Groupon Founder’s New App Offers Awesome GPS Walking Tours

Freaky fact: The Post Office by my house used to be the Peoples Temple, where cult leader Jim Jones recruited the followers that would ultimately commit mass suicide with cyanide-laced Kool Aid at the cult’s outpost in Guyana.

I discovered this only recently, after a year and a half of living in the neighborhood, thanks to a GPS-assisted walking tour I took with my iPhone.

The app that facilitated it, Detour, was created by Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon. A walking tour app may seem like an unlikely follow-up for a guy who made a fortune in group coupons, but Mason sees a connection. “Groupon was trying to create a catalyst for people to get out of the house and experience their city. This is kind of just a continuation of that same desire,” he says.

When Mason was running Groupon in Chicago, one of the most popular deals was an architectural tour. Every time it was offered, it would sell out thousands of tickets in a matter of hours. Mason noted that it wasn’t just tourists snatching up the tickets. It was locals. It convinced him there was a market for local history—if it was done right.

The hope is that you can keep your phone in your pocket the whole time.  Detour

To keep quality high, Detour’s starting with a handful of tightly choreographed tours. Initially, it’s offering six in San Francisco. Gary Kamiya, author of Cool Gray City of Love, a recent history of the city, leads one through the North Beach neighborhood. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, does one in the Tenderloin.

The tours are meant go beyond the obvious tourist spots. They not only point out noteworthy landmarks but occasionally invite you to go inside to get a closer look. One of the walks briefly shepherds you inside a soup kitchen. (The company has prepped these places to expect a few tentative visitors with ear buds.) With the app, you can also link two phones up and do a tour in tandem.

The app relies on elaborate geofencing and clever on-the-fly audio mixing to guide you seamlessly from site to site, accommodating brisk walkers and dawdlers alike. It took me a few minutes to get used to the voice in my ear knowing where I was, orienting me in relation to a certain tree on my left or an unusual house on my right. But generally speaking, it worked well. Aside from one hiccup where the geofencing faltered, I was able to take in most of the 90-minute tour without taking my phone out of my pocket.

As for the walk itself—it was fascinating. History is cool. But then I like history and walking and walking tours already, so I’m probably an easy sell. I also got to try the app for free, where most folks will have to pay $5 per tour, or subscribe for a little more to get all the walks. Whether or not there is in fact a market for history remains to be seen.

But even beyond the local color, Detour is a novel experience. It isn’t often you encounter audio as an interface, but here, you see its unique qualities. When you’re not holding a device or looking at a screen, you can move unencumbered through physical space. Audio leaves your eyeballs free to feast on the world around you.

Mason hopes to expand Detour to other cities in coming months. But the vision is to go beyond curated historical walking tours altogether. Mason mentions the possibility of opening the company’s custom-built authoring tours so people can make their own walks. He’s open to walks that dispense with facts altogether—one of the initial six, in fact, is a tour of gourmet bakeries guided by a fictitious German philosopher with a Werner Herzog-esque accent.

Someday, Mason says, Detour could even offer a more open-world experience, where you could pop in your ear buds and sip a little local history on any city block. Mason has a nice phrase for this; he says he wants to “annotate the city with sound.” Another way of thinking about it: aurally augmented reality.