It’s a time-honored tradition at SXSW for companies to give away breakfast tacos in order to capture your attention and it worked on me with Loku Pocketbook. After scarfing down a tasty taco, I was pretty impressed with what the team is trying to do with its location-based, content discovery service.
Loku Pocketbook is an absolutely beautiful HTML5 web app which tries to deliver the most entertaining things around you, including food, music and bars. Google, Foursquare and others are also deeply into this space but Loku Pocketbook believes that it can stand out from the crowd because it uses semantic search technology. This means that it will be able to discover the big-name artists playing in your town but also feed you the hottest food truck information from a local blogger who may not be big enough to be on the Google search radar.
It’s obviously going to be really tough to outmuscle Google or Foursquare in this space but Loku Pocketbook’s approach is very interesting and I’m blown away by the HTML5 web app – it’s swipe-tastic and feels like a native app. The company will soon have a native iPhone app but it chose to do HTML5 first so that it could give SXSW users a preview and this makes it easier to port the app over to other platforms.
Check out the video below for a better look at it and head over to Loku for more information.