Travel discovery startup Gogobot is making its first entry into the mobile space today with a new, free iOS app.
In case you aren’t familiar, Gogobot is sort of like a Yelp for travel. The site leverages social data from Facebook, Foursquare and other services. You can navigate Gogobot by searching for places or things and see where a particular user has gone by navigating his or her passports. Check out our launch post from last year for a detailed review of the service.
The new iOS app includes all this functionality and more, plus allows you to create and share real-time digital postcards, find nearby restaurant, hotels and attractions to your current location, and access personalized trip plans.
Users of the app can select their current location, snap a photo and choose from more than ten different styles and filters to transform their photos (or photos from Gogobot’s extensive catalogue) into beautiful, geo-tagged digital postcards. It’s sort of like an Instagram experience but tailored for travel.
Users can rate the places they have been to on the fly, write reviews and share the postcards immediately with friends via Facebook or Twitter. Each postcard is added automatically to a user’s Gogobot Guide on the site.
The Gogobot App also allows users to access the trip plans that they’ve created on their Gogobot.com profiles, including maps, reviews and more. Additionally, the ‘Nearby’ function lists the best restaurants, hotels and attractions automatically based on a user’s location, making it easy to find recommended places on the fly. Similar to Gogobot.com, the app sorts destinations based on your friends’ ratings.
As we mentioned above, this is Gogobot’s first entry into the mobile space, and an Android app will be arriving early next year, says Gogobot CEO Travis Katz. With the company’s mobile strategy, “the whole idea is how to capture mobile behaviors when people travel (i.e. taking pictures, checkins) and to make the experience it useful and beautiful,” he explains.
Called by Michael Arrington “one of my favorite new startups for 2010,” Gogobot connects you with friends to make planning and sharing your travels fun. Based in Silicon Valley, Gogobot launched its private beta in November, 2010. The site has been covered by TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, AllThingsD, Trendslate, the nationally syndicated Nate Berkus Show, WGN-TV Chicago and was mentioned in Trendwatching’s 11 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2011.
The site was founded by ex-MySpace exec Travis…