Valentine’s Day coming up… many romantic couples find it tough to do something special!! For many couples, Romantic Dining is very special. Activity on myBantu.com confirms that dining out is most liked romantic activity on a Valentine’s Day. myBantu is currently available on iPhone, Android & Facebook. On Android, myBantu is enabled with voice interaction as well. myBantu provides users with personalized and relevant recommendations for what they need. Users not only get personalized recommendations, but also can seek opinions from friends, get coupons & get their needs done.
Finding a romantic restaurant can be very tedious and painful, through myBantu,we make this effort easy with its relevant and personalized recommendations. For this Valentine’s day, myBantu recommends (source myBantu.com recommendations & usage data) these top 9 Romantic restaurants in San Francisco shown in the infographic below.
Workplace stress generally results in imbalance between work front and home. Every professional trying to juggle between work and home always wishes to have a personal assistant who could take care of things like booking tickets for the family for their favorite movie show etc. while you just join in straight from your work place. A poolside table all set to receive you right after the show to treat your family….a Fantasy.
Come and live this fantasy with your Bantu thumb. Yes! Your favorite application is now available on iPhones and other Androids. Simply login to myBantu application from your phone and get personalized recommendations for movies, dining, opinions from friends and the web, online coupons, product recommendations for shopping and much more. And with mobile integration, the application also enables you to check the location of the venue by integrating it with Google map.
The application myBantu is absolutely free and is available for both of the Apple App Store and the Android market.
While you are on your way back home, you don’t have to regret for the meeting that got extended as your family members are no more going to miss their favorite movie because of that. Simply log in to the application myBantu from your mobile and you can make reservations on the go. Where else can you find such a ‘handy assistant’ in literal sense.
Need something? – you do search online and to uncover thousands of options / results and go through the maze of finding out what is relevant for you… rather works for you.
While search has advanced so much even with social aspects, that does not help us to get the relevant results. While putting one of our ‘need’ online do we get relevant & personalized recommendations for what we need? Or does the outcome help you to finally get your things done?
In a world where everyone else speaks about search and find, myBantu simply believes in assisting the users with getting things done at ease. When a user asks for a kid friendly restaurant options nearby, myBantu gets user the most personalized & relevant recommendations for the user’s context along with Reviews, Restaurant ratings, Expert opinions, Directions and also assists to reserve a table. If a user is planning for a romantic movie, myBantu provides the lists of nearest theatres and gives the show timings, movie trailer, and options to book tickets instantly.
myBantu, a smart & free personal assistant provides the users with relevant and personalized recommendations for movies, movie reviews, movie recommendations, places to eat, shopping and neighborhood related stuff. It uses a patent pending relevance technology and goes a step ahead of this by not only suggesting what is needed but by also assisting users with expert opinions and crowd Experience. myBantu’s relevance engine uniquely combines the wisdom of web, wisdom of social networks & wisdom of experts in sourcing the relevant recommendations.
Apart from the recommendations, myBantu options like ‘Shout out’ ‘Share’ and ‘get opinion’ help the users to flaunt and get suggestions from those in your network and web experts. The whole hymn behind myBantu is to assist the users’ various needs merging under one single roof.
Example 1: Movie Recommendations – for ex: comedy movies playing
Example 2: Places to eat – for ex: top romantic places for a date night dinner
Example 3: Smart Shopping – for ex: Get Coupons for Dell Inspiron 14-Inch laptop
Example 4: What’s in the Neighborhood? – for ex: Dentists nearby
We are excited to announce that myBantu- Your smart personal assistant is now available on your iPhone and Android devices in addition to Facebook app. It’s Free …Why wait…? You can either download your app or signup to www.mybantu.com and avail this smart personal assistant.
We mentioned in our last post that myBantu’s new Avataar for the iPhones and Androids will be smarter, faster and more intutive for the users to enjoy the online assistant’s services on the move. Here is a peek-a-boo into the features available:
Movie Tickets Bookings, Dining Reservations-Just as in the web link, users can easily ask myBantu to book movie tickets or do dining reservations at a vegetarian restaurant nearby or buy you flowers for to be delivered at a friend’s place for his anniversary.
Share and assign to-do with friends – Share your to-do list with your associate as and when you remember and also stay updated with whatever they share with you, almost instantaneously.
Information on local places- in your city – Users can ask myBantu for information about places (Malls, service centre, theatres, various landmarks, etc) in their city and view them on map and also get driving directions!
Just a couple of days more and the wait is over. Keep watching this space for our pre-launch jitters and of course the launch announcement.
How familiar are you with this little online friend of yours who is so capable that you can’t imagine. This little online concierge is ever ready to:
1. Help share coupons for Bob’s Hoagy Steaks or your to-do list ,
2. Recommend Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black that has again started featuring in the charts
3. Shout out your opinion about the product you selected.
Over 528,872 recommendations have already been given by this application. Don’t be left behind. ‘Bantuing’ is the way to delegate all your dinning, shopping and movie preferences. Delegate your needs and let the application ‘Crank it up’ for you.
What is common in Pippa Middleton’s Maid Of Honor Dress by Sarah Burton, Natalie Portman’s award winning Black Swan in which she was trained by Mary Helen Bowers for ballet , Sachin Tendulkar’s bat by Mehnga Ram, or the historic 2008 Barack Obama Presidential social media campaign by David Plouffe? It’s Personalization. They all used experts in the business, who created personalized solutions for their requirements, to achieve outstanding results.
From fashion to fitness, sports to politics, personalization has become a part of all those who are juggling with tough roles and expect to excel in each one of them. Amazon.com popularized the product recommendation engine to help ecommerce customers personalize their preferences through its suggestion/recommendation mechanism based on what they and others like or had purchased or viewed in the past. This is the level of personalization consumers expect today.
With high work pressures and limited time for all jobs, it is becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to strike a perfect work-life balance. After a long day’s work if you need to unwind somewhere with family and friends over a cup of coffee or a movie, driving down to the movie theatre or a restaurant only to find that the bookings are not available is very disheartening. myBantu is just the kind of online personal assistant that helps you make the right choice after consultation with the experts-the specialized sites, social networks, semantic engines etc. The get opinion widget is also useful in checking out the opinion of friends in the network and others who used the same option.
After bagging the ‘most innovative startup of the year ’award, if you have to take your colleagues to one of the finest dining joints, just ‘bantu it’ i.e. use myBantu.com. Be it about looking like a million dollar maiden on the red carpet or striking the most difficult shot with great ease on a cricket field, personalization is the mantra of the day. Why should you be left behind? myBantu, the super delegated is here to help you.
“Honey, I need to rush to the airport. I will have to queue up before I get my flight tickets. Could you please call up my secretary to ask her to book a table for 5 at a restaurant near the airport so that I can line up candidates for the interview while I am waiting for the flight? And yes, I have not forgotten about Isabella’s 10th birthday bash. Keep the invites ready while I call up to find some fun place for her to enjoy with her gang of friends. And yes, ask your girls about the birthday theme. Chinese Panda was a …… man. Let’s get better one this time.
By the way, did you hear from Martha or Samantha about what cool destinations for ‘scuba diving’? Hon, Don’t worry! I will post that on my FB wall. Probably my friends Sam and others would know some cool escapades. I also need to get some good ‘yoga’ books. I have put on a lot of weight. I will ask Daniel. He has been following the Indian guru, ‘baba Ramdev’ for long now.
How familiar are these conversations to you. Most of us depend so much on our circle of friends-at home-‘Honey’, at work-‘colleagues’, on social networks –‘connections ’. Small jobs like booking tickets, reserving table for dining, finding holiday destinations, getting book reviews, sending flowers, getting movie tickets takes away so much of our quality time. How you wish you had a chum who could do all the dirty work of searching, evaluating and finally suggesting 5-7 options. Hey Man, we are talking about taking the pain away from daily chores. Some tool that can be a ‘Honey’ who takes care of the small things like booking tables for a birthday bash, ‘connections’ who give you varied choices such as which mobile to buy and which movie to watch and ‘colleagues’ who give us their opinion about the choices that we have.
Just go ahead and ‘bantu it’ with myBantu.com, the free online tool, which not only assists you in recommending digestible 9 options but also recommending options based on your past preference. In case you are not sure about the choices offered, you can also check out the opinions of your buddies (of course, your Mother-in-law’s too). Share and gain from experiences. You can even ‘bantu’ about Montreal Bagels you liked at Murphy’s or Susan Diner and her maple syrupy pancakes or catch the new Greek restaurant around the block. The myBantu links in the web, iPhone and Android, helps users to search for their requirements. It allows the users to not only avoid the hassle of individually going through numerous sites but also leverages on the social network to get opinion, thereby reducing the time taken to zero in your final decision. So what are you waiting for! Start ‘Bantuing’!
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Yesterday (March 13th), Chris O’brien wrote an important column on “Race On the best Search Engine” in SJMN . In the article he noted that “we do not just want a set f links when we do a search – we want an answer or a solution”. That is precisely myBantu’s recommendations are for. Traditional index / keywords based search does the best job in quickly giving hundreds of pages matching search keywords. However, such engines shift burden of cutting the clutter to finding the answer to the searcher. O’brien quoted Roger McNamee, from Elevation Partners, as, ‘”we are seeing the peaking and declining of Indexed search”. In the examples, O’brien mentioned users on mobile use specific apps like ‘Urbon-Spoon’ etc for specific searches. However, there are so many needs user have, is it practical to have many applications for all of them to be loaded and keep on switching context between them. That’s where myBantu’s integrated approach make sense. myBantu apps though currently focused on entertainment, travel and shopping, its capable of extending to provide personalized relevant recommendations to all sorts of needs.
TechCrunch announced a good news today, StumbleUpon stumbled on $17million investment. It is a good news for us because StumbleUpon positions as Recommendation Engine as myBantu’s core technology platform is positioned as. Only the big differences is in our approach to give recommendations. “StumbleUpon uses positive and negative user ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. “When users stumble, they will only see pages which friends and ‘like-minded’ stumblers have recommended”.
As per collaborative filtering, users are given recommendations based on the users with similar preferences (like minded). Typically like-minded users are bucketed and based on usage of one or more users from the bucket the user will get recommendation. However, collaborative filtering have some inherent problem. It assumes the like-minded users have same preferences in the current search’s context. The reality is the similar users are not same user. The preferences of like-minded users in one context may not be same in the different context. Assuming every individual in the like-minded bucket as same is a gross error.
A better approach is personalized recommendation based on the user’s preferences and past behavior. The preferences can be explicit or inferred (implicit). The explicitly entered preferences can be a taste profile or based on users Like/ThrashIt actions. There can be implicitly inferred preferences based on the users interaction with the web / searches and their results. These preferences are better indicator of the user’s likings than the like-minded users likings. Such user preference based recommendations is what would be more personalized for the user and would of course be more preferred by the user. MyBantu provides such personalized recommendations based on users preferences that includes past behavior.
Having said it, the collaborative filtering is not completely without merit. In some context it can be useful, MyBantu platform also supports it in other use cases that I would cover later.
