Tagged “recommendations”

For a while now I’ve been enjoying this series of bite-sized travel guides from The Guardian, which puts the spotlight on a European town or city and hands over to a switched-on local to share food, shopping, cultural and green space highlights.

Some are more suited to my tastes and budget than others, but overall they’ve been good. And not just for far-flung places – on a recent day-trip east I checked out a number of the stops on their Edinburgh guide and it gave me a great basis for further exploration.

Rubadub have a new mobile app that delivers the RaD crew’s top vinyl recommendations (the best around) direct to your phone.

At a time when lots of vinyl releases are highly limited, this gets you early access to the latest heat before it disappears. It should also generally save untold hours browsing/searching since in their recommendations Rubadub have already done the job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The app was developed by me and the team at Greenhill.

It was quite tricky, because aside from developing the mobile app itself there was a lot of API work needed to integrate it with Rubadub’s stock and e-commerce systems. We also built middleware specifically for machine-learning customer tastes.

The current v1 app handles the core feature of letting people listen to, save and buy records but there’s a lot of cool stuff vis-a-vis personalised messaging and taste-based recommendations on the roadmap. I’ve written about this in more detail over on Greenhill’s site.

The long-term idea is that it becomes the app equivalent of the actual record shop experience...i.e. going into Rubadub on Howard St and one of the guys/gals handing you a pile of tunes with a side of witty repartee.

If you’re a vinyl junkie like me or into electronic music in general, I recommend checking it out.