inbabble.com

There are few things more frustrating than being lost or lost for words in a foreign country, whose language either is or may as well be Cantonese. A couple of recently-launched mobile applications address these problems in completely different but valuable and mobile-centric ways.

The first is a service being trialed by PostBus (German only) in Switzerland. It’s essentially an information-oriented version of the barcode-based systems that many mobile operators are implementing as part of their mobile advertising strategies. Signposts around the small town of Heiden in eastern Switzerland have been adorned with special graphics. When scanned by a phone’s camera, they trigger the opening of a web page on the user’s device that displays the nearest bus stop and relevant service schedule. This could be very useful to any hiker, but particularly to tourists who may not know where they are, or have awareness about local transport options. While this may sound like a very niche application, it’s a mobile device- and location-centric approach that can be applied to any environment and provide information on virtually anything.

Meanwhile, Dutch start-up XS2TheWorld is following in the footsteps of Lastminute.com and coolgorilla by launching a mobile talking phrasebook service for travelers. Both services allow you to choose from a range of phrases needed by a typical tourist, from asking for directions to flirting, and have them read out in the required language. Available languages from XS2TheWorld at launch include Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Dutch, Spanish and Thai. In addition to the inclusion of Asian languages, the XS2TheWorld service differentiates itself by offering city guides to selected metropolitan areas in China, Spain, Holland, France and Argentina and Thailand. The company hopes that this will be enough to persuade users to pay £5 per copy of the application.

However, Lastminute.com recently made the coolgorilla phrasebook application free to the user. XS2TheWorld’s city guides will have to be sufficiently relevant to the target audience and very up-to-date, in order to compete effectively with both the coolgorilla application and other mobile city guide providers.

Hamish M.