Spending time in New York City anytime soon? Well, if you are, there is a new mobile app that you absolutely have to check out. The Garment District, New York City’s high-end fashion design center, can be an amazing experience or a complete nightmare. Fashion26 hotel and Socialight, a location-based social media platform that helps connect media content to a physical location, have come together to make navigating the fast-paced streets of New York’s fashion district much easier.
Fashion26 is a Wyndham hotel that just opened in April of this year. The goal of Fashion26 is to cater to the needs of tourists spending their time in New York’s fashion center. The hotel’s Director of Sales and Marketing, Diedre Yack, says that they really wanted to make Fashion26 stand out from the other hotels in the city. In December of 2009 they discovered Socialight and teamed up to develop a mobile service based app for NYC that guides tourists throughout the fashion district.
The app is called Socialight Concierge, and it offers restaurant, shopping, and art recommendations and even walking audio tours. It can provide instant links to NYC concierge services and access to NYC’s subway map. Yack says that Socialight Concierge is simply an extension of the normal concierge services offered. According to Yack, guests have liked and appreciated the app that lets them know about nearby sales, free museum passes, and tons of other useful tourist information.
Socialight’s services go way beyond Socialight Concierge. The Socialight platform finds user-generated content like video, audio, text, imaging, and comments that are all filtered depending on the user’s interests, locations, and times. Now it is very different than the other location-based services that are currently available like Foursquare or Gowalla. Socialight really lets the user customize the experience according to their interests.
The co-founder of Socialight, Dan Melinger, says, “The most interesting part of this to me is how it can enhance one's experience in a city. People aren't going to want to spend all day searching for events in the city. With location-smart push notifications, we can engage with people in a more mutually beneficial way."
The app is basically free with an open API. Socialight makes their money by teaming up with companies like Fashion26 hotel or by charging a small fee to publish an application. Right now it is only available on Apple’s iPhone, but very soon there will be an Android version of the app.
Socialights Concierge is only going to have more opportunities to profit as it gains popularity. There is a ton of potential for restaurants, shops, and museums to utilize the app for advertising to curious tourists. This could definitely bring in the cash for Socialights. They already have sponsorships like the guest bike rental discount with Chelsea Bicycles.
Socialights has a variety of different mobile apps all over the world. Their new Socialight Concierge app can definitely be a huge help if you’re spending some time in New York City. It can give some great tips about the best shopping, restaurants, and museums that NYC has to offer.
Looking for other mobile apps? Read all about the best free iPhone apps of 2010.
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