NewCity Labs unveils Nomad

This week NewCity Labs unveiled its first major product, called the NOMAD Mobile Guides app. We attended the Association of Partners for Public Lands conference in San Diego to show it off. APPL is an organization for the national parks and the cooperating associations that support them.

We teamed up with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to create NOMAD, but we're developing it as a platform that any travel publisher or destination can use to create mobile guidebooks, maps and tours.

What is NewCity Labs? It started as an initiative within NewCity to develop products that would dovetail with some of the services work we do for clients. We focused on getting our client work done from Monday through Thursday, and then on Friday the entire team changed hats and became an R&D lab. Rather than just have everyone pursue whatever interested them, we agreed together on products we would develop. Everyone had a hand in it.

When the opportunity for NOMAD opened up we kicked into high gear and put several people on it full time. It's been an exciting process, and has allowed us to apply our experience design approach to our own product. We poured everything we've learned over 15 years into NOMAD.

It's unique among travel apps because it allows people to purchase multiple guides and have them work together as one. All the content is location-aware, and you can find it easily by activity, topic or location. Imagine taking a trip to Tuscany - you might buy one general guidebook, another with walking tours of Tuscany, and a third with local wineries. You don't want to have to flip through all three to decide what to do in Florence. With NOMAD you could pull out your mobile phone, tap "Things to Do," then "Walking Tours" or "Museums" and see information from each guidebook displayed together on the map – based on your current location. Tap an entry and you're on your way.

We have applied for a patent on the aggregate guidebook model in NOMAD.

The Great Smoky Mountains Association will be publishing several guides and tours for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on NOMAD. We have some other exciting content partners we'll be announcing soon.

The NOMAD Mobile Guides website: http://nomadmobileguides.com

APPL http://www.appl.org