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Do Me London Launches Mobile Guides
Do Me London has launched a set of interactive guides for about 75 of the major sights in London. I reviewed a couple of their examples and found them to be funny and interesting. And the business model appears innovative as well. Basically you send a text message to their service and it replies with the mobile Web site. Once you enter the site, browsing the site, maps and general info is free of any charges from Do Me (your mobile carrier may charge you for data like here is the States). The rich-media (audio/video) guides are between £1.00 and £1.50 depending on length.
While some of the sights in London have guides that you can purchase, this expands to a larger base and without those ugly soundbar devices. The real question I have is how would a family use it? If I buy it on my cell, does the family need to crowd around the cell to hear anything and in London traffic will we be able to hear it? And they don't speak to whether visitors from outside the U.K. can use the service (I assume yes).
From their Web site, "The narrator is Ben Whitehead, a professional tour guide and actor, and his five alter-egos narrate the hidden tales you won't find anywhere else."
I regret to say that for technical reasons the Do Me ... London sound guides work only with UK phones. We plan to open up the service to US and other non-UK phones in the future. Browsing the site to use the map, photos and text information should work on any phone though.
If you let the call go to voicemail, you can listen to it as many times as you like (although you'll lose the welcome message which will fail to record as your own voicemail greeting is being played.) As with a regular call, you can plug in headphones or speakers, or switch on the phone's internal speaker, if you want more than one person to listen at once.
As to volume, we play the sound files as loud as technology permits, and they come across at about the same volume as a regular call.
Very glad you thought the guides were "funny and interesting" - that's exactly the effect we were attempting to create.
Duncan
Do Me ... London