
Ask HN: What do you think of a real-time travel app - snehesht
Hi, little back story to this I&#x27;m participating in Startup Weekend, We came up with an idea of developing a real time discovery app for travelers. We are trying to integrate real time information about the events that are going around, for an example a food truck located at the next block or a street performer next street. These are small things that brings a lot of good experiences in the trip and make it more unique.<p>I would really appreciate your inputs, suggestions.
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rahimnathwani
I am on vacation right now, and would like to consume content in something
like this. However, I'd only use it if it already had a lot of current
information about what's going on within a 2km radius of where I am right now.

That information is (i) hard to collect at scale, even with a really great UI,
(ii) goes stale quickly, (iii) sparse for many locations.

Perhaps you could seed this by building on stuff you pull from
Twitter/Facebook, and then slowly shift towards content originating on your
platform?

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snehesht
Cool, that one of he way we planned to gather information, and our design
relies on people to find and post it on our app/social media.

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LarryMade2
I've been working on that idea on more passive way and smaller scale
[http://www.doplaces.com](http://www.doplaces.com)

A few things Ive added beyond the general what's nerby on touristy websites
are: Group locations and meeting schedules, "points of interest" category for
those who like to wander, adjustable date time to see what will be open during
the time of their visit, notices to learn about pre-event tickets or signups
for competitions and such ahead of time.

The biggest issues I see is a)Advertising the service and b)Buy-in by the
businesses/community groups/vendors and performers - unless you have some good
traction already, you have to prove that it's worth their effort.

On the advertising, my current plan is to make a programmatic "vendor
printable" flyer they can print up and post - a simple sign "you are here [big
X] find out what's nearby [QR coe and custom url for the business like
"doplaces.com/near/BillsDiner"]. Reduces the effort to get results on the
public side, goes right into what they want to see.

Once you do have public buy in, the next problem is making quick updating
painless for the participants... My site currently has no-login updating, I've
made it about as simple as you can get (edit one text field - I'll deal with
the hard input controls.) Not as much input as I expected... but also could be
because I'm in the sticks, and mobile savvy audience is not as big as would be
in a city.

If I had the time, and doing it on a live scale, like you are thinking, I'd
probably have a vendor-side mobile app where they could either turn on/off
real time tracking or just be able to push a "ping" button to update their
location/status (tied to their record of what they do)

Incentive - might be able to provide them with metrics of popularity,
competition density, peak time graphs, etc.

Good Luck!

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kspaans
Have a look at Waze (now owned by Google): people on the road ahead of your
can put up warnings, and the system can figure out of a certain road has
congestion in real-time and suggest alternates.

Also maybe look at OpenStreetMaps for a starting point for mapping and place
data.

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snehesht
thanks, we modeled few parts of our app based on waze.

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kspaans
Also look at Untappd. Instead of "checking in" at a location a la foursquare,
you check in what kind of beer you are drinking (optionally with a picture and
a location). In denser areas I can occasionally find new beer without having
to walk past a bunch of pubs and squinting at their taps from the windows.

