colourDNA, a new social discovery tool that makes it easy to find new things to enjoy in life, announced the mobile app version of their site, available for iPhones.

The iPhone app makes it simple to discover all sorts of interests like books, movies, music, gadgets, restaurants and bars, to name a few.  The app utilizes your location and community to recommend things that you can discover or might interest you.  Personalized recommendations are available in an instantly.

“We continue to see social recommendation services getting more personal and more contextual,” said Ben Poynter, Cofounder and CEO of colourDNA.

“This is one of the reasons we cover everything in our taste graph, and why doing our first mobile app was so important. We also see these services needing to offer more than just a platform for sharing, taking the experience further by giving the users something back that is meaningful. That’s what we are trying to achieve with colourDNA and we are really excited about its potential.”

iPhone app features:

• Activity feeds to see what is being loved all around the world right now
• Matches personalised to you so you can discover new things to enjoy
• Near Me to find places to go and try out near your current location
• Tools to let you Create what you love on the go and as you’re enjoying them

What differentiates colourDNA from other social discovery tools is that it uses your favorite color or color preference as a basis for recommendation.  The first thing you answer when using the app is “What’s your favorite color?”  It may sound juvenile but some aspects of color psychology suggests that  your preference for given colors reflect innate personality traits within an individual.  And the colourDNA team worked hard to preserve the web app experience in the mobile app.

New to the Team

Speaking of team, colourDNA recently brought on board Guillermo Christen, a seasoned technical lead and algorithm specialist to head up the colourDNA tech team.  Guillermo’s wealth of experience includes most recently his role as Head of Product Development – Content Discovery at Red Bee Media which acquired recommendations platform TV Genius where Guillermo was the Technical Lead / Software Development Manager. Guillermo will focus on continuing to build out colourDNA’s machine learning algorithms and scaling the product as it grows in popularity.  He already has big ideas for colourDNA’s personalization capabilities, which competes with a growing trend around ambient discovery.

“This is key for us, and I suppose for anybody doing recommendations,” Guillermo explains.  “Our idea of personalisation though, extends the common static notion of relevance: that it can be measured equally for all users. For us, personalisation means not just attempting to give you suggestions about items (restaurants, books or markets) you could be ‘interested’ in, but also attempting to understand what that ‘interest’ means. Our initial approach is to have a number of recommendations algorithms compete for your attention, and have one succeed…. for each user.”

Hot Tools for Discovery

Discovery tools are keen on mobile because of the added relevance location brings to recommendation engines.  We saw the theme loud and clear at SXSW, where serendipitous discovery app Highlight, aims to bring people closer by alerting you if someone nearby.  Th goal is to help people break the ice that can make for an awkward introduction, one of our biggest challenges in real-world connections.

But Highlight isn’t the first app that exploited the “hidden connections” of people.  Sonar, a mobile app that pulls up publicly available information on Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, etc., was a big hit at TechCrunch’s Disrupt last May.  These apps are leveraging an array of data clusters to make a complete picture of you, but colourDNA thinks this format isn’t quite ready for prime time.

There’s certainly a big data effect clusters have, but “big data for me is cleaning up what’s out there to extract meaningful content,” says Poynter.  “It’s hard to assess that from different sources. There’s some clever things gong on, but we’ve created an experience that doesn’t require that. No data from anywhere else – not required.”