TLabs Showcase - Tour Wrist

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring Tampa, USA-based iOS app Tour Wrist.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

TourWrist is developed by SPARK LABS. SPARK, founded eight years ago, is a nationally–recognized leader in integrated marketing and branding. With combined team experience stretching to countless national brands (Nike, Herman Miller, Firestone, etc.), our team knows the importance of a well–organized and managed identity.

Under the SPARK umbrella, we’ve reinvented HSN, boosted Florida’s tourism industry (Visit Florida), and introduced the world to a new supermarket brand (Sweetbay).

During the first five years of this period, we also took stock of a widely unmet need: user–centric product development. Thus, three years ago, we introduced a sister agency dedicated to this.

SPARK LABS is an application development company with an appetite for the new and innovative. From the LABS side, we’ve accomplished many things others considered impossible. From web to mobile apps (and even including a few tangible products), our greatest value lies in our ability to optimize business, technical and creative objectives in balanced products that put the consumer first.

As CEO of SPARK LABS, Charles Armstrong balances creative vision, cutting-edge technical expertise, and strategic business insight. From national award-winning website projects to revolutionary, new product IP, his is a proven record of groundbreaking concepts and successful implementations.

In recent history, Charles has overseen the launch of Tour Wrist, a powerful, new mobile platform which allows users to view and share locations in immersive 3D.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Tour Wrist development has been entirely financed through revenue from SPARK LABS client projects.

What problem are you trying to solve?

To better engage people in search of remote places. To provide a better user experience, and to leverage undervalued new technologies.

Describe the business, core products and services?

At its core, Tour Wrist is a location search engine. By allowing users to search for places via geography, keywords, and popularity, it’s our intent to make the world remotely accessible in tactile, engaging new ways. Presently, Tour Wrist offers a remote viewing app available for all iOS devices.

Soon, this will be supported by Tour Wrist Capture, a recording app that allows anyone with an iPhone 4 or iPod Touch 4 to capture and share their surroundings as virtual tours on the platform.

Furthermore, Tour Wrist Manager is on the way, offering a powerful toolset for content providers with large libraries of listings. This product will allow for batch tour creation, interactive hotspot annotations, property detail updates, and much more.

For a quick overview of the TourWrist App, watch this video:

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Still in its infant stage, Tour Wrist has seen incredible adoption from the panoramic photography industry, which is helping fuel end-user adoption. As our content base continues to grow, we expect our value proposition to increase equally, further supporting a “search anywhere” approach to discovery.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Our product has seen the interest of multiple Fortune 100 companies and large government organisations, which has certainly added credibility to our claims. No outside capital has been solicited.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Many entities stand to gain from better connections between people and places. Whether from CVBs, hospitality companies, property owners, travel companies, or the photographers documenting them, we’re at the forefront of what we believe to be a very fruitful new industry.

Specifically, we have the following programs in place to monetize this marketplace:

Photography service commissions
Capture application sales
Tour Wrist SDK (engine) licensing
Private labeling
Hotel booking commissions
Contextual advertising

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

At risk of sharing too much about our company, we’d prefer not respond in great detail. Broadly however, we’ve identified the following:

Strengths:

Unique, valuable, timely

Weaknesses:

Heavily reliant upon content

Opportunities:

Further means of engaging and empowering users in search of inaccessible places

Threats:

New market entrants

Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?

Many people suggested that our viewing experience was not possible on non–gyro devices. After a year of development, we proved many people to be wrong.

What is your success metric 12 months from now

150,000 tours, 150,000 users.