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Like many established Angelenos, Anke Audenaert has many friends and family members who don't know the city, but visit for business or leisure. She tries to give them good restaurant recommendations.
“With a phone full of apps, some mayor badges, and a decent number of check-ins, I still had not found a tool that would easily let me save, organize, and share my favorite places,” said Audenaert. This frustration led to the creation of Favrit.
“Knowing that recommendations from friends are a lot more powerful than an aggregate review score, we knew something was missing: a local bookmarking platform that organizes and learns what you like and easily lets you share with friends,” Audenaert said. “Combine this with the long felt need for a better local native advertising solution for SMBs, one that is not rife with negative reviews and that can’t be gamed easily, and Favrit was born.”
[ibimage==33752==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-right]Favrit is an iPhone app that lets users store and share recommendations for eateries, stores, and more. It's a system for 'bookmarking the physical world.'
Unlike its major competitors, it doesn't bother with reviews, just endorsements.
Audenaert is well connected, exactly the sort of person you'd want to ask for a recommendation. After working at Yahoo! for eight years, Audenaert co-founded JumpTime with Andres Rodriguez and Michele DiLorenzo and led it to acquisition by OpenX in 2012. “After OpenX acquired JumpTime, we worked on integrating the JumpTime software into the OpenX advertising platform. Being part of the OpenX team taught us a great many things about ad marketplaces and it opened our eyes to the native advertising opportunity, especially in mobile. That is what prompted Andres Rodriguez and myself to leave our positions at OpenX and start Favrit.”
From the start, Audenaert said, Favrit needed a strong design team to make it stand out. “Finding good mobile designers with expertise in user experience as well as in creating beautiful user interfaces was our biggest challenge and caused us some delay in getting started. But joining forces with DTE Media was well worth the wait. Now we just face the challenges every startup faces: develop faster, stay in touch with the users at all times, keep improving, and don’t drink too much coffee.”
Favrit currently sports a five-person team and is actively looking for seed funding.
