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You're on a street that has four restaurants, five bars, and two nightclubs. So why can't you decide what you want to do tonight?
Cut down the white noise with Picksie, an app that will give you a limited list of recommendations based on your preferences, and the situation you're in at the time you ask.
What it is: Picksie is an app that recommends restaurants, nightclubs, bars and movies for users based on their location and preferences.
How it works:
Picksie uses your location, the time of day (within two hours), the weather outside, as well as curated selections by handpicked experts and guides like Zagat, to help filter out all the activities you probably don't want to be doing. It also uses your personal preferences, as noted in an initial profile builder and through connected networks. While using the app, giving a location a thumbs up or thumbs down, as well as indicating whether you've been to the place before, help Picksie get better at giving you recommendations.
Picksie has also joined up with Fandango so that it can provide movie suggestions, with the correct showtimes displayed. Tickets can be purchased instantly as well, and as with other recommendations, Picksie relies on your preferences to help give you the movie you'd most likely want to watch.
Users can connect with Facebook or Twitter, and share their Picksie activity on the networks if they so choose.
Why you'd use it: While Yelp tends to be the go-to for restaurant and bar recommendations, sifting through the enormous surfeit of Yelp reviews can be tedious, just as Yelp reviewers themselves can be less than reliable. Picksie helps you cut through the fat using common sense methods.
For example, Picksie won't show you a restaurant at lunch time that's only open for dinner, or recommend an outdoor biergarten when its thunderstorming. Especially in a city that's honeycombed with what can seem like almost too many options, a little assistance at dinnertime can be a welcome balm to the overworked mind.
Picksie Product Manager Saju Thomas also noted that Picksie is designed for discovering new places to go, so that users can get out of their food and bar ruts.
"If you take Yelp, a lot of it is driven off search--you search for places you already know," he said. "You're not discovering new places."
In the future, Picksie is aiming to roll out recommendations for even more activities, like museums and food markets.
How to get it: You can sign up for Picksie on the website or get it in the iTunes App Store.
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