Blue Lion Guides

Au Forum d'Avignon la société Bain & Company à présenté une étude intéressante, Terminaux et services connectés , concernant les modes de "consommation" des produits culturels aujourd'hui. C'est une évidence aujourd'hui : nous sommes de plus en plus connectés, que se soit par l'ordinateur, la tablette ou le smartphone. Tout ceci change notre relation au monde, redéfini nos rapports humains et a un impact sur nos activités en général. Tant qu'on ne perd pas l'humain... Inévitablement le numérique affecte aussi l'art et la culture. Régulièrement au cours de l'histoire le domaine culturel s'est approprié les nouveaux instruments et méthodes de production, avant d'être à son tour influencés par ces derniers. Un des plus importants théoricien de l'époque moderne sur ce sujet était Walter Benjamin, dont le célèbre ouvrage L’œuvre d'art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique (1935) fut publié de manière posthume e...

mTrip is a Canadian firm based in Montreal, established in 2009. Since its inception the company has focused on developing travel guides for mobile phone, obviously smartphones. The company developed almost 30 guides translated in seven languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese). Over half of the guides refer to European cities. The guides are sold at 4.99€. According to an article published by Techcrunch France in Mai, the mTrip guides had been downloaded 800.000 times since July 2010. We reviewed version 1.5 of the mTrip app on the iPhone 4. Design and ergonomics Overall design and ergonomics of mTrip is excellent. The visual organization of functionalities, the use of colors, the placement of buttons, etc. are in general well done so much that the user is able to learn how to make use of this quite complex app. All technological marvels are in place.

Pocket Guide, a Hungarian company, offers a fresh approach to mobile city guides. The guides cover about 20 European cities with 150 tours. According to the company's web site the texts are written by professional guides and tested by their own employees. Pocket Guide claims about 50,000 monthly downloads (not clear whether these include also the free versions of the app). The guides are available on several platforms: iOS, Android and Nokia's OVI. The guides cost €2.39 per tour or €4.99 per city bundle (which include, depending on the city, from three to twelve tours). Previously the tours were offered at higher prices. We downloaded a few of their guides and share our first impressions based on the iPhone app (version 4.0). Design The design guides is straight and colorful: the guides project an image that may be entice the young and technologically curious users. An introductory screen is simple and presents the app language choice (limited to English and Hungarian).

Tripwolf, a company based in Vienna (Austria), offers a wide range of city guides (over 100) for the iPhone and, more recently, also for Android smartphones. I downloaded a few of them, both free and premium (4.99$ or €3.99) and here are my impressions. The company claims more than 400.000 downloads since the launch of the iPhone app (June 2011). Design Flush design of the App. Screens are well organized and are completed with large photos. Each city has its own "cover page" with a representative image and access to its content. The navigation bar includes only five (quite large) icons, with the search function (leading to a list of available guides), the "My Guides" button with the TripWolf icon, a GPS-based geolocalization service, online/offline status and a "More" button. The points below the image show the number of guides that the user has downloaded so far and are directly available with lateral scrolling of the cover page.

I stumbled upon a few web sites that offer touring services historical cities by joining the offer by local guides, agencies and privates. One site, www.getyourguide.com , based in Switzerland, has an on-line booking and payment system and definitely has a quite substantial offer: there are more than 700 tours offered in Italy (nearly 200 in Rome alone). In Europe, Italy has by far the largest offer on the site. Spain, Germany and France offer around 300 tours, followed by the United Kingdom, Turkey, Portugal, Austria and Greece. The biggest offer comes from the USA with more than 900 tours offered. Pricing varies depending on the offer but tends to be relatively aligned: for a 3 hours in the Vatican Museums and Church the cost per person is around 30 to 40 euros (tickets not included). The site is organized like any travel booking site with as much services and content available on the home page, but it is still easy to find your way. The upper part of the site is occu...