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Business undergraduate Stefano Proietti has co-founded the app Alactive to give users a personalized guide to the best nightclubs in the U.K. capital.
LONDON — With almost 200 nightclubs in London, it can be a daunting task for a new arrival in the city to work out which ones will cater to their tastes.
A Northeastern University student is hoping to change all that with a new app.
Business undergraduate Stefano Proietti has co-founded the app Alactive — an abbreviation of “Always active”.
The artificial intelligence-powered app is designed to create a curated feed for users that highlights what nightclubs would likely most appeal to them based on their personal tastes.
The idea will focus on London’s nightlife but the founders plan to later incorporate other categories for going out, such as restaurant options, before expanding to other major cities.
“What we hope is that, in the future, you won’t need to spend time any more researching things to do because you will have Alactive,” Proietti said.
“It will basically show you all things you can do in a city based on your tastes. You can scroll like you do on TikTok and you’re going to find things to do in a city.
“We will start just with nightclubs but in the future, we want to expand to a lot of other categories. If you think about going out, you will think about Alactive — that is the vision.”
Proietti wants to reverse the trend of people using social media to “doom scroll” and instead use the medium to improve people’s social lives.
“There are now a lot of social media companies in the world, like Instagram and TikTok, and they’re all amazing,” he said.
“The only thing is that all these socials have the same issue in that they are getting people to stay inside their homes watching entertaining videos.
“That is great in one sense because you can choose not to go out and still enjoy your life, but, at the same time, that is a really big issue for people because it is fake. What we are planning to do is make it easier for people to go out.”
Alactive, Proietti explained, asks users a number of questions when they first sign up. That will then help its AI software to tailor the experience to individual users.
When a user discovers a nightclub or event they would like to try, they will have the ability to book tickets via the app, Proietti added.
Users can sign-up to Alactive by visiting the app’s website and registering to download the beta iOS version, which is available on iPhones and other Apple devices.
The startup project has been a labor of love for Proietti, who is in his second year of study with Northeastern in London, dedicating much of the past 15 months to creating and publicizing the concept behind the app.
The Italian built it with the assistance of four partners and has had the support of Northeastern staff based at the school’s London startup hub.
Proietti said he hopes the app can enable students who are new to London to make the most of the array of options that the U.K. capital’s nightlife has to offer.
“I really would like to help students,” he said. “When I moved to London from Rome, I didn’t know what was going on in the city, so I ended up going to the same pub every day because that is where the people who I knew were going.
“I eventually started experiencing more places, but I could have discovered them much earlier.
“And even when I did find places to go, for example a nightclub in Mayfair, it was really hard to book. But with Alactive, you won’t have that problem because we will be introducing users to all the nightclubs in Mayfair. That is how we can help students — we are simplifying their lives.”