Holiday times are good for epiphanies and Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon, had his during a one-month break in South-east Asia after he left the company he founded.
Andrew Mason: Came up with idea for Detour while on holiday in Rome.
During the break, he found his attention span returned. “I had built up this complete addiction to technology without knowing it and I felt free. Technology is about faster, cheaper, easier. It is like food 40 years ago. We didn’t fully appreciate that it was making us shittier people – it is easier to see it with food because it made us fat.”
And so he started working on
a technology solution that would “get people out of their world and celebrate life’s edges in an alternative way”.
Speaking at the PhoCusWright conference in Los Angeles, he said, “You can give consumers what they want but you don’t have to make them shittier.”
His new start-up is called Detour, a location-aware audio walking tours app, which is in private beta and will launch in January.
The idea came while he was with his wife in Rome. “We wanted the freedom to explore, but we wanted additional context and we didn’t want to be with strangers.”
He took an audio tour that was available on iPod. “I thought this was something special, a fun way to explore and not be imprisoned in a group tour.”
At Groupon too, he found that the most popular local deal was an architectural boat tour of Chicago. “We would run it every three months and we would sell 20,000 tickets. It was unbelievably popular and it shows that customers are looking for great things to do in their city. Most walking tours are targeted at tourists but we saw locals buying them in droves.”
With Detour, he’s curated local themes and stories around San Francisco – Fisherman’s Wharf with a fisherman who’s fished in the area for 40 years and who read the script. There’s a Beat Generation tour which follows the path taken by Jack Kerouac and his peers, and a cupcake tour conducted by a fake philosopher.
The app is in private beta and will launch in January 2015.
He admits though that it’s a difficult company to build. “Technology is difficult and content is difficult.”
First, it has to be location-aware. “It’s a collection of independent audio files pinned to latitudes and longitudes on a map which allows you to sync location with what it bsieng said with the precision as though someone is next to you”.
It uses GPS and iBeacon for indoor locations and “we are adding more location tracking technology”.
Second, it has to sync so that in a group, everyone is hearing exactly the same thing at the same time, removing the isolation of past audio tours.
He admits it’s not necessarily a new idea and many have tried it but he said, “Technology is just reachng a level of sophistication wjhere we can use location awareness – and the technology of sync – so that with Detour, it will feel like you have a private tour guide coming with you instead of the usual isolated experience.”
The idea is to release it on a platform next January and by the end of 2015, he wants to crowd source for content. “We want to make it really easy for people to create a podcast or blog about their city.”
