Kamino Offers Crowdsourced Walking Tours On Your iPhone

In TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley this week, we came across Roger Obando and Louis Huynh, co-founders of Kamino, a new mobile app offering crowdsourced city guides. Unlike the recommendations found in professional guidebooks, Kamino instead offers what they call “urban hikes” — guides created by locals and plotted on a map that help to introduce visitors to the best their neighborhoods have to offer.

The idea with Kamino is to take a walking tour of a given part of town, while getting pointed to various attractions, restaurants, shops, other businesses and hidden gems while on the way, as if you had a local showing you around.

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These “hikes” are plotted on a map in the Kamino mobile app, and include photos and other details about why these spots were recommended. The hikes are also often thematic in nature, letting you choose from things like “pet-friendly” hikes, hikes that are great for kids, hikes for going out with friends, and more.

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The hikes, which are also viewable on the web, can be saved, shared and rated from one to five stars. You can also see basic info, like how many stops each urban hike offers, how many miles long they are, and how long they’ll take to walk from beginning to end. For example, this “Whiskey Tour” of NYC is just over half a mile and includes 11 minutes of walking time (not including the drinking time, of course!).

Bootstrapped Kamino now offers hikes in 50 cities across the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, including New York, San Francisco, L.A., Paris, London and Tokyo, thanks to its community’s efforts. To date, users have created over 500 guides, according to Huynh.

You can grab the free app here on iTunes. The company may choose to eventually charge for premium features, like offline access to its tours and maps.