Groupon founder's tour app Detour goes to Bose, needs a lot more to survive

In some respects, Detour was Just Another Walking Tour Guide App that used smart technology to try and muscle in on an already crowded marketplace.

But the company was a notable for - and, as a result, get a lot of attention - because it was created by Andrew Mason, the co-founder and ex-CEO of flash sale giant Groupon.

The smart part about Detour was that it followed the user around a location, using the phone's GPS, and shifted gears and then the content in the tour accordingly.

Tours were created for the company's hometown of San Francisco and SXSW host city Austin, with others added for New York, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, London and Marrakech.

Harsh reality

Four years on and Detour faces an extremely uncertain future.

Mason and his team found something else to do back in December last year when they launched Descript, a spin-off from the original product that is an audio editing platform for content such as podcasts.

This left Detour in limbo land, inevitably.

Until now, temporarily, with audio equipment giant Bose (perhaps best known these days for its headphone sets) taking ownership of the software and content.

Mason muses that the Detour product could eventually be part of Bose's new augmented reality platform - but there's a long way to go until then.

In the short-term, Detour is going to be made available for free until 31 May this year, rather than costing users to download each individual tour.

After that date the app will no long be available or supported at all, at least until Bose finds "a partner to host the content and make it available to customers".

Mason says confidently: "Bose expects the Detour content to re-emerge and be made available via a new partner."

During the launch interviews for Descript, Mason told Business Insider that the company had worked on "hundreds of hours of audio tours, and we would be doing voice-over sessions in our studio and noticing that it took probably twice as long to edit the sessions as it took to actually record them, and you needed a professional engineer to do that".

He admitted it was "an uphill battle" to get people to use the service and that the team knew this challenge at launch.

Here is Mason talking about Detour in 2014