminate it in your world," Holden says.
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