Pre-Madrid and The Awesome Urbaniser
It’s been taking longer than I expected, and Covid didn’t help here, but Madrid is going to be the next city in my 10 cities adventure, and I am all set to be there in May 2023. I am super excited to be there, experience the city, meet people and possibly practice the little Spanish I have. Below is a reminder of that I plan to do in each city I visit.
What I plan to do in each city I visit
Get fit and get to know the city:
- Walk or bike >10km daily of the city neighborhoods and streets at least 6 days/week
- Follow a fiction book that was written about the city
Enhance my knowledge: Learn the local language through taking classes and speaking with locals
Immerse culturally:
- Attend at least one music concert per week of local or visiting musicians
- Attend at least two sports events
- Attend tech meetups, language-dependent
- Cook local food
- Eat where locals eat, eat in locals’ houses
Help others and contribute to the community:
- At least one day volunteering per city
- 5 TripAdvisor posts per city (stretch: 10)
- Write a weekly blog
Spend only one day out of the city in the month.
Urbaniser
Prior to the Madrid trip, it’s a good time to talk about Urbaniser. Urbaniser is an amazing app that I discovered during my last city visit in London, when I met Orit Gal — founder and CEO, and have been using it extensively since.
And I bring it up here because I am asking for your help in building my Urbaniser collection for Madrid.
On the outset, Urbaniser is a simple app: it allows you to store, per city, places that you discover and want to save for the future. You could do the same with Google Maps or several other tools. I used Google Maps for that purpose until I discovered Urbaniser.
But when you start to use Urbaniser, you find out that it is so much more. We can start with the pretty, yet effective user experience, that makes it easy to navigate, add places, and see/use them later. You can also choose the map view, which will show all your favorite places on a map. Then there is the simple and very useful arrangement of places by categories. You can also add notes for each place in your collection, see their opening hours, visit their website, and more.
But these, while great, are really the small things. Where Urbaniser really stands out is some use cases that none of the current solutions provide, at least as far as I know.
One of the most useful features of Urbaniser for me was Sharing. I travel relatively a lot and I am often asked by people to recommend places in a variety of cities around the world. Pre Urbaniser I was using Word files or Google lists which I shared with people, but these were easier hard to maintain or non-descriptive. With Urbaniser I can share my city collection with a click of a button, and the recipient can, also with a click of a button, see my collection in the Urbaniser’s compelling and useful UI, can drill into places, see them on a map, plot a course to them, see what’s on and more. I also don’t have to share the entire city collection: I can easily select the places I want to share or select categories that I want to share (dining, arts and culture, shopping, etc.). There are half a million places already “urbanized” today!
Next, and similar, is the ability to get recommended collections for cities that you visit. Let’s say you want to visit Tel Aviv. By answering few simple questions, Urbaniser will build for you a city collection for Tel Aviv, which will appear in your collections folder. This feature is now in preview mode and only available in few cities. Below you can see part of the recommended collection Urbaniser created for me for Tel Aviv.
What’s On, while still not available broadly, allows businesses that are in your Urbaniser’s list, to send you notices on events that take place at the specific location/venue. This keeps you always connected to your favorite places and allow the businesses to connect to you.
What’s Next, for Urbaniser and for me?
We expect Urbaniser to be used by cities globally to create general collections for the city, per interest (foodies, art, religious, etc.), and we have already seen conference organizer place an Urbaniser QR Code at the conference registration to allow the conference attendees to download a city collection for the event city, and easily find recommendations. We expect hotels to follow suit. Brands can create branded city collections of place that are relevant to lovers of the brand.
For me, I will be in Madrid in May and will be more than happy to get any recommendation for Madrid. Either in text or by sending me your Urbaniser collection for Madrid. And yes, Santiago Bernabeu and the Civitas Metropolitan Stadium are already in my Madrid collection… And if you’d like any of my Urbaniser collections for London, Tel Aviv, Nazareth, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Vienna, Budapest, Bratislava, Munich, Tirana, Park City (UT), Portland (OR), Great Falls (MT), just let me know.
