Photos Go Social With Geotargeted Trover
Trover hinges on a simple premise and a hypersocial zeitgeist: When we discover something new, our first impulse is to share it with somebody else. In Trover’s case, these “discoveries” mean the things we happen upon while trolling the landscape — the obscure little bistro tucked into a Paris courtyard, the mural in a Philadelphia alleyway or the defiant independent record shop in Boston, for instance.
The Trover user’s mandate is simple: Snap a picture of this discovery with a smartphone, give it a brief description and upload it into a stream of other images that will be geotagged and floated into a “spatial browser” based on other users’ distance from this discovery. Users on the receiving end can dive in from their current location or choose another city populated with such discoveries in Trover’s database.
For Trover CEO Jason Karas, it’s about capitalizing on the inherent strengths of the smartphone coupled with the social media zeal. “The geolocation of the phone plus the imagery plus the social networking capability of the phone — those three factors are really just starting to coalesce right now,” Karas said.
“We wanted to build the capability for people to leave these breadcrumbs behind,” he said. And potential competitors such as Yelp and Foursquare, he added, just aren’t leaving a sufficiently vivid impression of those crumbs. “If you ask them something, they’ll bring you back a text list of answers or a bunch of pins on a map,” Karas said, “and we thought that images are just a much better way to explore a neighborhood.”
Trover utilizes an embedded Google map to pinpoint each discovery and offers users a “follow” functionality like Twitter. “Once you start to follow, then you can filter through Trover to just see things from those people who you care about,” Karas said.
For now, the Seattle-based company isn’t monetizing the app, preferring to wait until its user base climbs from its current 100,000 to several million. Then, Karas suggested a possible revenue model of positioning offers to users based on their geolocation and the interests expressed through their following streams and uploaded photos. Then, Trover may serve up deals via push notifications or text alerts based on the user’s movement.
Karas said that the business model is likely to begin coming together at the local, rather than national, level. “A lot of our community is uploading discoveries from local merchants,” he said. “We’re just starting to engage with them and explain to them how Trover works.
“Our view is if we can build this community and if people start using Trover as one of the primary ways to explore their surroundings, there will be a great opportunity to work with local partners to promote certain offers or places,” Karas said.
Vendor: Trover LLC
Launched: July 2011
Cost to consumers: Free
Compatible devices: iPhone, Android, desktop (iPad forthcoming in the first quarter of 2012)
White label version: No
Number of downloads: Approximately 100,000
Key characteristics: Trover allows users to post “discoveries” onto a geotargeted stream of images. Users take, tag and upload photos of something specific to a locality, allowing other users to access the image through a location-oriented “spatial browser.” Sharing is compatible with Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
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