Before I took an arrow to the knee I was quite the adventurer. From Dragonsreach to Blue Palace I’ve visited them all and I have the mugs and commemorative shot glasses to prove it. But what about photos and web checkins? It’s hard to get those at a Khajiit souvenir shop.
Esplorio is trying to make it easier to record your trips on the fly. The app maps your trip passively and connects photos and locations as you move from location to location. Taking a long horse trip from Riverwood to Lakeview? Esplorio will update itself with locations along the way and create a travelogue of your adventures.
“We integrate with more services than any other travel app out there,” said CEO Tim Fernando. “Esplorio will aggregate your posts, trips and photos from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Picasa and Flickr, using the content to create trips.”
Obviously you’ve got to feed the system some high-end content – Tweets, photos, and the like – but the resulting travelogues give you a real sense of your slow and steady march across Skyrim (or Europe.)
Fernando created the app with his friends Essa Saulat and Sean Pham. All of them worked in digital marketing and app production and all have lived in Europe and Asia.
They’ve raised $300,000 from Akash Gupta, Elliot Mackenzie, and the Startup Funding Club. Their app is live now on iOS.
The two benefits to their app is battery life and data roaming. Because it does not require a constant data connection, the app reduces battery usage and costs.
“Our app doesn’t require roaming data to record journeys, so users can travel the world without having to worry about racking up roaming charges,” said Saulat. “We want people to enjoy their travels, so instead of them having to manually log their journey, Esplorio automatically checks you in at each place you visit.”
“The project was born out of Tim’s continuing frustration at a lack of easy-to-use tools to track his travels. When visiting Sri Lanka with his then fiancée, Tim wanted to find a remote turtle hatchery that he had been to and had recorded using existing networks but could not find it on his phone. The embarrassment of having to ask for directions led him to want to create an easier way,” he said.
While it’s hard to get across Skyrim (or Peru) these days without running into a dragon (or llama), apps like Esplorio make it fun to share your travels with fellow adventurers (backpackers) while not having to put down your two-handed great sword (Falafel sandwich.) That, on aggregate, seems like a good bit of code.