Adrienne Meisels has been a software developer, international corporate attorney and a technology deal negotiator.
Her passion is digital innovation. While working at AOL, she lead the company’s innovation team, which was tasked with creating large profit-generating digital businesses in nascent spaces like location-based services.
Today, she’s founded and leading a company called myPlanit that makes use of an individual’s personal data in a mobile app.
Meisels will take the stage during Inman Connect New York, January 17 through 20, for her general session talk, “The Internet of You and What it Means for the Future of Technology.”
We caught up with Adrienne to tell us more about her company and now the innovations she’s working on can help those in the real estate industry.
Tell us about myPlanit and how you started the company.
In addition to working on location-based services, for years I have been studying how the brain works — it’s always been a fascination for me, but I didn’t realize how helpful it would be with the development of myPlanit.
With myPlanit, I’ve been able to merge these two passion areas to create a mobile app and personal data platform that takes location services to the next level by adding the dimension of time: past, present and future.
In addition, the mobile app organizes, connects and allows you to search your personal data (which is currently scattered across various apps) in a way that mimics how your brain works.
Today in technology, all of search is word-based. Yet most of us can’t remember names!
For example, the name of that cafe you went to last fall in Soho, that prospective client you met at SxSW or that bottle of wine you had with your spouse in Maine.
Instead, we remember “context” … where we were or when it was.
So we’ve built our app to allow you to search for your information without words, based on how your brain works. With the app, you can use our timeline to home in on a time range or our map to zero in on an area so you can now find what you can’t remember and discover what you need to know.
It is the world’s first “visual search” of your life.
How can what you are doing at your company help individuals and those in the real estate industry do their jobs better?
We’re very excited about how myPlanit helps busy people manage their lives better.
MyPlanit was built on the notion that the smartphone is becoming more and more central to our lives. To say most of us can’t live without our smartphones is no understatement.
The challenge is using and making sense of all our information when it is dispersed across a multitude of apps.
It’s impossible for us to see the full picture of our lives, and we have to jump from app to app to find and then use our various, disconnected information. MyPlanit solves this problem by combining your personal data (your contacts, photos, calendar, places and more) into a single interface where you can search across it all in different ways — by location, date or text — and then take action on what you found, without ever leaving the app to go to another one.
In addition, myPlanit acts as your own personal time machine, automatically journaling the places you’ve been and mapping where you’re going so you can recall your past and see into your future. We’ve created a solution that allows your data to work for you.
For those in real estate, there’s not a single mobile application today that supports agents while they’re out in the field…and yet great agents spend most of their time out in the field seeing people and places.
After interviewing agents across the continent, we found that almost 100 percent of them are using either notebooks, Microsoft Word or Excel to track and manage what they see, do and experience in the field, resulting in a loss of time, productivity — and, ultimately, revenue.
The myPlanit app for real estate agents connects an agent’s clients, places, photos, notes, appointments and listing info into an all-in-one service that acts like a virtual assistant, helping them save time and money, close deals more effectively and uniquely position themselves to be the neighborhood expert for their clients.
The app automatically records every home they visited and automatically connects their personal photos and notes to the listing info. It allows agents to see which homes they showed to which clients and which clients they showed which home, all of which can be seen and searched based on time and location.
Agents also can seamlessly share showing appointments for the day, their notes and photos of homes visited, and lists of places nearby (supermarkets, schools, restaurants and so on) with clients and team members. All this information is displayed on a map showing where they’ve been and where they’re going next.
When people hear the term big data they may not understand how it can affect their lives. What do you think big data will mean or be able to do in the future?
When people think about “big data,” I think they think that it’s about data used by companies to understand their customers and businesses better, and therefore, it’s not relevant to them as individuals.
What they don’t realize is that “little data” makes up big data, and that little data is all about them.
The amount of data each of us is creating is exploding to epic proportions, but the biggest problem is that it’s currently all stored in separate applications and devices that do not talk to each other. What’s missing in this new era of “little data,” also called “personal big data,” is an intelligent layer that connects the data from all your disparate apps, unifies it and enables the ability for apps to now communicate with each other so that they can plan with each other, on your behalf and at your discretion — ultimately giving you control over your data, so that you, and not just the corporations, get maximum value out of your digital treasure trove.
This is where myPlanit comes in. We are pioneering in this intelligent layer, which we call the “Internet of You,” by contextualizing all your data into a standardized, shareable unit of information so that separate applications can talk to each other.