Tweet
Gowalla is now a city guide.(Credit:TechCrunch)
San Francisco--At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today, the first product announcement came from Gowalla CEO Josh Williams. The new version of the service will be bringing city guides to the service, leveraging the company's large database of places and updates from users.
The new version will launch shortly with over 60 city guides, using, of course user content. But the service has new editorial partners, including Disney, National Geographic, and several universities.
With Gowalla, you can now create "stories" around events. Anyone you tag in a location and time becomes a full authoring partner of the post, and the presentation of these stories is quite good.
The question is, by focusing on the traveler instead of the resident, does Gowalla give up the nice deal-based transactional business that Foursquare and Facebook can run with? Perhaps, but the travel business is in many ways a much sweeter place to be. The advertising money is national more than regional, bigger, and more stable. You can still use Gowalla to check in at locations, so this is a bigger, and smarter, pivot than it may appear at first.
TechCrunch has the preview post
Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin | Settlement Statement | WordPress Tutorials