February was an exciting month for us. We came back after three exciting days at SATTE 2016 and soon after, we hosted the first Startup Knockdown successfully in association with OTM Mumbai and are now looking forward to the next one in Mumbai. This month also saw some major investments in travel space. Like always, we also learned about some really interesting travel startups and shared them with you. In case you missed, here are our top stories from this month:

#1- Fxkart and Tramily emerge as winners at first Travel Startup Knockdown

In the first Travel Startup Knockdown, Fxkart was selected to be the winner by our panel of judges. Fxkart simplifies the process of foreign exchange for international travellers by connecting them to reliable forex dealers. Tramily was picked as people’s choice at Startup Knockdown. It is a platform that connects travel agents to hoteliers easily through a website or mobile app.

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#2- ibibo group to receive USD 240 million funding from Naspers

ibibo, the parent company of popular OTA Goibibo will be receiving a funding of USD 250 million from existing stakeholder Naspers. The group not only operates the popular OTA but also runs B2B travel platform TravelBoutiqueOnline, bus booking service Redbus and budget hotel chain Gostays. The latest funds will be used by the company to develop new technologies to enhance the products.

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#3- Zendrive raises USD 13.5 million to make car travel safer

Zendrive offers analytics on the driving patterns to offer a quality score. It doesn’t require any hardware and relies on the sensors in mobile phone of the driver to generate the data. Zendrive is available through SDK and can be embedded with various apps. The technology holds huge potential and the participation of major automobile companies in this round is a strong indicator of the same.

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#4- Shouut is the only app you will need for local discovery

In a time when we have a separate app for everything from discovering activities to booking hotels, Shouut comes in as one app that has it all. It seamlessly stiches together food & drink, nightlife shopping, leisure & outdoor and travel & stay giving the user an app that has it all. Giant Tech Labs, the company behind this interesting product has recently raised seed funding of USD 500K to further develop the product.

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#5- Softbank confirms the acquisition of ZO Rooms by OYO Rooms

Softbank finally put the rumours of the acquisition of ZO Rooms by OYO Rooms by confirming the same. Tiger Global backed ZO Rooms was the strongest competitor to OYO Rooms but was facing challenges after failing to raise subsequent rounds from its investors. The deal went through with ZO Rooms founders and investors getting 7 percent stakes in OYO Rooms.

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#6- Phocuswright MD, Tony D’Astolfo talks about their first event in India

Phocuswright is coming to India for the very first time with the theme “The Asian Mojo: Millennials, Mobile, Money, Mania”. We spoke with Tony D’Astolfo, MD, Phocuswright to learn more about the highly anticipated event and the driving factors behind it.

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#7- Volvo plans to redefine car rental industry with its keyless technology

The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has showcased a new keyless technology that eliminates the need of carrying any kind of car keys and allows unlocking the car using mobile phone. The digital keys can be shared with other users so that the cars can spend more time on the road than sitting in a parking lot. They will be launching a pilot project next year with their rental company Sunfleet.

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The post February 2016 round-up: The best in travel and web appeared first on TravHQ.

You will find a dozen apps that will let you find and book activities in the region, another half a dozen to find local attractions, even more to find hotels and then some more to recommend restaurants and bars. Most of them find utility at some time or the other while you are travelling, but they take up a spot needlessly for most times. This is where Shouut enters the frame. It brings together local food, attractions, events, shopping, lodging and activities, all stitched together seamlessly in a single app.

The recommendations are divided in five different categories- food and drink, nightlife, shopping, leisure and outdoor and travel and stay. Under each category, you will find three parts- Find, Do and Get. Under ‘Find’ you can find places. Places to eat, places to stay and places to visit. As the name suggests, ‘Do’ features things that you can do near you. It includes events, concerts, plays and activities that you can be part of over the next few days. ‘Get’ includes the nearby deals that you might be interested in. Of course the ‘Find’, ‘Do’ and ‘Get’ hold different meanings for different categories.

While most such services rely on crowdsourcing recommendations and reviews from anyone who is willing to contribute, Shouut only allows specific content creators who already have good knowledge about the topic in question.

“We are building a trusted recommendations platform and for that we need to keep the quality of content high. I don’t think we will take the crowdsourcing route, at least not in the visible future” says Praveer, Founder of Shouut.

At times, the reviews on platforms like Zomato and TripAdvisor can be subjective and might not paint a very clear picture. The contributors on Shouut have blogs with moderate to high following, making them a credible source of information.

Praveer, Founder and CEO, Shouut

Being an avid traveller himself, Praveer would often travel to new destinations and then shuffle through multiple apps and websites to put together a plan on places to visit. That is why he came up with the idea of Shouut.

By default, the recommendations are sorted by distance which can be changed according to your preferences. The results include tags which can be used to filter. You can also choose to manually select the location if you want to see results for the places that you are planning to visit.

We have always emphasised that any travel app or service should be relevant to the travellers for most times to keep them engaged and this is where Shouut takes full points. When asked about the geographies covered, Praveer very confidently asked me to try and find a place in India, however small it may be, for which there aren’t any listings. I am yet to find one.

Apart from listing the upcoming events and activities hosted by others, they are also working with brands like Rolling Stone and Lonely Planet to co-curate activities. This will help them drive more users to the app. The app also uses Bluetooth low energy beacons to drive store level engagement when shopping. For this, they have partnered with major brands like UCB, Croma, Reliance and are constantly adding more to the list.

While Shouut came into existence only a few months back, the app already has more than 25,000 recommendations, over 1500 events and around 300 offers. Giant Tech Labs Pvt Ltd, the company that operates Shouut recently announced a seed funding of $500,000 from an individual angel investor. According to Praveer, these funds will be used in product development and going forward, they will continue to add interesting features to the app.

The app is definitely worth a try, whether you are looking for weekend activities in your city or things to do at a new destination. You can download the Android app or go to www.shouut.com to learn more about it.

The post Shouut is the only app you will need for local discovery appeared first on TravHQ.