How To Store, Recall & Share All Your Favourite Places? Blix It!

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You saw a restaurant on a friend’s timeline you found interesting. But that was three months ago and now that you want to visit, you can’t remember who the friend was. And was it on Instagram or Facebook? Or maybe you stumbled upon a remote location you want to tell your friends about. Or simply want to curate a list of must-do places in your town to share with visiting friends. For that, you now have Blix.

Blix – ‘A Place for All Your Places’ – is an app which remembers places with location, tags and personal notes. It also creates personalized directories of places funneled in from online magazines and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Instagram etc., to store and share.

The app launched in Mumbai on July 1 and is free to download across mobile platforms, except Windows RT. We sat down with one of Blix’s co-founders Bruce Woolsey on the day of the launch. Check out the video where Bruce walks us through the app and discusses its social and business possibilities. Below are some edited excerpts:

How did Blix come about?

The impetus for Blix comes from something we can all relate to. John Samuel, my partner, had this idea when he was travelling in Europe. When he got back, his friends and family asked him about his favourite places. And his favourite place was a beach in Spain they’d discovered when they were driving between two towns, where they made a wonderful family memory. He wanted to tell people about that but couldn’t remember the name of the beach and where it was. And that was frustrating to him for two reasons: first, because it was a special memory he wanted to share with friends in case they were in Spain and secondly, he was upset that he didn’t know if he’d be able to find his way back. And so he called me up and said, ‘Hey I got this idea, what do you think?” and we’ve been working on Blix ever since.

The idea was simply that we all have smartphones in our pockets. The smartphones have GPS, and GPS is a very powerful technology that allows you to potentially locate a position that is 11cm in diameter. And he said, ‘Why can’t we use this to create and save places, and create a list?’

So that was it. That’s what you do: you open the app, add a map, you put in an address. You find a place you want to save, lock it in, add a picture, add a note, a personal tag and save it. And it’s there forever.

How is it different from Google Maps, Here Maps or other geo-location-based apps?

Within Google Maps, I think it’s embedded down there – you can save places. But you can’t add any information to it. So you still can’t add a personal tag or note or a picture. And what we are trying to do is create a very personal directory, a long list that is easily searched, easy to filter by and then easy to share where you can actually share as many places as you want with just a few clicks.

And if you think about the other apps that have geo-location enabled – like Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Twitter and Foursquare and on and on and on… you can post an image to Instagram and it can be geo-located, but the problem is how do you save that? So, what we’re trying to do is create an app – there are lots of apps that are about broadcasting, or sharing or tagging, or discovering or exploring – that’s about remembering. So, any place that you see in those apps that you want to save, or any place that you see in a magazine that you want to save, or any place that a friend shares with you, you can just put it into Blix. Our tagline is: ‘A Place for All Your Places’.

Why is it called Blix?

We feel like with Blix, the service that we are providing has a global relevance. You think about places that are growing rapidly, like India – and that’s why we are launching here – addresses are difficult to find because addresses change, streets change, signs change… and we thought we needed a word that’s not necessarily an English word but a word that’s easy to say, we wanted a word that didn’t mean anything, that had no connotation because we wanted it to become something that you use as a part of speech – ‘send me the Blix, did you Blix that?’ And finally, we thought that the idea of the X marking the spot was a connotation that was hidden fun for us.

What’s the application of Blix for business?

I was working in an ad agency with dozens of clients all over the world and I’d visit them periodically and I could never remember exactly where their office was. I would often have people come to my agency who needed to know where to go and it was very complex – I had the find the address, share the address, email it. Then they had to cut and paste the address onto Google Maps. If I had Blix, I could just save the address and share it with people. From Blix, you go right into Google Maps that takes you right where you need to go.