Outalot - It’s all about location, location, location

Outalot is a new, and free, location-based discovery site specifically designed for iPhone and iPod touch owners who want to be reminded of what’s nearby, or would like to discover new places. The founders of Outalot, Joe Cohen and Jesse Boyes, have domain expertise in location-based services having worked at Vindigo for over four years. Unlike Vindigo’s platform-specific mobile software, Outalot is purely web-based and optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch. Outalot is available to anyone using a web browser, but the city data is currently limited to San Francisco and New York. These test-bed cities will be used to improve the user experience before more cities are added the service.

There are many services, both online and mobile, that work well if you already know where you’re going - that’s more the search paradigm. We wanted a product for location-based discovery and knew others did, too. - Joe Cohen, co-founder of Outalot

In Outalot, the key to discovering interesting locations near you requires you to set your current location. You can set your location in one of two ways. In the upper right corner of each page is a link to set or change your location. Tap this to enter your zip code, select a neighborhood, or set it from a list of recent locations.

The other way to set a location is to find the shop, bar, restaurant, or movie theater where you are currently located, then tap the “set my location here” button. Once your location is set, Outalot will always sort your locations for you based on your proximity, making it much easier to see what’s near you.

You can also Tweet your location using Outalot’s built-in Twitter integration and you don’t even have to have an Outalot account to use it. You simply find your current location in Outalot, then tap on “Check in via Twitter” located under the Google map. This will notify your Twitter network of your current location so people can meet up with you. Outalot promises to support GPS-enabled devices in the future which will eliminate the need for this manual process.

Outalot categorizes locations into four main groups: food, bars, shops, and movies. Each group contains sub-categories making it easy to tap and drill down to find a location. As you would expect, food locations are grouped by type of cuisine. Bars are grouped by themes such as comedy, bowling, sports, live music, and even dive bars. Movies are sorted by name, but you can filter by theaters or even ratings provideded by Rotten Tomatoes. Shops are grouped by product type like shoes, toys, florists, etc.

Every location listing contains vital information like street address and a tap-to-call phone number for iPhone users. Locations are also enhanced with Google maps so you can see exactly where it is and how to get there. Movie listings offer viewable trailers and available show times, and you can purchase movie tickets through Movietickets.com. All location listings allow users to rate it with a thumbs up or down and add comments.

In addition to the drill-drown approach to finding locations in Outalot, you can also search the database by keyword, or find places stored in your saved bookmarks section. Outalot’s approach to bookmarks is refreshing and one of its most useful features. With a single tap, you can add any location to your favorites list, or send it to your wishlist as a place you would like to visit sometime in the future. You can share your bookmarks with your friends by sending them a link to your Outalot user page, or you can add other Outalot users to your network to view their locations. The network feature is currently not available in the iPhone version of Outalot, but you can view and manage your network of friends from the desktop browser.

There are many other location tools such as Yelp, Google Local, and CitySearch which work very well as long as you know where you are going or already visited. Where Outalot really shines is in the discovery of new places that are near your current location. And this is especially useful on your mobile device making it ideal for iPhone or iPod touch users. With GPS-enabled iPhones coming soon, we can expect Outalot to quickly become one of the dominant providers of location-based discovery services for mobile.

Outalot - Find and discover nearby locations
www.outalot.com