What is Blazr?
Part travel journal, part tour guide app, part social game. Blazr is a web and mobile application
that helps you learn what’s around you and share what you know about places. Blazr is an early
stage startup. Its web app will soon launch for limited public release, with the mobile app not far
behind. Blazr’s goal is to be part Lonely Planet, part Wikipedia, part FourSquare.
The Team
Lee Lindsey, CEO
Learning Technology Leader, Genworth. Lee’s work concerns how mobile,
distance, and social technologies can be used to help people learn the skills
needed to do their work. Lee has designed award-winning e-Learning
employing game mechanics and story-based approaches, and has published
work in the areas of entrepreneurship, experiential learning, and instructional
design.
John Kelvie, CTO
Owner, Atomizer Software, startup developing an educational game to teach
programming. Formerly Interim CEO, Ahead.com, CTO, Odin Technologies,
and Co-Founder and Chief Architect, Overture Technologies.
The Problem
Travelers to an area, as well as its residents, face a fragmented set of technology options for
learning about places. Want a tour guide app for Chicago? There’s an app for that, but you have
to go and find the best one, and hope the person maintaining it has kept it up to date. Want a
tour guide app for a smaller location like Salem, VA? Sorry, there’s not an app for that. Want to
travel through an area and serendipitously be told by your phone what’s around you? Nope, not
much there either. There is no single service that acts as personal escort as you go about your
day, telling you what’s around you, with features such as recommending the best nearby
restaurant when it’s lunch time, and getting you there. Similarly, localities, museums,
businesses, civic organizations, and others have a fragmented set of technology options for
sharing comprehensive current and historical knowledge of their locations to visitors and
residents. Most don’t have the resources to build an infrastructure for sharing that information,
and no go-to platform, recognized by both consumers and organizations, has clearly emerged.
Likewise, those with an interest in preserving information about places, such as genealogists,
history buffs, or conservationists, lack a go-to tool to capture and record all the changes that
have occurred in a certain place over time.
How Blazr Solves These Problems
Blazr provides a platform to manage knowledge about places. Blazr is at its core a wiki of
places, but tweaks the wiki model in several ways to encourage the contribution of information.
First, Blazr seeds its system with data from 3rd parties. For example, Blazr includes name,
address, phone number, and other key information for 17 million points of interest in the U.S.
Contributors add the information that is not already publicly available, such as an audio guide
about a place and a short “fun fact.” Second, Blazr includes the concepts of “layers” for places.
These layers can either be public or private. Users of the web and mobile app can peel back
layers for a place to see what was happening there at specific points in its history. The goal is to
stand on a street corner in New York City and, through Blazr, know both contemporary and
historical information about that particular location. In Richmond, a contributor could create Civil
War layers for multiple locations, showing what was happening at each location at that time,
with pictures, a description, and more. The contributor could then merge these together into a
“string” - also known as a tour - that allows others to look back in time to experience places as
they were during the Civil War. One could also create private layers to capture details of a trip
taken, bundle them into a string, and post on Facebook as a personal travel journal for friends to
see. The third way Blazr tweaks the wiki model is by employing basic game mechanics such as
points and badges to reward those who contribute information. It also includes the concept of a
“challenge” question related to a place. You leave a challenge for others to answer. A challenge
question could be anything - the name of the head cook or the architectural style of the building.
The goal is to create a knowledge-based reward system.
Business Model
Blazr plans several ways to generate revenue. The first is through ads on its web and mobile
spaces. Blazr’s web app would include display advertising, and the mobile app would include
display as well as audio and video ads. For example, audio narration about a spot would be
preceded by 5-second audio ad. Initially Blazr would use the infrastructure from existing ad
platforms. Over time, Blazr would evaluate the development of its own advertising capabilities.
The second source of revenue is by allowing organizations, businesses, and celebrities to
create branded spots, layers, and strings. For example, a health care organization could create
a string of wellness-oriented activities to do around a particular location, featuring their own
branding and links to their website. The third source of revenue builds on the ability to create
branded items, by allowing content contributors to create premium, ad-free tours (known as
strings in Blazr) for purchase. Many private museums, for example, are challenged with how to
share their vast collections of photographs while monetizing them at the same time. Blazr would
offer a “Geo Store” 70/30 split revenue model to address this need. For those organizations and
individuals whose knowledge is their key resource, this offers a way to share that knowledge in
a way that builds long-term value for their franchise.
Market Size
Gartner estimates that mobile advertising revenue was $3.3 billion in 2011, and projects it to
rise to $20.6 billion by 2015 (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1726614). Gartner notes
that, “Mobile search, which includes paid positioning on maps and various forms of augmented
reality, all of which can be informed by location, will spearhead mobile ad spending.” In terms of
the tourism market, in Virginia tourism brings in billions of dollars in revenue, and millions of
people visit the state each year. Travel revenues for the City of Richmond alone are over $500
million annually (http://www.vatc.org/research/economicimpact.asp). The potential market is
large.