Nothing stays the same for long in Berlin’s fast-paced startup world: Gidsy rolled out two new features earlier in the week and has now announced an overhaul is in the works. The Columbus Launch is a redesign of the site that will make the urban discovery and experience website even easier for users to engage with.
The Dashboard Overview and integration with Facebook Timeline is just the beginning, with CEO Edial Dekker telling Silicon Allee that he hope the relaunch will be a big step towards making Gidsy more social, more useful for experience organizers, and more accessible for people all over the world.
The Dashboard Overview arranges all of a person’s activities in one place and is designed with both organizers and participants in mind. Created as an organic extension of the Gidsy service, the new feature is a way of looking at everything that’s happening for a user at a glance, letting them see things they have organized and events they are attending, as well as reviews and messages.
Edial said that the Dashboard is useful for everyone, but in particular for organizers who can streamline their events and activities: “We really want to create a small management system for them to just have access to all of the tools that they need to build a business.”
A Social Experience for Users
The Facebook Timeline integration is geared more toward participants, and is one of the ways that Gidsy is building a social experience for users. Participants will be able to post events they’ve attended on their Timeline, and they can choose to share reviews with their friends.
The integration with Facebook also gives a new level of trust to the online booking service. It’s very difficult to fake a Facebook profile, and so connecting people via Facebook gives the whole situation a new transparency. Edial said: “People come together to do an activity, to an event where they share a similar interest and it’s really important that there’s a trust network going on.”
Edial also promised that Dashboard Overview and the Facebook Timeline integration are just a taste of what’s planned for Gidsy: “It’s just a very very small start for something very big, so we’re excited about that.”