We’ve added a few more pages around the web that you may be interested in:

• Our Tumblr Page
• Our Facebook Page

You can see our Facebook Page there on the sidebar – while you’re there, make sure to Like It so you can follow updates.

This blog post will appear when we’ve switched over to our new website server.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Discover Anywhere Mobile to all our friends and customers across Canada and the United States. May your 2011 be prosperous and exciting.

David
Joanne
Julie
Jen
Tim

Overnight we replaced all the software (except Apache) that’s running our client’s servers, to have the very latest and best of everything. If we did everything correctly, nothing has changed!

We’ve just added a new link in a Resources Section: DMAI 2010 – Going Mobile. This is the slides for the mobile session we presented in at the DMAI 2010 conference.

Discover Anywhere Mobile has done several changes to make sure all our apps work as well as possible on Apple’s new iOS4 operating system for the iPhone. We’ve resubmitted every single one of our apps and upped the version number to “2.0″. One thing not to worry about: to make sure of broad compatibility across all Apple devices, we also test every app against a 8Gb first generation iPod Touch running version 3 of the Operating System.

If you’re interested in seeing our apps, the sidebar of every window has a panel that will show you everything we’ve done (and quite a few things currently under development).

Discover Anywhere Mobile now has a Resources section, featuring:

• White Papers – our first paper: .mobi Tourism: how to get your tourism site mobilized
• Presentations – our first presentation: Discover Anywhere Mobile tourism apps
• Conferences – see you at the Mobile session at  DMAI in Fort Lauderdale!

And coming very soon – videos of how to use our products and features.

Tnooz / TLabs has a nice profile of our company up over on their website. Go over there and check it out. Since that’s been written we’ve launched another series of apps for Butler County and we’ve got four more in the app store approval process right now and three more in various states of development!

We’ll be at the WACVB Destination Marketing Tech Summit tomorrow and Friday at the Vendor Showcase. Do drop by and visit! You can follow our show updates on Twitter on @discoverany (and WACVB’s Twitter updates here).

We were surprised yesterday to learn that TripWolf is claiming to be the “first iPhone travel guide with integrated Augmented Reality“. Surprised, because TripWolf’s claims are simply not supported by the facts. For example, Discover Anywhere Mobile has been shipping Augmented Reality in all its products since September of 2009. Here’s a select sample of our apps, all which include POI databases, events calendars, itinerary planning, search, integrating mapping and much much more.

• Finger Lakes Wine Country (released March 9, 2010)
• Ocean City, MD (released February 17, 2010)
• Central Nova Scotia (AR release Feb 16, 1010)
• Destination St. John’s (released Nov 17, 2009)

All these apps are actually available in the app store right now; many more are in the pipeline. In addition, many other app makers in the Travel sector offer Augmented Reality (and the dates given here are for their latest releases, earlier versions no doubt had these features too) :

• Wikitude (Feb 11, 2010)
• Canada Eye (March 3, 2010)
• Metro Paris Subway (Feb 1, 2010)
• Bionic Eye (Feb 5, 2010)

One application that may reasonable lay claim to being first into the AR travel market is Yelp, who cleverly snuck an Easter egg into their application before Apple officially allowed AR to be supported in August of 2009. There are also a number of Asian travel apps which offer integrated Augmented Reality.

We’re happy for TripWolf that they’ll soon be offering a feature that was available from the rest of the market 6 months ago (FYI: it takes Apple less than three days to approve an app these days). We look forward to their announcement, perhaps someday, of them being the first to offer comprehensive social media integration into their products.

Here’s Teresa from Finger Lakes Wine Country demoing the (fantastic) app we wrote for them (read more about it):

If you like what you’re seeing and are interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced solution in the market for getting CVBs/DMOs mobile.

Discover Anywhere Mobile was in Montreal last week at the Online Revealed Canada and Canada-e-Connect conferences. We’d like to say “hi” to all the people we met, especially the event organizers and Canadian DMO folks from coast-to-coast-to-coast. We’re excited that you’re excited about what we’re doing, and we’ll be in touch soon. And as Phillip Wolf of PhoCusWright says “don’t miss mobile opportunity“.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

Every visitor is marketing your destination
Every visitor is virtually standing in your office
Every visitor is immersed in your story

Discover Anywhere Mobile is pleased to announce the game changer for mobile destination marketing – the Discover Anywhere Mobile Social Media extensions. Now with a DAM application in your visitor’s hand not only will they have the best information available about your destination, they’ll be sharing their experiences with all their friends and be interacting with yourselves (and your partners) at your DMO/CVB.

The Discover Anywhere Mobile directly integrates social media into your visitor’s travel experience. Now visitors:

• can quickly share every place they visit in your destination with everyone they’re connected with on social media
• can send photos, status updates, and their geolocation to Twitter, Facebook, Twitpic and Flickr
• will receive your DMO/CVB’s latest updates from Twitter directly in your app
• can likewise (optionally) receive #hashtag updates from other visitors
• can directly respond to your DMO/CVBs to ask questions, provide feedback, or just get in touch
• will be notified whenever your DMO/CVB responds to them

Additionally:

• all Twitter updates will include your destination’s #hashtags, allowing everyone to quickly find who’s talking about your destination or participating in events
• all Facebook updates will include links to your destination’s webpage plus other brief useful marketing text, helping to spread the message about your destination and build your reputation
• all Flickr updates will include your destination’s tags, allowing everyone to find photos of your destination
• Twitter and Flickr updates may – at the visitor’s discretion – include geolocation information about where they’re taking photos and sending updates

To find out more, contact us via email or give us a call at 416-785-4425. We’ve got pricing specials until the end of 2009, so if your destination is considering mobile and social media, now’s the time to start moving.

Our Flickr Photoset has many screenshots and descriptions of each step of the way:

Discover Anywhere Mobile is proud to be a sponsor for HoHoTO, raising funds for Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank.

If you’re interested in attending, it’s December 16th at The Mod Club; if you can’t, you can give a donation here.

There are two issues that come up over and over again when we talk to prospective clients: “if I’ve bought the application, why should I keep paying for yearly maintenance” and “We’re thinking of just developing this ourselves”.

These two issues are related.

Shopping List.

iPhone applications should not be an exercise in box ticking — iPhone app, check, next…. A useful iPhone application comes with a set of expectations from the user about the way it feels, the way looks, the way it reacts to way the user interacts with it. A failure to respect this leads to the fate of about ⅔rds of iPhone applications: they never get opened more than once or twice. For your destination this is a disaster – you’re supplying the best information possible on behalf of your members and your visitors are not even bothering to look at what you have to say.

There’s a reason you don’t photocopy your destination brochures, even though it has exactly the same information that your expensive glossy stock paper version has – it just doesn’t feel right.

Or to put it another way, you want an iPhone application that people look forward to using again and again.

Generic App. Wow?

Now, there’s two non-Discover Anywhere Mobile solutions for getting a custom iPhone application built: cheap or professional. Cheap is going to give you the photocopied brochure: it has the correct information but there’s no appeal. If data is being pulled from a website live (the easy approach, often taken for quick and dirty iPhone applications to solve the ‘keep-the-app-up-to-date problem’) your visitor is going to experience a delay getting to what they want to see. As Google has extensively studied in the past and has nearly perfected solving, even the tiniest delays ruin the user experience. You now have shelfware. Professional will give you the solution you’re looking for, given time and money. There’s some great looking iPhone apps out there in the tourism / leisure categories. Some of them cost 6 figures to develop, almost all the others a reasonably sized fraction of that. Why? Because great work – great graphics, a feel for the user’s needs, well-tested applications – requires talented staff at all levels of the development agency.

This is what you want!

Discover Anywhere Mobile has the solution for your destination. We’ve done all the hard work for you: we offer great looking interfaces that visitors will want to come back to again and again; we customize the interface for your destination’s branding and message, so visitors don’t feel like their getting a generic product; and – behind the scenes – we keep your visitor’s iPhone updated with your latest information to give them the immediacy they’re looking for while actually using the app.

And we’ve figured out how to do all of this at a price point that, quite frankly, is well below what anyone should be quoting for custom development, even for the “cheap route”.

And this brings us to the issue of ongoing maintenance. Nothing, not websites, not software, not mobile applications are “fire and forget”. Issues of bugs aside (which will always requiring fixing) no application remains fresh. Great websites are redeveloped every few years as our understanding of how people interact with the web evolves – every website is effectively amortized over the period you have it for.

Maintenance, for Discover Anywhere Mobile apps, covers several things. It covers the ongoing costs of getting your data, reorganizing your data for best presentation on the mobile web, and pushing out that data to all of your visitors for that great destination experience through an iPhone app. It covers access to all of our other features and apps for other devices that Discover Anywhere Mobile has and will make – yes, these will cost extra money but only a marginal incremental cost. The iPhone didn’t exist 3 years ago; the capabilities to do Augmented Reality weren’t there 6 months ago. Apps _always_ needed to be updated in the mobile world or, once again, you’re shipping shelfware.

In short, Discover Anywhere Mobile wants to be your partner in making sure your apps deliver the best possible destination experience for all of your visitors. Our solution provides the best of both worlds – low cost, with professional polish.

Today we’re officially launching the new look of our Discover Anywhere Mobile website. Have a look around and tell us what you think! We want to make sure our message is loud and clear, front and center. Briefly:

• Discover Anywhere Mobile can quickly and cost effectively create iPhone, BlackBerry and .mobi applications for your destination, with almost no additional work required on your part
• Apps can be purchased à la carte – though of course we suggest you get them all for complete coverage
• Discover Anywhere Mobile has introduced great new features, including destination weather, Augmented Reality, Coupons, Advertising and Facebook integration. We’ll have more posts about these topics in the upcoming days and weeks, but now mobile apps can be more than giving visitors a great experience in your destination – they’re also letting your visitors become your marketers
• We’re creating your apps — not Discover Anywhere Mobile apps — and they’re completely branded to your destination’s message

We’ve signed up some great partners in the last few months and you’ll be seeing new Discover Anywhere Mobile-apps showing up in apps stores soon. More from us, very soon

Discover Anywhere Mobile’s now includes a “weather” option, to show weather in your destination. Weather is shown just like another theme, with the current weather being shown in the icon in the list view and the “About” details showing the full current conditions and a 5 day forecast. Weather is courtesy of Google’s Weather API.

Screen Shots