Discover Anywhere Mobile, a mobile application developer based in Toronto, Canada, has announced support for a major extension to their mobile destination platform.
Known as Discover Anywhere Tours, the system provides visitors to a destination with pre-designed walking or driving tours loaded by the local DMO (Destination Marketing Organization).
Each tour contains check-points or points of interest that have geo-tag data, photos, and relevant details as the visitor progresses through the tour.
Tours allow users to track where they’ve visited and where they should go next by allowing the user to check-off the point of interest after they've visited.
In addition to getting information about a destination such as dining options, general tourist information, and local businesses, the Discover Anywhere Tours directly integrates lists of tours into your visitor’s travel app experience and allows the visitor to use the app as a guide for seeing the destination based on a particular theme.
Visitors can view lists of interesting tours and select which ones they wish to take. Tours consist of thematically grouped places to visit within a destination. Tours are defined by DMOs/CVBs and like all Discover Anywhere Mobile data sets, can be updated at any time — even on deployed apps.
When visitors approach nearby places in an active tour, they receive a notification allowing them to view the place and mark it as “visited”. Further actions can also be triggered, like playing an audio file, starting a video, or even sharing the trip experience on popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Discover Anywhere Tours lets visitors track the status of their tours, displaying the number of places visited, the number of places to go, the next place to visit and how far away it is. All “visited” places are marked with a checkmark so visitors can easily identify what they’ve experienced so far.
Discover Anywhere Tours takes advantage of Apple’s new iOS4 features. Visitors using Tours on iOS4 will receive “background notifications” when approaching the next place on a tour, even if another app is running. To ensure the best experience possible, tours will temporarily pause if the visitor’s iPhone is running low on power.
Here's a video clip:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ0Pi1TddEI