Sumazi, A Connection Recommendation Engine

Sumazi’s whole schtick is to make relevant introductions, positioning itself as “recommendation engine for professionals that introduces connects you to the people you don’t know but should.” Sharing the same introductions space as Hashable, Sumazi has the very ambitious goal of being the world’s ultimate super connector.

While we were demoing, founder Sumaya Kazi brought up the example of being able to meet a good UX designer through the Sumazi network by signing up for a “Need.” Kazi promises that with just a few clicks of a button Sumazi can help you meet anyone with the skill sets you’re looking for, helping you extend your number of average meaningful connections per year from four to a lot more.

The iPhone app leverages the contacts you already have, and doesn’t need the end user to sign up for Sumazi. It won’t even spam them afterwards.

Sumazi’s plans for services beyond the iPhone introduction app is to build what founder Sumaya Kazi calls “Visual Career Roadmaps” of successful people in industries such as finance, communications and technology as well as university networks.

These “Visual Roadmaps” are interactive, allowing users to click into any part of to see other roadmaps/networks that are similar, like if somebody went to Berkeley, worked at Accenture, was a good marketing manager, etc. Ideally this leads to advertising and contextual job opportunities.

While the Sumazi “Visual Roadmap” web service is now live, the app will soon be in the store.

Q&A:

AN: How will this compete with offerings from LinkedIn?

Sumazi: No one uses the Linkedin suggested user list, we offer a different way of making connections.

EW: Social graphs are asymetrical. You have to build out your social graph; how will you attract people who are already using LinkedIn.

Sumazi: We’re not trying to compete with these existing networks; we are trying to leverage then. You can also use our mobile apps, which leverage your contacts,

MT: How are you dealing with the time-bound messages in the stream?

Sumazi: Needs are changing-when someone helps you, you can close the needs.

C: What is the end goal?

Sumazi: An intelligent recommendations engine.

C: What about a feature?

Sumazi: With the iPhone app, I can tap four names of people that I trust, i can get recommendations, leverage the network as soon as possible.