Tourism on your phone: How Philly is leading and why it matters

With tourism, it’s all about where you are. Exactly where you are.
In Philadelphia, the past month has seen a wash of mobile geo-location tourism applications launch in and around the Cradle of Liberty. Trends say those deals and the mobile tools they employ today will help to profoundly reconfigure how tourists experience this greene country towne in the future.
City tourism officials announced last week with great fanfare a mobile app that puts users onto competitive ‘treks,’ sending them throughout the city to find and explore and earn points for what they find and how they find it. Philadelphia is the first city to use the platform, developed with SCVNGR, a now Boston-based company rooted at Princeton and Drexel universities.
In May, a deal was announced that partnered Commonwealth booster agency visitPA with geo-location social media powerhouse Foursquare, offering users digital badges for checking in at locations across the state in one of three categories: dining, buying and museum-going. Visit Bucks County has also launched a Foursquare deal, and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. is starting to play there too.
Then in early June, the Fairmount Park Art Association unveiled its multi-platform Museum without Walls, in which visitors to the Ben Franklin Parkway can dial a phone number and choose to hear professionally-produced, rich oral histories of the art and sculptures that line that famed promenade.
All are giving users choice.
Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.