Ulocal is an app that gives you practical advice for cities all over the world, provided directly by the people who live there. Its creators, Edoardo Centioni and Elia Fornari, are two 21-year-old students in the degree program in Economics and Business. The goal of the app is to better meet the needs of young travelers, so that “when you travel, you experience each city as if you’ve lived there all your life.”
Friends since early childhood, Edoardo and Elia ended up being classmates in Rome and spent a year studying abroad in Holland, thanks to LUISS’s partnership with the Utrecht School of Economics (USE). It was during this experience abroad that they came up with the idea for Ulocal: “We realized that, whether people are traveling for business or pleasure, it is often difficult for them to find out what is around them and to discover all the possibilities that a new city has to offer. This is how we came up with the idea of creating a community where travelers could contact ilocals easily and for free, to get informal and honest information about a city through chat or telephone calls. After all, who knows a city better than someone who lives there?”
If it is true that nobody knows a city better than someone who lives there, then it is also true that it is not that easy to get information from the locals. There’s the issue of language, there’s not knowing who will give you the best advice, there’s the possibility that the information is biased. But above all – as Edoardo and Elia stressed – “there are no quick and easy ways of communicating that information.” On Ulocal, however, which is structured like a social network where each person can create their own “local expert” profile, where they can promote their favorite places in the city and get feedback on the recommendations given, “just enter the city you’re interested in and the category – fun, food, or culture – and a list of people ready to give you recommendations will appear.” In addition, an added value of the app is the possibility of writing and calling the community’s users for free.
It has only been around a few months, but Ulocal can already be downloaded from the biggest online stores and boasts a large number of registered users. At the moment the main challenge for Edoardo and Elia is to provide adequate coverage of all major cities: “Promoting a new app requires time and effort, especially if you have a limited budget.” For this reason, the two young designers continue to travel and look for stimuli and experiences like the ones that gave them the idea for the application. “This is another reason why we want to thank LUISS – for the opportunities it has offered us. It’s a university that has given us access to a circle where a lot of attention is given to innovation and enterprise.”
