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Frequently Asked Questions
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| Zoodango is a site that answers the question of "where should I go?" and "what should I do?" based on your location and group of friends. It takes the 4 dimensions of a social context (what, where, who, when) to help you make decisions. Zoodango helps you manage all the places that you and your friends like and uses this data to intelligently compute real-time answers when you need them. Currently, you can use Zoodango on the Web, but you'll be able to use it on your mobile phone very soon.
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| "Ask Zoodango" is a proprietary location based social search technology that uses an intelligent software engine, proprietary algorithms, and neural network design to help you make collaborative social decisions. Due to our current pending patent filings, we are not able to describe in more detail about the inner workings of the "Ask Zoodango" technology platform.
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| The "Recommend It" application answers questions like "where should we go for dinner tonight?" or "where should we go have drinks?" whether you are in your hometown or visiting a new city. It is perfect for when you getting together with a few friends, and you want a quick way to find venues that are good for everybody. The application provides a list of venues with scores that are 100% customized to your group. The score is not a generic score, but rather, a dynamically generated personalized score of how good the location is specific to the people in your group.
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| A smart invite is an online invitation utilizing the "Ask Zoodango" engine that allows you to intelligently collaborate with friends on your next get-together. You can assign importance of each attendee, and have Zoodango suggest places and date/time options. You can then send an invitation and collaborate with your friends on which options work best for everyone.
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| Zoodango has a large system of business rules based on social conventions of how people meet up. Through our research and focus groups, we gathered data that helps us make suggestions on location and date/time options based on the category of what you are planning to do. In addition, Zoodango uses a very complex set of algorithms to create intelligence for every person signed up or invited through the system. Even if your invitees don't have a formal profile account on Zoodango, they can still provide their preference information through the collaboration engine.
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| Absolutely. The "smarts" of the engine begins to learn more about your location and date/time preferences as you increase the frequency of use. By creating more get-togethers, inviting friends to meet up, responding to more invitations, assigning more favorite venues, and interacting more on the site, you will teach Zoodango's engine to deliver more accurate results for you.
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| There are a many things that you can do to help Zoodango's engine understand your preferences; however, the simplest way is to find venues on the site and click "I like it". By doing so, Zoodango will add these to your profile and use the information (type and physical location) to better understand your preferences.
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| Zoodango currently has venues all across the United States and Canada. Because new venues pop up every day, we might be missing some places in your town. We will be offering an automatic way for you to submit a new venue into our public database. In the meantime, please email us the venue info (name, address, phone number, venue type) to support@zoodango.com and we will add the venue promptly.
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| Other online venue sites simply provide a way for you to find static venue information and read/write reviews. Zoodango takes a unique approach by providing a smart recommendation engine to help you discover new places with a ranking system that dynamically scores each location specific to the people in your group. It also incorporates a smart invitation system that allows you to invite and collaborate with your friends with a click of a button.
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| Other invitation sites simply provide a way to send an electronic invitation. Zoodango goes much further by actually helping you make decisions through the integration of a social search engine, venue listing service, and collaboration tools. Zoodango helps you make social decisions with an intelligent engine that will pre-compute location and date/time options based on who is invited to your get-together.
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| Zoodango does not require any of your invitees to create a profile account in order to respond to your invitation or officially RSVP for your event. Invitations are sent through email addresses, and all your invitees can interact with your invitation page without a profile account.
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| By creating a profile account, Zoodango will provide you with more customized and accurate location and date/time options because you can better define your preferences. Whenever you are invited to a get-together, your personal preferences will be directly part of the formula when Zoodango's engine computes the options based on all the invitees. This will increase the likelihood that the location and date/time options will be convenient for you for all future get-togethers.
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| The more friends you have on Zoodango, the more everyone benefits because Zoodango will take each person's location and date/time preferences to help you plan and schedule all current and future get-togethers. The process of meeting up with your friends will now be simple and fun.
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| No, Zoodango is completely free to users. Zoodango offers a few paid marketing services to restaurants, bars, and venues to help them increase customer traffic and customer loyalty.
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| Yes, we have multiple privacy settings for you to choose. The default setting is private ("friends only") so that only the people connected to you will be able to view your profile. Your profile listing will show up in search results, venue pages, etc or other aggregate map views, but you will always control the level of privacy for who can actually view your page.
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| Your data belongs to you. We will never share or sell your private individual information. We will only send you email if you indicate that we may, otherwise you will never hear from us. For all the details, read our privacy policy.
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| After creating your online invitation and sending out the invites, you can make your get-together or event "public" and this will make your event searchable to everyone. You can also submit your event on our featured list to increase visibility.
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| Many of the popular, widely-used, free internet email providers have very strict spam filters that do not recognize valid email messages. Please check your junk email folder for your confirmation email to make sure it was not filtered. Once you mark emails from Zoodango as not junk email, you should receive all the relevant email messages from Zoodango.
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| Many of the popular, widely-used, free internet email providers have very strict spam filters that send valid emails to a junk folder. Please have your guest check their junk email folder to make sure it was not filtered.
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| You can make changes anytime, and your guests will automatically see the changes whenever they visit the page next.
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