Print and the internet

I love what David Sifry and team have done in Offbeat guides.

Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. Our guides scour the web to find the best, most up-to-date information about your destination. You can personalize the information you want based on your travel dates, preferences, and destination. The guides come with local maps, festivals and events going on while you're there, exchange rates, key phrases in the city's language, weather forecasts and more.

It kind of reminds me of Idiomag but the business model is a little more straight forward and I like the fact you only really pay if you want the PDF or book. Unlike Idiomag however there's no APML being built in the background and you can't point to other services you may use. I mean it would be super handy if offbeat guides would look at my dopplr account and see when I'm next going somewhere new and might need a guide. It could also take hints and tips from friends and add those to the list. Can I also say once again, outside the iphone bubble there are many other types of phones which they could also support using textual/tagged PDF.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io