Blue Lion Guides

Antonio Ca’Zorzi, historien de formation, créateur du site Blue Lion – Mobile Tours, guides touristiques pour visites thématiques.  De quelle manière vous est venue l’idée de créer des applications touristiques ? Pouvez-vous nous parler plus particulièrement de votre projet d’application pour Paris : comment est né ce projet ? Depuis combien de temps y travaillez-vous ? Je ne suis pas un technologue mais j’ai toujours été intéressé par l’usage de la  technologie dans notre vie quotidienne. Les nombreux projets que j'ai financés et suivis lorsque j'étais responsable des programmes de technologie pour les PME en Amérique Latine, m’ont permis d’être en lien avec la technologie et de savoir ce qui fonctionnait ou ne fonctionnait pas dans ce domaine. Quand je suis arrivé à Paris en 2008, ma première envie était de faire une promenade sur la Révolution Française. En cherchant sur Amazon ou dans les commerces, j’ai été déçu de ne rien t...

In any tourism guide and other content-centric apps one of the most important tools is the table of contents, yes the old stubborn table of contents you usually find on old tech paper books.... Why is it so important? In the case of touring guides like the ones we are preparing and hopefully bring to you soon, tables of content are the actual way for the user to find his path on an itinerary. And the better the table the better the experience of his visit. Figure 1 So, how does a table of contents look like? Let us start with the traditional book-style table. The table will have different levels of content and can be quite structured like in the example shown in figure 1. The table allows the reader to quickly find his/her way through the content of your book or guide and, thanks to the page number, to find the content she wants to read. The approach on an app will be different, especially if the app needs to work on smaller screen estates, like an iPhone or an Android w...

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...

Background Do you want images or not on a tourism guide? I remember when I was younger that my preferred guides (for a while) were the classical Touring Club guides published by the Italian Touring Club. I even traveled with one on my back-pack when I made a 1800 km solo tour of Sicily in ... hem 1976. The guide, an edition from 1930s!, was very useful and with the maps for most of the cities it helped me a lot to get around. I didn't need any hotel or restaurant suggestions: my budget was 200.000 lira (approximately 1,000 euros today) for 2 months travel including train transfers from Naples to Messina and, on the way back, from Reggio Calabria to Rome. So any hotel was out of reach. The only time I spent something to stay overnight was in Palermo, where I stayed in a camping. And I lived with sandwiches and fruit. The absolute lack of hotel and restaurant information of these guides didn't bother me at all. The other aspect of these guides was that they didn't have im...

When we started the Blue Lion project we looked at what other companies had done so far to deploy tourism services and content on mobile phones. We were struck by how many features were built in some of the mobile guides. We will review some of these features in a series of articles. Today we look at audio reading. Providing audio to visitors is somehow essential: the smart phones or tablets are portable devices, just like audio guides in museums. You definitely do not want to read the text while looking at a painting (or monument). So, audio is a necessity, especially when you have a good quality content that is long enough to explain things thoroughly. If your text is just a paragraph or two you should not embark audio in your solution. Natural voices Now, how to provide audio? The best would be to offer natural voice, which implies having real people (hired or not) reading the text. While the results are definitely the best you can get, there are some drawbacks: unless you r...

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...