Cell Phone Tours

AJ Kim points to a very interesting intersection between old school technology and new school thinking. The new company/service, called Talking Street, provides history and content rich tours of different locales. The kicker is that these services are obtained by dialing into a central service and punching in the appropriate location id to retrieve the audio snippet. As the original article notes:

What's particularly remarkable about the effort is the company's unique funding strategy: get funded by the people hoping to share their content, rather than by a technology developer. In this case, founder Miles Kronby offered his fledgling application to a Jewish philanthropy: as a model for a walking tour of the Jewish history of the Lower East Side. He signed on American Jewish comedian Jerry Stiller, and got a grant to develop the technology.

And it works. Hundreds of tourists and residents of New York have already spent many hours on the same streets trod by early immigrants to New York City and learning about the weddings, labor protests and commerce that took place there a hundred years ago. With the Lower East Side tour serving as ample proof of concept, Talking Street is about to release new walking tours — one of the Ground Zero area in New York, one of the Mall in Washington, DC, and another of Boston, “City of Rebels and Dreamers.”

Source: TheFeature, "These Streets Were Made For Walking"

The CEO notes that though the technology is not new, the most difficult aspect of the deployment was the selection of content. Most areas have any number of stories to tell which makes selecting the most representative 2 minute segment is truly a balancing act.

Looking forward, the company has some ambitious plans, but a sound strategy. New versions may include other media formats like photos or even videos.