Oh my Guide! mobile app
This post is a kind of tribute from me to my past. I’ve decided to perpetuate everything that is left on different disks and flash drives to remember how great, fun and wonderful it was. Another reason is this experience became crucial for me and defined my future, which brought me to far from where I’ve started.
I was so young and ambitious and could not even imagen that is only a tiny step in a long journey.
Prehistory or identified problems were to explore any new city or place, tourist was needed: to buy different paper maps, which is difficult sometime to understand; don’t get lost during exploring the new city; usually spend a lot of money to use internet abroad to google the helpful information; steadily look at huge map in the hands; no time to enjoy what user sees — no app which could say/read loud information about objects (integrated speech synthesizer).
Behavioral change: people started to strive to explore a new city/place without guides getting more independent especially Y & Z ew generation.
Let’s start from the beginning. It was immemorial 2011, when StartupPoint (startup community) and “Prioritet” Venture Capital fund sent 8 startups for 3 months to “the Spanish Village” business accelerator in Spain.
One of the super successful startups at that time was my startup “Oh my Guide!”. Together with other co-founder, we gathered a team from full stack engineers, UI designer, copy writer and Product Owner/Product Management & Marketing/QA lead in my face.
The main idea was to provide our end user a mobile app and a headset with a camera so that user could in real time recognize the objects around and get immediately receive an information about it in app, by buying only what they were interested in (micropayments).
To consume the bought content user could listen in via headset with integrated camera or read in the mobile app or our mobile app could say it loud.
At this time there was not yet a google glass, but we prototyped it (!) 2 years right before Google or maybe we did it parallelly. Notwithstanding on this we decided to postpone its development of this physical device due to complexity and expenses. Compared with Google we had not unlimited investments :) and decided at least to launch a mobile app and make it a separate product. This was the first difficult product decision. Because both ideas later would bring us huge success and revenue.
However out headset with video camera was turned into a separate product under name Mobile Video Systems.
Thus “Oh my Guide!” became a mobile app for travelers. However technically it was an offline travel companion service for individual tourists. Android application allowed to navigate through the city using offline maps and provided tourists with useful and interesting information about architecture objects and landmarks, that were recognized in real-time by taken photos.
At the beginning we launched 2 apps, one as MVP called Around The World (ATW) and 2nd one for London separately to validate specific functionality. It was ugly looking but with a good functionality and available in GooglePlay.
We launched downloadable maps for 70 countries in more than 40 languages. Before to scan an object user downloaded a map for target country.
In real time via camera on user’s phone user could find an object, scan it and receive an information about it.
User could navigate her/him self via OpenStreet maps, which we utilized.
Step when the user reads requested information about a target object. It is a screenshot of UI interface of our mobile app.
Our app even could read the object’s information, where a language was not matter(!) user could select almost any one.
We made even a promo movie (2mins) how are app was working.
Augmented reality was the next step or even a level of the development of our mobile app, which required to increase our development team and investments to maintain everything especially at the beginning.
For example our planned use case was: User had downloaded the target country map, already bought some information about a few objects (micropayments) and via augmented reality observes these visited objects.
To help our user find other interesting objects we planned to reflect them via augmented reality and distance to them.
Of course I’ve created personas to target right audiences and utilized them for our use cases, however here I will not share it to short my post.
Here I place the schema of an object recognition, how we did it. I intentionally don’t translate it to respect the developers’ work and how awesome they were in 2011!
Our main achievements were:
- my negotiations with partners and investors brought us a seed investments for the first round x00 000 EUR.
- our Android app for the fist couple months got over 10,000 installations in more than 70 countries and 40 languages within the first 3 months. Up to 8 000 active users.
