Innovation That Matters

App tags physical places with personal stories

Travel & Tourism

Findery links stories with real-world locations through geotagged 'notes' that can be left for online explorers to discover.

The offline world is gradually becoming connected with the web, and we’ve already seen apps such as Grafetee let users ‘bookmark’ physical locations. Created by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Findery now helps to link stories with real-world locations through geotagged ‘notes’ that can be left for online explorers to discover.

Available for iOS devices, the app aims to enable residents and travelers alike to pin their own stories or a piece of local knowledge to its corresponding location on the globe. Anyone can then browse the notes for any particular area to find out something new that perhaps they wouldn’t have found elsewhere. The app has been in beta for the past two years and has already built up an active userbase to ensure that the most populated global cities have enough content for users to find something interesting. Notes can be organized into their own NoteMaps, collecting stories about a particular topic or showing the best places to get pizza.

Although Findery is marketed towards sharing the stories that might otherwise remain as oral history, the platform serves more broadly as a way for users to geotag any piece of information, private or public. Are there other ways that communties’ shared location-enabled data could offer insight into the way we live?

Email: help@findery.com

Website: www.findery.com