Glenn Fowler (back left), Geoff McQueen (blue shirt), Ryan Cross (head between columns), Tom Voirol (red jumper), Linda Kerz (lady), Elias Bizannes (pink shirt Poser)

A new startup can be seen on the horizon, Activity Horizon that is, one of the many startups being created and launched in 24 hours at Startup Camp Sydney II this weekend.

The team of 6 saw a problem that needed fixing, and sought after doing just that.

The Problem:

Co-founder Ryan Cross during university at New Orleans had a car, plenty of friends, but extreme difficultly in finding events and activities that were location based. When he migrated to Sydney four years ago, he found similar issues trying to find activities he was interested in.

The Solution:

“A website that allows people to discover events and activities that they would be interested in.”

Activity Horizon allows people to do just that, search for activities and events based on their location, interests and friends.

In a presentation yesterday evening by Elias Bizannes, one of the representatives for the team, he explained how the innovative technolgy works.

“Although there are a lot of websites that provide event listings that you can organise with your friends, there is no actual way to be able to search across all these different event and activity websites to find things that are actually relevant to you,” He pitched

“So what’s happening is we’re scraping so much data, we’re overloading Google,” He joked.

“Every second we’re adding one or two new events, maybe even three,”

“We’ve got this machine that goes out over the web searching for events, not just ordinary events, but activities”

“It goes out, collects all the data, and puts it in a very nice user interface that as you explore, you’ll be able to quickly identify activities that are relevant to you”

In a demonstration of the product by Linda Kerz, a usability expert, showed how it was easy for users to navigate around using Google maps.

Elias explained that they built the platform around not needing to read anything to understand how to use it.

Mick Liubinskas, a startup advisor with Pollenizer, said

“Matching events with motivation is one of the Holy Grails of online businesses. The balance of useful versus simple has always been the challenge and this application may just have nailed it.”

Monetization:

The team explained their different thoughts on ways of raising revenue from the product, with one of thoughts being to liase with event co-ordinators to creat “Sponsored links” that may be in a different colour, to help promote awareness for a certain event.

Another one of the monetization methods was the extra features option…

“Other revenue models might actually occur with our users, they might want to get extra features for example:  friend functionality and a few other things that are too top secret to announce.” Elias commented

With a focus on local recommendations and what you potentially are interested in, Activity Horizon is said to help keep you in the loop.

Be on the lookout for more posts on the other startups from Sydney Startup Camp.