What happens when you put two Ph'ds from Yale and Caltech, a dot.com veteran, and an ambitious entrepreneur from Donald Trump's show "The Apprentice" in the same room on a web project?

Something colorful, engaging, and smart (lots of math). Okay, those are the good things, but I want to tell about the complexities that come along with these good things. No excuses, here is the news...we will be late on our launch. It doesn't look like it will happen in March. We are now shooting for a launch date in the first 2 weeks of April.

So, could things be worse than a late launch? Sure, but even one of the best companies in the world, Apple, was late on their SDK for the iPhone, right? Okay, I guess I'm looking too hard for sympathy.

Imagine being on the cover of Time magazine for your startup's release? It could be the best thing in the world or it could turn out to be your worst nightmare. For Zoodango's launch, we will not be creating the biggest splash news. We will not be sending out a national press release. We will not be hyping the site.

Why not, everyone else does? Because we want to get our user's feedback and create the best user experience first. It's all about the user experience! We also want to give time for the Zoodango brain to learn.

Zoodango will be providing smart answers of places to go based on a subset of people and the category of activity/event. Zoodango will also be providing date/times that are best for those types of activities for a subset of people without even calendar sharing requirements. Since we are using a neural network, Zoodango gets smarter and smarter as an individual use the system more. So, the system basically rewards the users who use the system often.

Do you remember when Zillow first came out? People were really upset about their homes being mispriced, but over time, the numbers are getting more and more accurate as additional data is given to Zillow. One more example is Amazon...their book recommendation engine wasn't very good in the beginning, but it became smarter and smarter over time.

In the same manner, Zoodango will get smarter over time, and we don't want the press going crazy about things until our user's data catch up to the smarts. However, I'm still afraid the press might go "goo-goo, ga-ga" and write about us prematurely. I've already gotten requests by press about doing an interview as being one of the first venue recommendation engines similar to what Expedia did for travel and what Amazon did for books. Well, those are pretty big companies to compare us against. I don't mind the ambitious comparisons because we are indeed very, very ambitious....but we also have to recognize that Rome wasn't built in 3 days. In fact, neither was Expedia or Amazon.

But my press contact mentioned a very good point. He said Zoodango has the ability to be super sticky because people make decisions about places and whom to go to those places at least 3-4 times per day. Breakfast, coffee, lunch, dinner, happy hour...and of course, who I should hang out with. I personally have not found another venue recommendation engine personalized to a specific group of invited people. Lots of review sites out there, but nothing that really takes it to another level. Well, this is why we have filed our patent. Wish us luck!

Zoodango's launch is imminent!