Winners to be announced at International CTIA WIRELESS IT & E 2009®

WASHINGTON, D.C. September 18, 2009 – Geodelic Systems and the Geodelic mobile location aware discovery application has been named a finalist in the “Best Mobile Consumer Application” of the first annual CTIA Hot for the Holidays awards program, which showcases this year’s must-buy mobile consumer electronics products and applications. International CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment 2009® takes place October 7-9 at the San Diego Convention Center.

CTIA 2009 Hot for the Holidays award winners will be announced at a ceremony on Thursday, October 8 and all finalists will be prominently displayed in a special showcase at International CTIA WIRELESS IT&E. Submissions were judged on innovation, functionality and creativity by a panel of top tier reporters and industry analysts.

“This year’s awards program offers a preview of the many CE devices, applications and accessories that are sure to be in demand this holiday season,” said Robert Mesirow, vice president and show director for CTIA WIRELESS IT & E.   “CTIA congratulates Geodelic on being named a finalist in Best Mobile Consumer Application.”

Geodelic’s Sherpa app, available on Android, aggregates many consumer mobile experiences — Yelp and CitySearch for customer reviews of restaurants and destinations, Zillow for real-estate information, Google Local for business listings — and associates them with locations that are relevant. The idea is to see everything around you on the screen in your hands. It’s largely navigational today, but that’s not the end game, Mr. Sonnad said.

“Everybody’s got a website, but nobody has a mobile experience right now,” he said. “Next year, probably the end of next year, if you pull your phone out and you’re in the Hilton hotel and it doesn’t tell you information about the Hilton, either your phone is broken or the Hilton’s broken. If you, as a business, own a location, you’ve got an interesting shot at reaching your customer.”

That’s a bullish prediction — more bullish than most mobile experts would make — but Mr. Sonnad is building his business on the premise. He sees the “mobile experience” as something every hotel chain, big mall owner, theme park, or convention center will need, as well as an opportunity for more traditional marketers. Think about a credit-card rewards program, he said, and what it could do with a better understanding of its customers’ travel patterns.

UPDATE: We have identified the source of the issues that were causing connectivity problems and may post a more detailed, technical explanation soon.  In the mean time, please download and install the latest Sherpa build, we corrected the issues and released the new client to the Android Marketplace last night, the same day that we were made aware of the issues.  Thank you!

We are having some inconsistent server connectivity issues that are preventing a limited number of people from connecting to the primary database.  The result is slow or no connectivity, which means that results are delayed in searches, or Sherpa is unresponsive in extreme cases.

These problems appear to be limited and are not system wide.  We just wanted to let you know that we are aware of the problem and are working quickly to get it resolved.

If you have any specific feedback for us with your Sherpa experience right now, we would love to hear it in the comments, feedback is always useful.  Of course we always encourage you to send us specific bug notices and problems to support@geodelic.com as well.

Thank you so much for your patience, we will post and update when we have it.

Just because you’re not scaling Mount Everest doesn’t mean you don’t need some assistance getting around–and Sherpa’s here to help. A free local discovery application optimized for Android and powered by a learning engine dubbed GENIE–i.e., Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation–Sherpa promises a customized user experience that improves each time you use it, recommending retailers, restaurants and attractions as it begins to understand your likes, dislikes and behavioral patterns. Sherpa also takes into account the larger world around you, combining your interests and location with related contextual information (for example, time of day) to aggregate and present personalized, site-specific recommendations and insight about the places and things in the immediate vicinity. With Sherpa on your smartphone, it’s a small world after all.