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New Yorkers Can Easily Tell if You’re a Tourist (But That Can Change)Because you don’t want to be that person standing in the middle of Times Square or on the subway train with that massive paper City of New York map completely folded out... By DAVID R. BUTCHER Assistant Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions Tourists: The bane of New Yorkers’ existence. You’re easily recognized, no matter how inconspicuous you think you are: You’ve not yet mastered the Sidewalk Shuffle. It’s called Sixth Avenue, not Avenue of the Americas. Your “favorite” spot in Central Park should not include the word sheep, lawn, meadow or Bethesda. Stop caring that you’re sitting next to a celebrity in the bar or restaurant. And for the love of all things holy, we know you’re not a New Yorker because it’s taken you longer than a minute to eat that street-vendor-served pizza slice while you’re walking due to your incorrect pizza-folding technique! But hey, there’s good news for visitors: In the time between working on these tell-tale giveaways, tourists can at least avoid using an obvious fold-out map or a guidebook while visiting the great Manhattan. Racontours Inc., a provider of fully integrated multimedia self-guided tours for hand-held digital devices, today announced its new Voyager software platform for mobile devices, providing interactive self-guided walking tours of Manhattan’s historical areas that can be downloaded and played on virtually any PDA, smart phone or MP3 player. Voyager is the first touring system to integrate interactive maps, audio and visual material on mobile devices: self-guided tours providing images, video and scalable vector maps for the user. There are currently six tours of Manhattan available for download from the company’s Web site: Central Park, Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan, Soho, South Seaport and Washington Square. The tours enable sightseers to guide themselves, according to their own pace and interests, through the streets and paths of the area of interest. Each tour recounts stories, intrigues and obscure facts while winding through a particular neighborhood. “One of the best things about living in New York is the stories — from Donald Trump to Babe Ruth to Fiorello LaGuardia,” noted Racontours Founder and CEO Michael Guthrie in a company statement. “As New Yorkers ourselves, we built Racontours as a vehicle for recounting these tales and connecting the user with this storied city around us.” Newcomers are seamlessly guided through New York’s maze of streets with a triple-tiered set of directions: an audible guide explaining where to turn and what to look for; a complete set of photos by which to navigate; and a high-resolution, scalable map that shows the user’s location at all times. (It should be noted that there is a significant group of New Yorkers who, even after a lifetime of living in The City, still have trouble navigating through the West Village, especially on early Saturday mornings in a stupor. Also related, the old adage is fairly accurate: Before you’re a New Yorker, you have to get lost in New Jersey — even though you can see the Manhattan skyline.) The Java-based Voyager 2.0 is compatible with a variety of operating systems and mobile devices. The Voyager platform enables each tour to customize itself automatically to the user’s device. Do you know how to log on to the Internet and download a file? Then you should be able to do this in a fairly painless process, as no technological expertise is needed beyond the aforementioned ability. The Voyager platform is currently compatible with most PDAs, smart phones and MP3 Players, and it supports the following mobile-specific operating systems: • Pocket PC 2002; • Pocket PC 2003 (Windows Mobile); • Pocket PC Phone Edition; • and iPod. A $14.95 payment allows the user to download and license the tour to his or her hand-held device — couples pay half-price for a second copy of the same tour so they can take it together. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in New York, Racontours provides downloadable, self-guided tours for six neighborhoods and parks in the city, and is dedicated to developing similar tours for other cities, both in and outside of the United States. (For other things you should know and do before calling yourself a New Yorker, refer to Issue 424: November 13–20, 2003, of Time Out New York.) ----- David Butcher is Assistant Editor of Customer Interaction Solutions. To see more articles by David Butcher, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100008&nm=David%20 R.%20Butcher |