TAO City Guides is a Paris based company offering location aware tour guides of the city via hand-held PDA type devices. Tourists can rent and return the GPS enabled devices at one of many popular city hotels or via the company’s own Paris based store, with a 200 euro deposit. Rental arrangements can also be made through the taocityguide.com website and are typically priced at ~10-15 euro per day.
The guides can help tourists navigate between various hand picked points of interest around the city, find nearby restaurants and stores, and read about or hear audio tour information on major points of interest throughout the city. TAO City claims that the devices are loaded with the equivalent of four guidebooks worth of information.
As a nice added feature the devices also contains bi lingual dictionaries, food vocabulary and phrase finder features to help their English, Japanese and Spanish speaking visitors more easily communicate in French.
It sounds like recent visitors to Paris have found the devices being offered on a special 1 euro per day, which would seem to indicate the TAO is trying to either spark demand or is potentially moving to an ad sponsorship model where advertising businesses within the device is supplementing rental income.
The use of un assisted GPS technology likely presents some user experience challenges for customers trying to plan itineraries and get their bearings from within their hotel or their next stop from within the Louvre for example. Also, the long time to first fix may be challenging in more urban sections of Paris, but standing on a street corner waiting for a signal fix, still beats pulling out that 40 panel folding map, and spending 20 minutes trying to figure out how to fold it back up. According to the company, battery life is limited to 3-4 hours, depending on the level of use.
Despite some of the potential shortcomings, these type of services could have huge potential. They will not only allow visitors a new found sense of confidence in exploring a new city without concern of getting lost, but also eliminating the often times embarrassing need to ask for direction from locals who may not be very understanding of non French speaking visitors.
The Calabash World Explorer offers a similar service for travelers visiting the US Virgin Islands, and from the number of tourist I see each day wandering haplessly through mid town Manhattan, a NYC service with its 40 million annual visitors could be a huge hit.
The guides can help tourists navigate between various hand picked points of interest around the city, find nearby restaurants and stores, and read about or hear audio tour information on major points of interest throughout the city. TAO City claims that the devices are loaded with the equivalent of four guidebooks worth of information.
As a nice added feature the devices also contains bi lingual dictionaries, food vocabulary and phrase finder features to help their English, Japanese and Spanish speaking visitors more easily communicate in French.
It sounds like recent visitors to Paris have found the devices being offered on a special 1 euro per day, which would seem to indicate the TAO is trying to either spark demand or is potentially moving to an ad sponsorship model where advertising businesses within the device is supplementing rental income.
The use of un assisted GPS technology likely presents some user experience challenges for customers trying to plan itineraries and get their bearings from within their hotel or their next stop from within the Louvre for example. Also, the long time to first fix may be challenging in more urban sections of Paris, but standing on a street corner waiting for a signal fix, still beats pulling out that 40 panel folding map, and spending 20 minutes trying to figure out how to fold it back up. According to the company, battery life is limited to 3-4 hours, depending on the level of use.
Despite some of the potential shortcomings, these type of services could have huge potential. They will not only allow visitors a new found sense of confidence in exploring a new city without concern of getting lost, but also eliminating the often times embarrassing need to ask for direction from locals who may not be very understanding of non French speaking visitors.
The Calabash World Explorer offers a similar service for travelers visiting the US Virgin Islands, and from the number of tourist I see each day wandering haplessly through mid town Manhattan, a NYC service with its 40 million annual visitors could be a huge hit.
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