Software Development

Tour a neighborhood from your couch with this app: Crumbdrop

Currently in beta, Crumbdrop allows users to create a virtual tour by dropping a trail of photos on a map. Real estate agents are one likely paying customer.

Lucie Leblois is the cofounder of Crumbdrop. (Photo courtesy of Crumbdrop)

Lucie Leblois knows the internet backwards and forward.
“I dove into the dot-com world,” she said, working on SEO at WashingtonPost.com at the dawn of online news.
These were the good old days, when “our job was to get readers online,” election results were still tracked by coloring U.S. maps with markers — at the end of election night, Nov. 7, 2000, Florida was a “purple brown” mess — and “mobile was not even on the radar,” she said.
“It really hooked me to the internet,” she said. “I just started seeing the real potential of what this medium could do.”

The Crumbdrop app.

The Crumbdrop app.


Armed with her knack for spotting the shortcomings in user experience, Leblois is now creating a new app. Crumbdrop allows users to create a virtual tour of a neighborhood by dropping pictures on a map. “A mini chapter, if you will, of something that you did,” she said.
Leblois bumped upon the idea by observing where the internet was heading — and where it hadn’t been yet. “Twitter and Instagram all are great ways to tell stories,” said Leblois. “How do you tie these stories together and make a deeper context?”
She cofounded Crumbdrop in 2012 with Christian Allen — her husband’s former college roommate at Trinity College, whom she’s known since age 18. Ahead of its upcoming launch, the app, currently in beta, will charge realtors $9.99 per month to help them give neighborhood tours to their clients.
But the app also presents the potential to branch out into social networks, which might be the next step for Crumbdrop. It allows users to make a geo-trail of images from pictures they either take on the ground or input manually.
“Pictures literally fall on the map,” she said. “You can actually build a trail from your couch.”

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