GeoTour for iPhone, iPod Touch, & iPad turns your device into a personal digital tour guide. It’s free at the App Store.
For each location, you can add any combination of audio, image, video or text descriptions using media files that you’ve uploaded to your GeoTour media storage.
When the GeoTourist is close to any point of interest on the tour they are experiencing, the app automatically triggers the multimedia content for that point of interest.
GeoTours can be downloaded to a variety devices including Garmin and TomTom GPS devices, smartphones and PDAs.
Simply search for and download a tour to your device, then watch as your device teaches you about your surroundings. Along the way, you can map, get directions, and view the multimedia (video, audio, image, and text) associated with each location.
Using their web-based GeoTour editor, you can add locations to each tour by entering the location’s address, specifying latitude and longitude coordinates, or by choosing the location on a map.
Other location-based apps and developments include:
- Broadcastr collects audio clips from various sources and pin them to physical locations, so people can be fed stories, audio tour guides and historical clips that are relevant to their physical locations. Playlists can also be formed based on subject matter or source. The start-up’s founders see the project as a tool for citizen journalism and oral history as well as entertainment.
- Audio-sharing start-ups include, SoundCloud, and London-based companies Audioboo and Said.fm which allow users to share short audio clips, and navigate online audio files.
- For the Christchurch earthquake, EQNZ.co.nz has a running feed from Twitter and Geonet, as well as photos and a blog. This site has graphs of earthquake data from Geonet.
WindowSeat a new, offline, in-flight map for air travelers in the continental U.S. It’s an in-flight map in the palm of your hands. You can track your flight, recalculate your remaining flight time, and learn about landmarks you’re flying over. It works without GPS or wi-fi, and predicts the location of all commercial flights in the continental U.S. based on historical flight path data.
- Google’s Hotpot is new way for you and your friends to share recommendations on bars, restaurants, hotels in order to get personalized Google search results. It can work in conjunction with NFC embedded posters.
- In Shakespeare’s London, you get a virtual walking tour through Shakespeare’s London. Creator Victor Keegan says today many of the popular venues of Shakespeare’s time no longer exist, and there is rarely any sort of plaque or landmark.
- The Red Hat Map Hack in Portland last weekend enabled participants to design, hack and field test locally focused civic geo mobile applications. Anyone at any skill level can come learn how to make mobile apps. They were up all night designing and coding, then field testing the apps. Don Park was there, as were other Portland luminaries.
- GitHub is more than just a place to share code. It’s a place to keep tabs on your favorite developers and projects, easily contribute fixes and new features, and visualize what’s going on inside your codebase.
- Adam DuVander explains how to use Open Geo Stacks for the web. His book, Map Scripting 101 explains it all.
Open Geo Stacks for the WebView more presentations from duvander
The NY Times has a guide to mobile apps as does App Scout and Free Apps.
