Tobias Bauckhage is founder and CEO of Moviepilot, where he is responsible for company strategy, business development and sales. In 2007, along with his business partner and best friend Jon Handschin, Tobias formed Moviepilot.de, a community-driven online entertainment guide and recommendation engine, which has the largest online film community in Germany. In October 2011, they launched Moviepilot.com, a personal recommendation and discovery platform for upcoming movies and TV shows, built for the English speaking market, with a Facebook community of over four million fans.

TOBIAS'S FAVOURITE WEBSITES

Foodspotting – A great example of crowd sourced innovation at work. There are loads of restaurant recommendation services and apps out there, many of them very good for their own reasons, but Foodspotting.com drills down to the level of letting you recommend to others what your favourite items are on a particular eatery’s menu. You can take a picture of your meal, give it a recommendation and attach it to the built-in map for others to find. The flipside of course is you can browse everyone else’s choices, and never be stuck for what to eat again. Best used with the accompanying smartphone app, it’s saved me from resorting to a less than inspiring lunch on many an occasion.

Gidsy – A fellow Berlin start up, good friends of ours and a very cool service to boot. Put simply, Gidsy is a marketplace for things to do, for you and your friends. Whether it’s finding a private guide to take you around a new city or an exclusive one-night-only pop up restaurant from a top chef, the platform makes it easy to find interesting stuff to do – or if you are an event holder/service provider – makes it simple to tell the world about your unique, fabulous service. Currently catering for Berlin and New York, they plan to roll out to other cities soon. A really cool way to discover the kind of events and services you’d never normally think about.

Mubi – Being a movie service ourselves I had to get at least one cool film recommendation in! Fortunately, the wonderfully realised service provided by Mubi.com is not a direct competitor of ours, so I can shout about them guilt free. It’s an online streaming movie service for world and alternative cinema. This is Netflix for serious movie buffs, hosting an incredible array of undiscovered gems and rare masterpieces. An essential for any self confessed film nut.

Spotify – Needs no real introduction given their meteoric rise of late, but it’s amazing to think how far they’ve come since launching a little over three years ago. Quite simply the best streaming music service on the web for my money; it’s elegantly presented, boasting near faultless execution and an immediately accessible user interface. Their recent integration with Facebook will only make them more of a household name given time.

Evernote – Lots of apps and online services claim to help boost your work productivity and organise your life, but only a precious few really tick the box and earn a permanent place on your desktop. Evernote is certainly one of those; its simplicity earning it well deserved rave reviews. Evernote allows you to make short notes, ‘to do’ lists, reminders, shopping lists, recipes and whatever else you might need and sync them across which ever computers, smart phones or handheld devices you happen to own. It’s a basic premise, but it’s executed perfectly and has quickly become a near essential for me day to day.

Songkick – Track your favourite bands and find out when they’re playing next near you. Songkick even sends you alerts and reminders when tickets go on sale. I don’t have as much time to go to as many gigs as I’d like these days, but taking the arduous research element out of finding out when my favourites are playing makes things a lot easier. They also have a huge archive of concerts that have been and gone, with user submitted videos, pictures and comments; perfect for pretending you were really there after all!

24 January 2012