Yeti Wants To Be Your Travel Companion

No, not the abominable snowman.  I'm talking about a new mobile platform -- with a slick new interface -- that just might become a killer app for travelers, though the app is not just for travelers.

Yeti – available now for iOS devices -- is the brainchild of Alex Capecelatro, founder of At the Pool , a social networking platform that facilitated offline interactions.  After several months of testing that platform, Alex and his team discovered an unmet market need:  a switchboard, if you will, for conversations with a local focus. The new app, Yeti, makes these conversations fun and simple.  Once Yeti knows where you are -- say Miami Beach on a Friday -- it displays talks between travelers and locals on any number of topics:  traffic to and from South Beach, parties in Wynwood, how the weather is shaping up for Saturday morning.  And the touchscreen interface -- each conversation is a visual tile that you can tap if you are interested, or swipe away if you are not -- enhances the experience of discovering those conversations.

There are several reasons why I like this.  First, as a frequent business traveler, I have learned to remove the stress of my peregrinations by assimilating as much as I can into local culture. Sometimes, that means spending time with friends. But often, I am somewhere that I have never visited before.  A companion to conversations on topics of local interest feels compelling.

Second, although Yeti is young and building its first audience, it could have wide appeal among merchants that thrive from local tourism.  Reminds me of another social platform -- A Small World -- which recently transitioned from an online network to a mostly offline community.  Supporting the new business model for A Small World are restaurants, hotels, and other venues that provide context and services for the offline experience.

But what I like most about Yeti is its potential to facilitate local interactions between all citizens, not just travelers and streetwise townies.  The original vision for At the Pool was a platform that made relationships happen offline.  With Yeti, Alex may have discovered the content strategy for making that vision possible. Your network talks about a great hole in the wall in SOMA (see the screenshot below), and you are more likely to go there.  And if you go there, you are more likely to meet people in your network.  Like Yeti the snowman, Yeti the app aims to have a pretty big footprint, and the footprint, like the snowman’s, is physical.

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