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Name: Moveable Feast
Quick Pitch: Arrange text, photos and videos on a map to create an immersive virtual tour.
Genius Idea: A new method of storytelling.
In 2003, Steve Schultz organized a walking tour of Manhattan's Lower East Side, narrating the history and culture of the neighborhood through its various landmarks and lesser known treasures. A little less than a decade later, and Schultz is now developing tools for you to create, share, experience — and soon, monetize — multimedia-rich walking tours all over the world.
The New York-based company is called Moveable Feast Mobile Media in tribute to the set of Ernest Hemingway memoirs by the same title. The startup has developed two apps thus far: an app for the desktop web that enables you to create visual, location-based stories, or tours, and an iPhone app [iTunes link] that allows you to experience them.
The creation tool allows you to drop pins on the Google Maps interface. At each location, you can add text, audio, photographs and video from your personal files. After you hit publish, other app users will be able to download your tour, either experiencing it on-site or remotely.
In its current, early iteration, the app's design is rather poor. It's visually unattractive, and somewhat laborious to pull up all of the multimedia elements separately at each stop point. But conceptually, we think the app has promise. I can imagine New York magazine, for instance, turning its neighborhood shopping and dining guides into Moveable Feast walking tours, or the Jane Austen Centre touring users through the scenes of the more famous scenes in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey in Bath, England. There's also potential to create something beyond tours, Schultz contends — for artists and filmmakers to tell location-based stories through multimedia, for example.
Schultz has mutliple ideas for revenue, spanning in-app purchases for premium tours (coming this month), location-based advertising along tours and premium tour-creation tools. There's also opportunities for media companies such as National Geographic to license their content so that users could create high-quality visual tours you wouldn't have to develop the material yourself. For now, the focus is on improving the existing product and bringing on content creators, as well as expanding to further platforms such as the iPad.
Try the app for yourself and let us known what you think.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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