Tagwhat Launches First Tools to Tether Web Content with a Relevant Physical Location and Push it to Mobile Users at the Location

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tagwhat, the mobile tour guide for the world, today announced the launch of the first ever location-based publishing tool to quickly and easily tether digital content from the web to its relevant real-world location, so mobile users can have that content delivered to them when they are that physical location. The company also announced the release of a push notifications feature in the Tagwhat mobile app that proactively notifies users about interesting stories nearby, even when the app is not open on their smartphone.

“Over the past year, Tagwhat has been a great vehicle for us to push our content about the history, attractions and accommodations in the Dallas area to visitors when they are here or are planning a trip here”

Publishing Tool: Tether Web Content to the Real World

Tagwhat’s new publishing tool addresses a growing challenge related to consuming content on the mobile device. As the amount of content on the Web increases, there is still no easy way for businesses and organizations to leverage it in the context of location or for people to access it at the places where that content is the most relevant.

For example, universities cannot easily deliver the thousands of YouTube videos that could comprise great campus tours to spots around campus. Images and text telling the stories of heritage sites and historic Main Streets worldwide sit idle on the web when ideally they could delight and inform passersby at those locations. Tourism bureaus fail to leverage mountains of rich multimedia to engage visitors at the destination. Similarly, restaurateurs and shopkeepers spend countless hours creating websites, blogs, and social network streams but have no simple way to share them with nearby customers.

The Tagwhat publishing tool allows users to quickly select content on a Web page and assign it to any location in the world in a designated channel, such as Food, Sports, or Art. The Tagwhat backend then optimizes the content for delivery to a smartphone and makes it available to access via the Tagwhat app. Content can include text, photos and video. Businesses and organizations can even tether social media streams, such as their Facebook pages and Twitter streams, to engage nearby mobile users with real-time content.

Tagwhat has created two tools that enable this advanced “geotagging” functionality. Like a Pinterest button for location, the “Tag it” button is a Web browser “bookmarklet” that allows users to quickly select content on a Web page in a single click and direct it to any spot on a map. The Tagwhat Publishing Dashboard lets users upload their own digital content to real-world places and manage what they have created. Content uploaded with the new publishing tools is added to Tagwhat’s database of more than two million pieces of connected content globally.

“Over the past 20 years, the world has developed billions of pages of Web content. But there continues to be no way to deliver the content to real-world settings -- where the information would be most meaningful,” said Dave Elchoness, founder and CEO of Tagwhat. “Rather than typing in a search engine query and hoping for the best, location-aware mobile devices now enable a new way to search for and discover Web content based on the context of a user’s location and their interests. By making it incredibly easy to geotag Web content, Tagwhat is helping to turn the Web into a massive tour guide with relevant content about the places around you.”

Already, businesses and organizations are using Tagwhat to deliver their Web content at the most opportunistic time – when users or customers are physically at relevant locations. “Over the past year, Tagwhat has been a great vehicle for us to push our content about the history, attractions and accommodations in the Dallas area to visitors when they are here or are planning a trip here,” said Traci Mayer, Executive Director of the Dallas/Fort Worth Area Tourism Council. “Tagwhat’s new publishing tools make this process even easier and enable us to expand the amount of content we have currently tagged.”

Notifications Feature: Discover Interesting Stories

With the new Tagwhat push notifications feature, users can be notified of stories they might find interesting everywhere they go, even when the phone is in their pocket. Users can personalize their notifications by determining how often they want to receive them and by selecting content channels that interest them such as Movies, Heritage, Sports, Food, Art, and Music. Tagwhat users who have added Tags to their recently announced Travel Log as a place they “Want to Go” can choose to be notified when they are near a Tag on that list. Imagine using Tagwhat to find and save interesting places you want to see while planning your trip to London, and then have the app buzz you as you approach those places throughout your trip!

About Tagwhat

Tagwhat is the mobile tour guide for the world. Using your mobile device’s built-in location sensors, Tagwhat delivers the web and social networking content about the places around you, wherever you are. By associating the vast amount of digital multimedia content with its relevant real-world location, Tagwhat is pioneering a new way of organizing information by using the powerful context of location and interests. Walk by a statue in Rome and Tagwhat delivers an article on the artist’s inspiration, a short historical video about the Italian Renaissance, and the local historical society’s Facebook page. Tagwhat is available for iOS and Android.