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Zimoro is a smart, location aware retail marketing platform for web and mobile. Think of it as your personal, custom tailored lifestyle and shopping magazine. Zimoro uses proprietary technology to keep you informed on the latest promotions, offers, news, and events of your favorite brands and nearby stores. The company was founded by Egyptian entrepreneurs Mohamed Samy and Ahmed Al-Husseiny.

Using the platform is fairly simple. On the main page, you’ll find two tabs at the top next to the Home button. Interests, which categorizes brands based on the type of products and services they offer, seven categories in total: culture and nightlife, vehicles and motorcycles, fashion and clothing, electronics, restaurants and cafés, hotel and travel, and health and beauty, each with corresponding sub categories as well. The Nearby tab, as the name suggests, highlights all brands in your vicinity, provided that they have posted ads on the platform. The latter is done in a map view. The first time you hit the Nearby button, you will be asked to give Zimoro access to your location.

The main page also features highlighted ads preceded by a larger featured section that displays video. Clicking on an ad will show you the latest news from the advertiser. That can be either a product launch, a store opening, a new collection announcements, special offers and promotions, etc.

The idea for Zimoro originated when the founders realized that there didn’t exist any dedicated platform for brands to communicate with clients. Instead, both people and brands resort to generic social platforms to fulfil this need. “It’s always interesting to find a need and solve it with technology,” explained Mohamed. So what Zimoro really does is that it isolates and perfects that function, then weaves it back into your social streams. In other words, you can still share any interesting bit of news or offer on any of your social accounts, Twitter, Facebook, and the like using the built in sharing feature, only this time you won’t have to deal with the clutter that these same brands tend to produce on your feeds. What’s more, it’s location aware, which means that information is treated in a smart way. First, you’ll only be notified of events within reach, secondly, brands can also choose to tailor news broadcasting and offers differently for different locations.

Zimoro also borrows from traditional social networks. You can follow brands for instance, which is how you pick the brands you want to keep track of and receive notifications based on their offers and news. Notifications pop up right on the website, if and while the user is navigating Zimoro, and are shared via email as well. For mobile, news is delivered through push notifications, a tiny blue encircled Z that shows up in the top bar. Additionally, you can bookmark an ad, or add it to your Zbook, for later reference. The platform also includes a comment section where you can share your thoughts and converse with other users.

Mohamed was also keen to highlight Zimoro works as a “two way communication platform” as well. The service is able to generate valuable feedback and analytics from its wealth of users and channel it back to businesses to measure and improve their offers, products and services. Inherently, the platform is a natural fit for loyalty and rewards programs.

In six months, Zimoro saw more than 6000 downloads for its app, and over 20000 users overall. More so, the company had attracted the interest of a Luxembourg based investment company which acquired the service for $250K. The interest in location aware technology is high in Europe explains Mohamed, and that is where the focus will be looking forward concerning the platform that they're developed. The team will help the investors operate the technology for a while and take it to the next level, specifically build on the loyalty aspect. Unfortunately this means that Zimoro will cease to be in the near future. The platform will shut down sometime in April or May. But Mohamed and Ahmed are hard at work on a new and exciting project, but that’s a whole different story, coming to you sometime next week. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, if you are curious about the service, you can still pay your last respects either on the web or on mobile, for a short while.

Zimoro  is one of six startups currently being incubated by AUC’s Venture Lab. We already reviewed El Shahbander, Mubser, and Alkottab, and will be featuring the remaining three on our blog in the coming weeks.