Founded in 2008 by Rahul Sonnad, Geodelic has secured $3.5 million in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, where the company was incubated, and Shasta Ventures. Sonnad's previous company, thePlatform, acquired by Comcast in 2006, services the majority of large video publishers on broadband and wireless platforms.

Created by Geodelic, in partnership with T-Mobile, Sherpa is a local discovery application that learns a user's favorite types of locations and preferences over time.

The more it's used, the more it customizes itself to the user's taste, learning their likes and dislikes so it can prioritize recommended and relevant local retailers, restaurants and attractions. By combining a user's location and interests, with other contextual information such as time of day, Sherpa aggregates and presents contextually relevant, location-based information about the "real world" that surrounds a user at any moment.

"Any local search application can find the nearest video store or Chinese restaurant, but Geodelic's approach is to go beyond this and give you the information you want while you're at these locations - movie reviews, menus or promotional information all while you're in the store," added Sonnad.

"Our partnership with T-Mobile is the first step toward taking local discovery to the next level."

"The amazing thing about Sherpa is that it learns your favorite types of locations and preferences over time and the more you use it, the better it knows you," said Saj Sahay, director of product innovation, T-Mobile USA. "myTouch is all about putting you at the center of the device experience and Sherpa is a shining example of this true, powerful personalization."

Sherpa uses a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation) that automatically learns a user's favorite locations and lifestyle behavior. If a user eats out more than they shop, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores. So no matter where a person goes, whether they are traveling or exploring their neighborhood, Sherpa prioritizes recommended locations and presents them to users.

Just as a browser allows Internet users to surf the web, the Geodelic application serves as a "geobrowser" for users allowing them to browse the "real world" through an interface optimized for a mobile experience.

Geodelic's advanced technology searches the web, gathering the best public and proprietary information from sites like Yelp!, MenuPages, City Search, and a large number of specialized sources to supply the most complete content based on users' location and interests. The application's learning capability allows it to then automatically organize a user's environment by what is most important to them.

In addition to delivering customized content to consumers, Geodelic's application also offers business owners a means to communicate with patrons who are at their location. Geodelic provides a unique experience for navigating both the physical nature and informational content of their business.

"The incredible adoption rate of smartphones and advancements in GPS and location technology, combined with a plethora of location-specific information, is helping to create a new type of web - the 'Global Mobile Web.'

This new medium will not only change the way we create, access and navigate information, but allow smartphone users discover what is happening in the world around them without needing to search," said Sonnad.

While many businesses are scaling back due to the economy, Geodelic has expanded from six to over twenty staff members in the last six months, with top technical talent from Silicon Valley and Seattle, including Chief Technology Officer Dr. Keith Dutton, former Chief Scientist at Shopzilla; Client Architect Billy Woody, formerly with Yahoo! mobile's advertising group; and Creative Director and Product Designer Ken Ng, who after a long tenure at Disney was the first employee at Jamdat.

Geodelic will offer Sherpa on the Android market this summer. Similar applications that support advanced location technologies and a rich mobile browsing experience will be available later this year for other devices and platforms.

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