Voice Tours
May 9th, 2008 by some dudeDamn, they’re getting closer to stealing my idea. “They” is anyone else that knows how to program something. Here’s my idea…
You know those self-guided tours—like Alcatraz—where you carry around a little electroic doohicky, walk around, and it tells you about whatever you’re standing in front of?
If you replace the doohicky with a phone, you could listen to stories anywhere. Now that phones either have GPS or can geolocate (triangulation), knowing where you are is no problem. The “tours” could be produced by anyone. Anyone could upload a story or series of stories online, or by calling in to their account. If you call from the location you’re talking about, it could automatically mark the location, since your phone knows where you are.
“This pizza place is awesome after the bars. I’m wasted. By the way if you need to pee…I found this great secluded alley, behind the yellow trash can you can see from the corner.” The stories could be a little more compelling than that, obviously. It could even be categorized for more touristy stuff vs. every day stuff, by organization, or by topic… You could filter only points of interest left by some historical society, for example.
If you want to go on a walk about through the city, you could open the app on your phone and whenever you’re close to someone’s story/point of interest it would start playing their recording automatically.
So anyway, I just saw this thing called Geograffiti today that does something similar to my idea…or at least half of it. And I thought of this like 2 years ago. Seriously, I need to learn how to program, or find people that’ll work for me for free.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:41 am
A.J., the people who get rich are the ones who have those ideas, and then get on the stick and actually figure out how to implement them. And like you say, usually that means finding somebody else who actually has the knowledge to do it, and getting them to do it for you. You’ve always had a lot of good ideas, so next time, get organized. I’m getting closer to retirement, and it would be nice to have a rich kid to take care of me and Mom….
Dad
May 14th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Hey AJ– Happened to read your post, and also happened to read this article: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080512/android_c…
It’s about a student competition at MIT to create interesting cell phone applications. At the bottom of the article they talk about one called Snap. Check it.