Street guides meet the evolving Local, Location aware space

Posted: July 29th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Uncategorized |

The proliferation of Smartphones changes the dynamics of what content strategies to pursue for publishers. It also gives publishers of niche content especially that type that can be viewed as locally based a major opportunity to make themselves much more relevant and compelling.
For example, Jittr as part of it’s own portfolio of products is currently developing a smartphone application (iphone as the first targeted platform) that is niche as to locale (New York City) and niche as to domain (Street Art).

Though I would not take the leap and state that New York City invented Street Art, I would say it is major center of the art form today though the illegal variety in recent decades in the form of Graffiti on public and private property has seen a decline because of strong Police and Judicial efforts to make easier to be caught and more costly if you are.

The gist of our UrbanArt mobile application is to provide followers of the street art form a simple application that provides the most basic elements of content surrounding urban art such as where it is located as well as photo images in the form of photo galleries .
Of course, what Mobile Application with a bent for local would be complete without the ability to checkin to the location of the art work itself. Foursquare to the rescue because of it’s open API and it’s allowance of creating “venue” or “location” records on the fly as long as a Latitude and Longitude record is available.

Since all of the locations and art photos are location aware in the sense they have distinctive latitude and longitude associated with them and coupled with the location awareness of the mobile device the ability to craft walking tours based on proximity becomes an easily achievable result based on the existing APIs on both the iPhone and Android powered handsets.

Photo Galleries tied to Location, Location Services such as Checkins, geography centric activities such as walking tours based on your current locale; sounds similar to your typical Web Mashup of the past few years and technically speaking, it is save for the fact the presumed medium for consumption is a device we carry with us religiously and the application is intended to be experienced when out and about and not vegetating and sedentary.

So how does one make money on this? Or is this solely an ego satisfying effort to serve a niche market with something they would find compelling?

On the one hand, everything described so far can be found strewn throughout the web so if one does their research most of the core information is obtainable. The question becomes what if anything would a follower of this art form need to be induced to put out 99 cents or something insignificant for an enhanced version of the mobile application?

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