In the April 22 edition of The Telegram, Discover Anywhere Mobile’s Destination St. John’s app gets a nice mention:

St. John’s app

m.destinationstjohns.com

Through Destination St. John’s, here’s a way to get more out of the city on your iPhone or BlackBerry. You’ll find restaurant listings, points of interest, where to go for a hike, where to grab a beer … it goes on. If you know someone coming for a visit, this would be a great tip to send along. If your phone is GPS-enabled, the mapping functions will become a whole lot more useful.

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!

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.

One issue that comes up often is whether one should develop an “app” — a program built specifically for a mobile phone — or just make a mobile optimized website.

Here are the key advantages of developing an app:

• Immediacy – except for exceptionally-well developed websites, there is often a several second lag between doing an action on a mobile phone and seeing a result come back over the mobile network. Apps are immediate: when one does something, you see the results instantly. Immediacy leads to a different type of interaction between the user and the device, more playful, more experimental and fundamentally deeper.
• Offline Use – apps don’t depend on a network connection, which means they work in airplanes, in below-ground floors of buildings, in tunnels and (especially) they work on iPod Touches which comprise nearly half the iPhone device market.
• Gizmos – your app can access your device’s camera, compass, GPS, touch screen, motion sensor, and so forth. Mobile sites, not so much.
• Privileged space – people who own devices that can run apps, run apps. The first place they’re going to look for information is their apps which are given a “privileged” place on the screen of the user’s mobile phones. Your mobile app is just another website, that they may or may not get to when they use their browser.

We’ll also briefly mention here that most “mobile optimized” websites rarely are: they don’t work with the user’s location, they don’t design for limited bandwidth and high latency network connections, they’re not tested against a range of devices, and they rarely provide the right amount of information in the right way. In short, the user experience is awful.

Related reading:

• Five Reasons Mobile Apps Rule
• Mobile apps: Cemented into your business’s tech strategy?
• Mobile apps: Does your business need one?

Last week we did a brief “background” interview with Nora Young of CBC Spark about Discover Anywhere Mobile’s Transit app and Augmented Reality. You can listen here:

• Full CBC Podcast (with notes, etc)
• Our segment (as an MP3, about 2:15 long)

Thank you very much to Nora and the gang at Spark!

Discover Anywhere Mobile got a write-up today in the Halifax Chronicle about our Central Nova Scotia iPhone app:

TOURISM INFORMATION ABOUT CENTRAL NOVA is now as close as your iPhone. The local tourism association has signed on to provide information to Discover Anywhere Mobile, an iPhone destination application aimed at North American travellers. Central Nova Tourism Association marketing manager Devin Trefry said the application provides travellers with direct access to visitor information on Central Nova Scotia that can be downloaded directly to their mobile phone.

“We recognized the trend and opportunity of using mobile phones to help visitors to access information, and make travel within our region easier. We were fortunate enough to strike up an innovative partnership with Discover Anywhere Mobile to become the first destination in North America,” he said. “The use of technology with travel is definitely the way of the future and we’re excited to be on the forefront of this trend.”

Discover Anywhere Mobile Inc. is a Toronto-based software development company focused on mobile solutions for the travel industry. Applications created by Discover Anywhere Mobile include traveller-centered listings with photographs and text for popular sites and attractions, hotels, restaurants, businesses and tourism offices within a destination.