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by delphinius81
3727 days ago
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This has potential to be a really engaging and useful platform, especially if you can connect with the various partners/affiliates. One of the things that I always try to do when traveling is stay in more local friendly neighborhoods to experience the real life of a place. If you can figure out how to integrate this into VR, all the better. I'd even suggest having a mobile app for once you get to a location. It could dynamically curate content based on things happening that day/time, that season, or similar times in years past (e.g. major yearly festivals). My biggest concern is about how many pieces need to hit "critical mass" to be successful. You need digital content to attract users, but your model relies on users to provide the digital content. For example, to cover a new/off-the-path location, you'll need to seed your platform with media. How much media can you scrape from publicly available locations to do this? What incentives would locals have to generate content for the platform for expanding to a new location? Would you pay freelancers or hope for people to upload content for free? Really cool idea though and something that I could totally see using to plan my next trip! |
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Like you said, one of our use cases is helping people find the right neighbourhood to stay in. Whether it's because they find it safe, close to things they'd like to see, or has the vibe and lifestyle they want to experience.
Your suggestions are interesting and we've had similar thoughts. Hope we'll be able to implement them soon.
Regarding your concerns:
We want Lucal to be a community project so we don't see ourselves paying freelancers directly.
You're right, covering off-the-path locations is definitely a challenge as public media sources for these are limited. We indeed need to incentivise locals to contribute to the platform. One such incentive is publicity for their area and small businesses within it. We hope to work with local businesses and get them to contribute media for their areas, providing content for us and getting their names out at the same time. Partnerships with local tourism boards could help us with this as well.
For more popular destinations it's easier to seed the media so we plan to do some of it ourselves at the start. We can attract users with these initially. Once we have a large enough user base we can start social media campaigns for lesser-known places to get the community to contribute to those.