Heading off to a major tourist destination this summer? Wanting to know what you are looking at when wandering around in a museum? Or already hit the most famous tourist spots in NYC, and looking for more? Audio Excursions is looking to be the answer to all of these questions by giving you an interactive website community along with a device neutral mobile application for self guided tours.
After graduating from the ASU Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative (2011 – Top 20 Company), Benson Garner founder of Audio Excursions was prepared to put the financial grant and 1 year of free office space in the Skysong building to good use. Now, quickly approaching year end to the free gravy train given by the ASU Skysong Entrepreneurial Program, Audio Excursions has secured its first paying customer (Arizona Museum of Natural History), and is set to spread their wings in real life corporate America.
Garner is running Audio Excursions is close alignment to one of his favorite books: The Lean Startup. With that in mind, Garner is the sole founder of Audio Excursions and is currently bootstrapping the business, but is in dire need of a technical co-founder to fulfill some visionary ideas with concrete software / application development. Any tech developers out there? Send me an email at: reid@aztechbeat.com
So, let’s get to the good stuff . . . What is the full vision of Audio Excursions, and what can we get excited about as potential users?
Main Components for the Mobile Application:
Self Guided Tour Directory
Playing off the feel from Apple’s App Store, Audio Excursions wishes to develop a directory that sorts tours from a featured list, to top charts, and category searches, which is then completed with customer reviews and ratings. Aiming to be the largest directory of self guided tours in the world, Audio Excursions must display their value to tourist destinations so they wish to add their own content to the directory, in the same manner that app developers worldwide add content to Apple’s App Store every day.
Content Management System
Audio Excursions themselves will be responsible for managing all content in their system, and keeping tourist destination demand for using their tour platform. Audio Excursions feels that their platform complete with device neutral mobile applications and pertinent information will drive traffic and consumer interest in museums, libraries, and major city attractions. With budgets being tight at most of these tourist destinations, Audio Excursions must clearly show their value and make the impression that without their service, tourist spots will be left behind in this competitive marketplace. If they can successfully pitch that message, any organization that is slightly touristy will be flooding them and scrambling to get self guided tours up on their tour directory. Could this be the platform that brings this industry all together? Stay tuned.
End User Experience
So, how will all of this look on my handheld device? Well, all you need to get started is an audio headset and a smartphone. Audio Excursions is branding a new name for their service: Edutainment. A cohesion of education and entertainment will be facilitated by photos, videos, gaming, and multimedia in general based on each particular self guided tour. Not your typical grade school tour to the local museum, however, when I was in grade school the iPhone / iPad wasn’t even out yet! How did we survive?!
Glad to see great ideas coming out of the ASU Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative Program, and if you would like to see the Top 20 Companies of 2012, click here.
More About Audio Excursions:
Founder & CEO: Benson Garner
Email: bensongarner@gmail.com
Phone: (480) 627 – 9978
Address: 1475 N. Scottsdale Road, Suite 200, Scottsdale, AZ 85257
I think this concept is a no-brainer… in my top 2-3 favs from Extreme Pitch 2012.
Audio Excursions (Benson) did really well at Extreme Pitch, and its great to see them doing well by receiving a first paying customer as they leave the Edson Program / Skysong Building.
I agree that Audio Excursions has tremendous potential. I could see a platform where content creators could create audio tours for virtually anywhere (think when you check into a place, you could immediately get an audio tour that someone made of the place – how cool would that be?). While most tours would probably be free, some could be paid and since tours could be rated by the users, great tours would bubble up to the top. Great idea!
That would be awesome. Looking forward to the creation of the app!