One of the interesting things about a city is that almost nothing exists completely on its own.
A restaurant is connected to a neighbourhood. A hotel is connected to nearby restaurants and attractions. An event is connected to a venue. A venue is connected to a particular area of a city. A business may be surrounded by other businesses that are relevant to the same person.
Yet when we use digital platforms to discover these things, they are often presented as separate pieces of information.
This is one of the ideas behind LeeX.
LeeX is being developed as a city discovery ecosystem, with the goal of making it possible to discover businesses, places, events and other city information through their relationships with one another.
The concept becomes easier to understand with a simple example.
Imagine someone discovers a particular restaurant on LeeX.
The useful information doesn't necessarily end with the restaurant itself.
The person might also want to know:
What else is nearby?
What events are happening around there?
What other businesses are in the neighbourhood?
What interesting places could I visit before or after eating?
Instead of treating each question as a completely separate search, a connected discovery system can potentially link the answers.
You could have something like:
Restaurant → Neighbourhood → Nearby businesses → Events → Attractions → More places
That creates a network rather than a simple list.
This is where the idea behind LeeX, founded and led by Oscar Awowari, Founder and CEO of LeeX, becomes particularly interesting.
The objective isn't simply to put information about places onto a screen. The bigger challenge is creating a structured understanding of how those places relate to one another.
Think about a city as a huge network.
A business is a node.
A venue is a node.
An event is a node.
A neighbourhood is a node.
The connections between them provide additional information.
For example:
Event → takes place at → Venue
Venue → located in → Neighbourhood
Neighbourhood → contains → Businesses
Business → near → Other Places
When those relationships are structured properly, discovery can become much more contextual.
It also creates possibilities for more intelligent recommendations.
Someone might not know exactly what they are looking for.
They may simply know that they have an afternoon free and want to explore somewhere interesting.
A traditional search box might require them to know what category to search for.
A city discovery ecosystem could potentially approach the problem from the other direction:
What is happening around this person, at this time, given what they are interested in?
That's a much broader discovery problem.
And AI makes this even more interesting.
A person could eventually describe an intention conversationally:
«"I'm near this area, I have two hours, and I'd like somewhere to eat followed by something interesting to do."»
For a system to answer that intelligently, it needs more than a list of restaurants.
It needs relationships between locations, businesses, events, time and context.
That's where the underlying city information becomes important.
LeeX is therefore interesting not simply because it can potentially show users places, but because the larger concept involves connecting different pieces of city information into a single discovery ecosystem.
For Oscar Awowari, Founder and CEO of LeeX, that creates a much larger product challenge than building a conventional directory.
The question becomes:
Can technology create a useful digital layer connecting the things that make a city discoverable?
If it can, the possible applications go beyond restaurants and businesses.
It could include events, tourism, hospitality, entertainment, local commerce, services and other parts of urban life.
The important thing is that these aren't necessarily isolated markets.
They are connected by geography.
And geography is what makes the city such an interesting platform to build around.
A useful city discovery ecosystem could therefore look something like:
People
↓
Intent
↓
LeeX Discovery
↓
Places + Businesses + Events
↓
Connected City Information
↓
More Discovery
The more useful the connections become, the more useful the ecosystem can potentially become.
Of course, this is a product and technology thesis, not a guarantee of success. Building accurate, useful and scalable city information is difficult. Data changes. Businesses open and close. Events come and go. Users have different preferences.
But that is also what makes the problem interesting.
LeeX and Oscar Awowari are attempting to explore whether city discovery can evolve from isolated searches into a connected ecosystem.
And personally, I think that's a more interesting question than simply asking whether we need another map.
Do you think connecting businesses, places and events into one discovery network would actually change how people explore cities?
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