Panos to the People! 0

by Dan Smigrod • Industry News, TourWrist News • Tags: , ,

2012 marks the virtual tour panorama renaissance because of initiatives by Apple, Google, Microsoft and TourWrist:

  1. First Microsoft launched its PhotoSynth app and panorama sharing via its Bing Maps
  2. Then, Apple launched iOS 6 with native panorama photography
  3. Monday, Google enhanced its Android Jellybean OS 4.2 to include Photo Sphere panorama photography and panorama sharing via its Google Maps
  4. Now TourWrist licenses its platform-agnostic, panorama capture and viewer SDKs to include in your companies’ websites and apps

White Pages versus Yellow Pages

Apple, Google and Microsoft are doing the heavy lifting of promoting an easy way to shoot panoramas on mobile devices, and Google and Microsoft for sharing panoramas on their respective maps. TourWrist provides a platform to enable marketers like you to integrate our viewer and capture technology (SDKs) in your websites and apps. If Google and Microsoft maps are the “white pages” listings of panoramas on their maps, TourWrist is the “yellow pages” providing marketers with robust tools, such as:

Mobile Photo
In 2003, digital photography made the leap from digital cameras to web-connected mobile phones, marking the beginning of the photo-social-web as we know it. To power all these images however, consumers needed a convenient, web-based platform and sharing community. They found it with Flickr, which quickly established itself as a leading, mobile photo publishing platform.
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Mobile Video
By 2006, YouTube had become equally visible, providing a similar solution for web-hosted videos. Having this infrastructure in place was key, as it fueled demand and distribution partnerships which paved the way for an avalache of smartphone pre-installations, beginning with the Apple iPhone in 2007.
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Mobile Pano
With Apple, Google and Microsoft adding panoramic photography to mobile devices, panos are primed for mainstream adoption. The market too, is ready, as smartphone-based image/video publishing is showing tremendous year-over-year growth. TourWrist – the leading platform empowering consumers to shoot, discover and share 360-degree panoramic images via smartphones, tablets and computers – is ready to fuel open, online pano sharing in much the same way that photos and videos are served.

Think of TourWrist as the YouTube of panoramas. Like YouTube (though specific to virtual tours rather than video), we offer both a global, agnostic publishing destination and distributive infrastructure for third-party publishing. The latter is key. TourWrist technology is fueling a pivot point within the travel industry, where travel brands can now — for the first time — easily add panoramic image capture and virtual tour viewers to their own websites and apps.

Our Expertise
Our team — one that specializes in mobile delivery, big data, UX and computer vision — has been redefining panoramas for the past 18 months. By focusing on motion control algorithms, panoramic capture technologies, and progressive business methods, we’ve reinvented panoramas. Earlier this year, we were awarded Best of Show at Macworld. We then went on to win DEMOgod and People’s Choice awards at DEMO Spring 2012, plus a million dollars in advertising. Apple used our app in this year’s global media tour and has featured us nearly 600 times in the App Store — which may have had something to do with us reaching “#1 iPad Travel App” status in 81 countries. More importantly, we have a highly-regarded IP portfolio that includes 10 pending patents. Our own global platform is preparing to reach tens of millions of travelers in 2013, and we already operate the world’s largest pro panoramic photographer community.
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While Apple, Google and Microsoft focus on enhancing mobile devices with panorama capture, TourWrist is focused on delivering powerful, personal publishing tools that democratize the pano industry.

Add the dramatic proliferation of smartphones and tablets and social image sharing to the panorama equation and you can see why TourWrist is ready to help marketers surf the mobile-social-pano tsunami.


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Banner image by Kanga360.