Locatify team celebrates 10 year anniversary!

Locatify SmartGuide – a little ahead of it’s time

In cooperation with the Settlement Centre we made the first recording of the Icelandic Saga in Borgarfjörður. We recorded some great guides, some of who even gave their work as they believed in the project, which we are always thankful for, and could pay for some translations services.

The outcome was the Locatify SmartGuide, at the time there was only one other GPS guide in App Store. We were really proud, sent press releases and expected that many customers would start using it, but nothing happened, with only a handful of downloads rolling in.

Looking back, the market wasn’t ready, and with time we learned that not many consumers are not willing to pay for content, and as customers expect to get it for free, someone else who gains from increasing tourism in the area will need to sponsor or buy the product.

Locatify TurfHunt

We continued to apply for grants and were so lucky to received award funding from the Nordic Game Program and the European NordPlus educational fund. With those fundings we could develop the treasure hunt game TurfHunt and start to build up our Creator CMS platform. Since 2012 we have offered TurfHunt free for teachers and their students and consider it as a give-back to the society for the grants we have received.  Our goal has always been to make learning fun, whether the focus is on games or guides.

Locatify and GeoParks

We started cooperation with GeoParks and other institutes and took part in some grant funded projects that took us forward, step by step in building up the CMS. Locatify built apps can be found in many GeoParks around the world today and we are really grateful for our partners and grants that helped us start the company and to our customers who believed in us.

Our next big turn of the company was when we were asked by the curator Axel Hallkell to create and automatic indoor guide for a new museum in Iceland, Eldheimar. We rolled up our sleeves and created the first BLE Beacon enabled automatic museum guide. (And to our knowledge the first one in the world).

We used trilateration in order to show the visitors location as a blue dot on the screen. Axel’s goal was to immerse the visitor into the story without them having to read a single sign, and that was a success. Eldheimar received awards and is to this day considered one of the best museums in Iceland.

There we had found a new passion as the museums fall right into our enthusiasm for learning with joy. We started serving museums with automatic storytelling and gamification tools and were always on the lookout for the best products. We came across Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) three years ago, which is a huge step in providing precise, accurate location in milliseconds.

Our first and biggest projects so far was a great learning curve for us. BAM Homestudios is a cutting edge retail experience centre in the Netherlands, which provides new home buyers the opportunity to visualise and customise their new home. As this was the first time the technology was set up in a huge environment (4800 m2) with different building materials, we had to learn quickly, identifying which obstacles interfered with the signal and which didn’t.

UWB has taken us on a journey we would never have imagined, we have set it up in museums, a retail centre, at an equestrian arena and even tracked some chickens. Even though some of these project are not in line with our goals, we welcome them as a part of our learning process. As the new iPhone has a UWB chip we are looking forward to explore further the opportunities it will bring.