TheZCompany.com introduces their new product "aLike Places" to local Miami networking event Refresh Miami. The presentation covers an update of the last year since the team presented at Refresh, a demo of aLike Places, an insight into the next release, and the competitive landscape of the product.

2. The Team Jose Gonzalez Joel Cloralt Douglas Suarez

3. The Team The Z Company was founded in Miami, Florida on June of 2009 with the premise of building useful, innovative, simple to use, fun and amazing online products. We are Yahoo! alumni, and focus ourselves around the idea of developing solutions more than websites. Our team consists of Jose Gonzalez, Joel Cloralt and Douglas Suarez. Mr. Gonzalez is the co-founder of The Z Company and a professional in the fields of project and product management specializing in the areas of technology. He has a Masters of Management Information Systems and a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from Florida International University. Mr. Gonzalez has successfully launched a variety of products on a global scale, coordinating with teams from Brazil to Singapore and India. He has over 12 years of experience developing products from conception to execution and has extensive experience successfully launching products into the Latin American Market. Mr. Cloralt is a Software Engineer for The Z Company and a professional in the fields of project and product management, development and social media. He has a Masters of Science in Management Information Systems from Florida International University. Mr. Cloralt has over 10 years of experience and has successfully launched projects in social media, web development and online advertising. He has also worked successfully with clients in Latin America and the US and has a solid experience in managing projects in both markets. Mr. Suarez is the co-founder of The Z Company and a professional in the fields of project and product management. He has a Bachelor in Communications and Marketing from Florida International University. Mr. Suarez has successfully launched a variety of products throughout Latin America, coordinating with teams from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Miami. He has over 10 years of experience in the areas of product management, online advertising, market research and management. Mr. Suarez has worked successfully with both the U.S. and Latin American markets and oversees all stages of product development.

4. What we’ve been doing since our last Refresh Demo

5. ISoPlanit

6. Self Funding

7. Idea Is Born

8. How we currently discover new places Recommendations from friends/family Recommendations from coworkers Advertisements Coupons / Specials Search (Google) Twitter / Facebook (Social Networks) Newspaper/Blog Articles/Reviews TV Shows (Food Network, Travel Channel, Local News) Randomly Passing By Smartphone Apps (Google Places, Where, Aloqa, etc) Yellowpages / Phonebook Mall / Street Directories Review Sites (Yelp, CitySearch, etc.) Eavesdropping

10. We’re not the only ones who believe this is an area of opportunity – mashable, Nov 2010 – readwriteweb, Sep 2010 Restaurant Comparison Quick App To me, the most interesting-looking announcement of all is this one. The Restaurant Comparison quick app basically gathers all the restaurant search results for your query and collects them together in a grid- or chart-like display for easy comparison. Yahoo says this is currently being tested with a limited number of users. You can see it in action, briefly — along with some of the other local products — in this Yahoo video. – searchengineland, Nov 2010 Facebook Acquires Local Recommendation Service Nextstop – mashable, Jul 2010 Get Custom Local Business Recommendations with Bizzy – mashable, Nov 2010

11. Our approach to this problem

12. Demo Time! aLikePlaces.com

13. How our approach works Tags Place Each place in aLike Places has corresponding tags, uniquely describing the place We then apply a unique algorithm matching places a user might like based on tags Place Place Places in aLike Database

20. The Market -comScore, Oct2010

22. The Market (mobile)

23. Thank You! Powered by