Locacious FAQ
What is Locacious?
Locacious is an iPhone app that allows users to create, distribute, discover and enjoy audio walking tours worldwide.
What's special about Locacious?
Walking tours are a great way to explore, and having guides from all over the world accompany you and offering their perspective can enrich both real and virtual travel. But Locacious is a two-way street, giving you the ability to create your own tours. So you can easily share your knowledge, stories, and advice about any location in the world!
Whether you are someone interested in preserving the history of your community, an architecture aficionado, a parks enthusiast, a music maven, an expert on local street art, or a professional tour guide — if you want to hear about new places or share your own stories, Locacious is for you.
How do I create a tour on Locacious?
Creating a tour stop on Locacious is simple. Tap "create," name your stop, and tap on the microphone button to begin recording. Snap a photo and give your new tour a name and brief description. When you save, Locacious automatically adds a pin with your audio tour stop to the map in your current location. You can always place the stop or drag it to any point on the map.
How do I add stops to a tour?
When you create stops, you can select which tour your new stop will be added to or create a new tour. Once you've selected a tour, any new stops you create will automatically become part of that tour.
How do I choose the order of my tour stops or organize my tours?
Locacious' "tours" page shows you a list of the tours that are on your device, including any tours you have created. For your own tour, an "edit" button lets you change quickly rearrange the order of your stops or group stops into different tours that you've created. On each stop, you can also select the tour it should belong to at any time.
How do I change the location of my tour stops?
Tour stops are represented on the map screen as pins. Stops that you've made get pinned to your current location by default and show up as green pins so you can easily pick them out. If you press and hold on a green pin, you can drag it to a new location. Once you let go of the pin, you are given the option to save it in its new location or undo the move.
How do I upload my tours?
Once you've perfected your tour, you can choose to upload your content so that others can find, download, and go on your tours. Just tap on the upload button on each stop you want to publish!
How do I take a tour someone else created on Locacious?
Once a tour has been published, it is now discoverable by anyone else who has Locacious. You can discover and download other users' tours by searching on the map, with keywords, or by browsing featured content. For example, suppose you are sitting in Katz's Delicatessen on New York’s Lower East Side. Open the app and you'll immediately see colored pins on a map representing available tour stops nearby. Tap on pins to see what they are, view a picture, see who the guide is, and immediately download just the stop or an entire Lower East Side walking tour and start taking the tour right away. Once you've downloaded a tour, you will see pins on the map representing stops of your tour. The GPS blue dot will guide you to your stops. A touch of a button begins to play the audio track associated with the stop. Read any text that has been added and look at any photo that your guide has added.
How do I find the best tours on Locacious?
- Ratings
Anyone who downloads a tour can rate it, one star to five, and comment on the tour. Yes, this has exactly the pluses and minuses you would expect. That’s why there are other ways to find out about tours.
- Staff favorites, New and Noteworthy
Well, if the App Store can have favorites, why can’t we? This is a way for us to give extra exposure to particularly notable tours.
- Reputation
It makes sense that if you like one tour by a certain guide, it might be worth looking at others produced by the same guide. This is very easy to do.
- Search and sample
It is possible to look for stops and tours on a map or via search. You can download individual stops or whole tours to find one to your taste.
Aren’t there already walking tour apps for the iPhone?
Existing walking tour apps fall into one of three categories.
- Traditional Guidebooks
Often polished, but prey to a least-common-denominator style, traditional guidebooks are often out of date the day they are published. Locacious will always be fresh and feature new voices... perhaps yours!
- Wikipedia Wannabes
Wide coverage, but ripping their content from Wikipedia, these have even less personality than traditional guidebooks. (Ooh, that hurts!)
- Individual, Unique, and Quirky
These have the right idea about voice, but by their individual nature are often hard to locate or even to know they exist.
And remember, Locacious is two-way. If you have something to offer, you can add your own distinct point of view.
I am a professional walking tour guide. Why would I want to place tours on Locacious?
Audio tours are great things (that's why we launched Locacious!). But they will never fully replace a live tour guide to whom you can ask questions. We get that. And so we want to make Locacious helpful to professional tour guides. A Locacious tour can serve to advertise live tours. Post one or a few stops to give potential customers the chance to know what kind of tour they would take and how to contact you. Or post abbreviated stops of a complete tour for the same purpose. Like to test the water first? An easy way to start out is to post a tour about an area that you personally find fascinating, but where you don't ordinarily give live tours.These won't compete with your core business, but can advertise it. A few additional notes may be of interest. While your live tours can only be of one place on a given day, your Locacious tours are available every day, all day, in every location where you develop a tour. In future, Locacious will also allow users to search by language of the tour. So if you are able to develop tours in more than one language (yourself or with a translator), these can be made available to visitors who are non-English speaking in their native languages. Naturally, this will take on added interest when we implement opportunities for tour guides to earn based on downloads. Mobile walking tours are coming. Learn how to make them work for you.
How is Locacious different?
- Voice
Since all tours on Locacious are user generated, they will natural reflect the unique voice of the tour guide. If you like one tour produced by a specific guide, it is simple to find additional tours produced by that guide. Voice extends to the choice of locations for tours, so soon all the world will fill up.
- Ubiquity
There is only one Earth. And so it makes sense for Locacious to provide a single app to search for walking tours. Wherever you are, pull out your iPhone, open Locacious, and you will see all nearby tours on a map. Going to Prague? Open the Locacious app and move the map until you zoom in on the Czech Republic. You will see all the available tours.
Walking tours have been on the web for a while. How is Locacious different?
Simplicity.
In the past, if you wanted to take a web-based walking tour, you had to
(1) Know in advance that you will want to take a particular walking tour;
(2) Know the tour exists or search for it;
(3A) Print it out, remember to take it when you leave, and then carry the pages around;
(3B) Have at least a minor in computer science to figure out how to put the tour on your cell;
(3C) Call in on a cell phone every time you want to hear a stop and punch in a stop number (if you can find it);
(4) Not change your mind and decide you want to do some other tour.
Just too complicated.
With Locacious, wherever you are, just open the app and you will see all the tours around you. Find one you like and you can download it in moments. Then you are off to take your tour. What could be easier?
Will you develop Locacious for Android and other platforms?
Of course.
Why did you develop Locacious?
We believe Locacious has the potential to launch a revolution in people's understanding , and appreciation, of their local surroundings. People who know more about their surroundings will care for them more and protect the really unique elements. We are also awed to think of the world we will live in, in which the great knowledge accumulated over decades and centuries will become so much more accessible in the very locations where that knowledge has greatest salience.
Who are you guys?
Locacious is a collaboration. Peter Grand is owner and principal developer of Peter Grand, Inc., developing professional software and web applications for over twenty-five years for Fortune 500 companies and small agencies alike; Chief Evangelist Donald Davis is a Professor of Economics at Columbia University (identification purposes only); Seth Kamil is the president and founder of Big Onion Walking Tours. We've been ably assisted by visual and graphic designer Gabe Grand. And of course we are grateful to our many knowlegable and skilled guides and contributors.
Join us! Locacious is you.
