Most of us travelling to new destinations want to explore and learn as much as we can about the country we’re visiting but are sometimes put off by expensive and heavy guide books or tours that will spend our valuable foreign currency, whereas our cell phones are a non-negotiable travel companion.
New Cape Town based startup Hummba, that launched out of beta in 2011, is a social and travel networking website that lets you download audio travel guides for free and share your travel experiences on Hummba, Twitter and Facebook directly from your mobile phone. Hummba, as many South Africans know, is derived from the isiZulu word “hamba”, meaning “to go” but because the URL was already taken, Hummba was used as an appropriate alternative.
Hummba comes at a time when people are increasingly accessing a wealth of information, services and apps from their mobile phones and a travel guide seems such an obvious, yet brilliant feature to add.
Available for Android and iOS devices, with BlackBerry and Nokia versions coming soon, users first download the audio travel guides from a selection of over 400 hours of recorded guides for hundreds of popular tourist destinations in 100 countries. Once downloaded users simply plug in and play the guide with their phones. It may even come in handy when navigating around your own home town.
The Hummba guides combine GPS and mobile technology, with Hummba-created content recorded in the company‘s three studios in Cape Town, Spain and New Zealand, using local guides and fact checking with local tourism authorities. The result is a personal tour guide giving you first-hand information at your exact location that plays as soon as the user is in the area.
Hummba’s parents company, Tourism Radio founded by Mark Allewell in 2005, is the technology behind the guides. The original Tourism Radio device used GPS technology and was used for self-driver tourists who hired cars. Allewell, a qualified tour guide says that “The idea was to create a product with all the correct information, researched and factual, so that tourists could get quality information at any time.”
There are currently about 4000 devices that are rented out from Tourism Radio daily around the world, however, it has created a lot of costs and so Allewell looked at developing an alternative. Allewell, now CEO of Hummba explains that “The expansion of our apps is because we can create great sounding guides with quality content, but expand exponentially at a small percentage of the costs.”
The Hummba website also has a route feature where a user is able to start a route and tag pictures along the way. Jonathan Meyer, content manager at Hummba says “So for example if a tourist is walking around Cape Town, they can track their route, tag pictures and share this with their Twitter followers, Facebook friends and the Hummba community.”
An example of this is the route tracked by the Planet Solar Turanor, a solar powered catamaran that is currently in its final leg of an around-the-world voyage. Hummba is the official media partner of the vessel. Meyer, comments that “It‘s been incredible to watch the crew upload pictures from all the places they have visited over the last 540+ days. This of course is an extreme example, but the routes can be anything from someone mapping their way as they take a drive along the Garden Route to someone doing an around the world trip of their own.”
Another feature, Postcards, is an area where users can share geo tagged snapshots of their travels with others.
More recently, a deal between Hummba and Frommers, one of the world‘s largest producers of guide books has been signed. Allewell says that “They have done a JV with us to produce app travel guides encompassing their text content and our audio and technology.”
In February 2012, Hummba was featured on Forbes Africa‘s Top 20 Tech Start-ups in Africa.
Personally, I‘m really excited about the app and as a BlackBerry user, am looking forward to experiencing it for myself when it becomes available to explore more of my home town and my next travel destination.
Download Hummba for Android and iPhone.
Other source: Media Club SA
