Skobbler, best known for its free sat-nav app for iPhone, has entered the world of gaming. GeoBrain for iPhone and iPad is described as “a fun yet educational game experience that tests and trains geo-knowledge.” Basically, you spin a giant globe and answer questions to demonstrate your knowledge of the world. Fun, huh? OK, it’s probably no Angry Birds.
The idea is to build on Skobbler’s map-based app experience but to enter into new and potentially profitable genres: knowledge-based games certainly do well on the Nintendo DS franchise, for example. And it’s common knowledge that the sat-nav market is both saturated and becoming a commodity. In fact, Skobbler’s own free offering for iPhone based on the do-it-yourself ‘OpenStreetMap’ (OSM) model is a perfect example of this. Never mind Google Maps or Nokia’s own free Ovi Maps voice-guided navigation.
The GeoBrain interactive quiz contains over 600 geography, history and entertainment-based questions. The app has three difficulty level settings and three different game modes. Interestingly, GeoBrain also pulls in data from Wikipedia so that a user can learn more about a subject – so again, Skobbler is powering some part of its app from open data.
GeoBrain can be downloaded at an introductory promotion price of 0.59p.