5 Questions for Walt Doyle of Where Inc.
This is the first in a series of brief Q&As with leaders in the local space.
Who is he?
Walt Doyle
What does he do?
CEO of Where, Inc.
Describe WHERE as if a friend’s mother asked, “So what is this WHERE?”
WHERE is a service on mobile phones and the web that helps people discover their local area. Based on some information about your interests, WHERE helps you discover great places and great deals that you may not know about. WHERE Ads is an advertising network that helps connect business owners with a local audience.
If you were not involved with WHERE which service would you use to satisfy your needs?
If I was not involved with WHERE, I would still use it. It’s the best service out there for local discovery. If I didn’t have WHERE, I would probably end up using a number of different applications and would need to call my friends a lot more. I would use Google of course and probably a deal site or two. Mostly I would need to rely on asking friends about recommendations for places to eat, sleep, and play. With WHERE, I get all three in one.
Why should people use your product over, say, watching hockey?
Well, if you are a big Bruins fan like me, and tried to get tickets to the playoffs last year and got shut out, you’d be smart to use WHERE to find the best local sports bar to watch the game with fellow fans.
Gone are the days of the search box. We have built a recommendation engine that will help our users discover great places and great deals.
Tease us with a hint of what’s in your pipeline related to local…
In the next few weeks we are going to change the way people find places locally. Gone are the days of the search box. We have built a recommendation engine that will help our users discover great places and great deals.
On the merchant front, we are rolling out a series of services to enable small business everywhere to drive commerce through flash deals to hyper-local audience. Our focus is on reach relevance and redemption, connecting the right consumer with the right business.
What is the future of local + mobile, in 15 words or less?
The future of local and mobile is commerce. Mobile LBS will fundamentally change how local commerce happens.
Walt’s passion for emerging technology has kept him on the leading edge of consumer media and technology for over 15 years. Prior to joining Where, Inc. in 2005, Walt was a GM of MapQuest (AOL). His career began in Hong Kong with Dow Jones (DJ), then spanned executive level appointments with GameSpot (CNET), Net2Phone (IDT), and DialPad (YHOO). Walt’s ability to identify emerging technology trends, create corporate strategy, and build winning teams puts him squarely at the helm of Where, Inc. Most recently Walt was named a finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2010 program and was also named a Massachusetts High Tech All Star.
This post originally appeared on Locl.ly.