BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tagwhat, the mobile tour guide for the world, today announced the launch of the Tagwhat Superslider and Travel Log. With the Tagwhat Superslider, the multimedia stories Tagwhat currently provides to your smartphone about the places around you will be supplemented with real-time feeds from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare related to those places, making you a local expert whether you’re traveling overseas or walking down the street in your hometown. The Tagwhat Travel Log will enable you to plan a trip and create a unique itinerary by unlocking relevant web and social media content about your destination, as well as craft a personal travel journal of the places you have been from multimedia stories about those places.
“People are curious about the world around them, especially when they visit new places,” said Dave Elchoness, founder and CEO of Tagwhat. “While you can’t always hire a tour guide to share the hidden stories on your journey, we believe you can do even better. The Tagwhat app now draws upon and organizes the endless amount of content locked away inside the web and social networks to provide you with the ultimate tour guide… always available, incredibly knowledgeable, catered to your interests, and free.”
The Superslider: Multiple Real-time Feeds About Where You Are, in One Click
When users currently open Tagwhat, they immediately see a gallery of visual “Tags” with multimedia stories about the places in their immediate vicinity. For example, a sports fan passing AT&T Park in San Francisco sees stories and photos about the San Francisco Giants pitcher Brian Wilson’s infamous beard and Barry Bonds’ home run record chase, as well as video clips of Giants legends Willie Mays and Gaylord Perry. Now, with the Tagwhat Superslider, a new bar that appears at the bottom of each Tag, users will see the website for the San Francisco Giants, the Facebook page for AT&T Park, Foursquare tips for the stadium and the most recent tweets about AT&T Park.
“With the Superslider, Tagwhat becomes the only app to display relevant web and social media content based on your location and interests,” said Elchoness. “It provides mobile users unprecedented access to live streams uniquely related to the places around them.”
The Superslider works by analyzing the content in a Tag after it is opened by a user. It instantly and intelligently queries the web and social networks for related, real-time content. Powered by a set of proprietary algorithms that automatically “geo-tag,” Tagwhat attaches a latitude and longitude to related third party feeds. The multi-tiered algorithms cross-reference numerous siloed feeds, extracting pertinent pieces of content referencing location. By analyzing the content in the Tagwhat Tag, the algorithms perform the difficult task of identifying feeds that are valuable at, but typically considered unrelated to, the location.
“Many apps can flood you with a sea of photos, tweets, and status updates, but to what end?” said Elchoness. “Like a helpful tour guide, Tagwhat takes into account your interests and location to provide you a valuable, personal experience each time. While the initial focus of the Superslider is on web and social network content, there is no limit to the third party apps and content that can be delivered. Imagine being able to add a ‘Dirty Harry’ film to your Netflix queue as you walk past a famous Clint Eastwood scene filmed in San Francisco.”
Plan and Remember Your Trips Like Never Before
With the new Travel Log features, users can now view the Tags of any location on Earth to construct a must-see itinerary for future trips. By entering the hotel, meeting location or city where they will be, users see Tags with interesting stories about the area, as well as live maps, phone numbers and other travel details. Tapping the “Want to Go” button on a favorite place will save it to a personal Travel Log that provides a custom tour itinerary.
While on a trip, users can now tap the “Been There” button to create a log of the interesting places they have been with the Tagwhat Tags attached. Each Tag immediately becomes part of a media-rich travel journal filled with the stories, videos and photos of places visited. Trying to remember what that fantastic sculpture you saw was? Open the Travel Log to experience the whole story again, watch the video interview with the artist, and then share it with friends and family. Tagwhat even keeps a running counter of how many places, cities, and countries a user has visited.
About Tagwhat
Tagwhat is the mobile tour guide for the world. Using your mobile device’s built-in location sensors, Tagwhat delivers the web and social networking content about the places around you, wherever you are. By associating the vast amount of digital multimedia content with its relevant real-world location, Tagwhat is pioneering a new way of organizing information by using the powerful context of location and interests. Walk by a statue in Rome and Tagwhat delivers an article on the artist’s inspiration, a short historical video about the Italian Renaissance, and the local historical society’s Facebook page. Tagwhat is available for iOS and Android.