Brilliant startup idea of the day

[jducoeur]

Thanks to TechCrunch for this article about Offbeat Guides, which is a deliciously clever idea. Basically, the company makes one-off custom-built travel guides for you. You say where you want to go, and what kinds of things you're interested in; it scours through a variety of online sources, and builds you a little city-book travel guide in either PDF or bound form at fairly reasonable prices.

I'll bet that the first iteration of this will largely suck -- any startup is going to need time to refine its algorithms and build up appropriate data sources for something like this. But the high concept is great. It probably won't find much that an experienced web-searcher couldn't find on their own, but by acting as an intelligent agent and doing the scutwork, it has the potential to save a bunch of effort and surprise you with some gems. Once they get all the details right, this could be really useful.

(And once they have the data sources right, I'll bet that they explore new modes of delivery. The heck with PDF and paper -- if I buy one of these guides, I want to be able to reach it from my phone, so that I have the restaurant guide at my fingertips. I'd be very surprised if they don't figure that out pretty quickly...)

Comments

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

That is a deeply neat concept, yes. Thank for sharing!

[selkiechick]

That sounds really neat. I know I generally wind up using less than half of whatever guide I get. I like the Lonely Planet guides which do something a bit like this: "Pick and Mix" you can purchase whatever chapters of the guidebook you want, and download them.
http://shop.lonelyplanet.com/Primary/Product/Pick_and_Mix_Chapters/Central_America/PRD_DIG_1306_BK/Belize++Pick++Mix+Chapters.jsp?bmUID=1212423478977
It's handy- but not as likely to find the kind of interesting stuff that crops up on the web.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"The heck with PDF ... I want to be able to reach it from my phone"

My phone reads PDFs now. Admittedly, the reader is fairly primitive, but it's already usable, and doubtless going to improve.

[jducoeur]

True. But even with iPhone-grade zooming capabilities, it's not really the optimal form factor for something that's presumably designed for a full-sized page. It would be usable, but something designed for mobile small-screen would likely be considerably better...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

One of the few features my PDF reader does have in the current generation is the ability to just display the text, wrapped to the size of the screen, at one of three font sizes. Which admittedly won't help with a super-fancy page with lots of embedded graphics, but should do fine for more sensibly designed pages.

[rosinavs.livejournal.com]

That is so awesome. I am definitely going to use it in the future, and tell my sister the world traveller about it. She's currently planning a trip to Antarctica.

[jducoeur]

Heh -- now *that* would be a worthy test of the tool...