Promote your destination with full featured Premier membership

by Jackson Everett - 9/1/09 5:49 PM

Encourage tourism to your destination by creating GPS tour guides with the newly enhanced Premier Membership of our GeoTour Creator. This full-featured, web-based application enables you to define points of interest using text, audio, photo and video media. Your GeoTour can be viewed online and downloaded by travelers to a GPS or mp3 device and used as a mobile travel guide.

You get full access, unlimited storage and hosting to develop tours that can be discovered on our GeoTour Xchange search engine and your own branded micro-site. You can also market each tour independently through your website, blog, email and social media campaigns. We even handle shopping cart, payment and fulfillment of each tour purchase, saving you the trouble of processing the sale. To top it off, we provide reporting tools to help you track interest, tour downloads and revenue generated.

Our Premier Membership offers the following benefits.

GEOTOUR CREATOR
Create, edit, redesign or delete your GeoTours at any time with full content control and unlimited storage and hosting.

GEOTOUR XCHANGE
Our advanced search options direct visitors to your GeoTours. Your uniquely branded micro-site displays an index of all your available tour products.

REVENUE GENERATION
Offer free or premium GeoTours from our website and websites of your choice. Sell advertising that links to local businesses. Attract visitors to your destination.

CREATIVE SERVICES
Our expert team can handle web design, integration and content development for you.


Contact us today so we can walk you through this unique tool that will help visitors explore your destination in a new and exciting way. See our GeoTour Premier page on the web to learn more.

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TomTom and Garmin Route Downloads!

by Scott Rock - 4/8/08 8:29 PM

We've added two new download formats to GeoTours Web--Garmin Routes and TomTom.

Garmin Routes

Would you like to be automatically guided to each tour location when you download a tour in the Garmin TourGuide format? Now you can! Routes are currently compatible with the Garmin nuvi 7xx, 8xx, 9xx, and 5000, all zumo devices, and the StreetPilot 7200 and 7500. When you're downloading a tour to your Garmin GPS device, you'll see a link to download the route. Click this link and follow the instructions to download and install the route to your compatible Garmin device.

TomTom

Now you can download any tour to a TomTom GO or ONE device. Simply select the TomTom download format on the Download Tour page and follow the instructions provided. Unfortunately, TomTom does not have a POI format like Garmin does with the Garmin TourGuide Format, so the download won't contain any audio or images--just the location names. However, you can also download all the audio and images from the tour and load them to your TomTom device. Then, you can play them manually once you're at the tour locations.

Enjoy!

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Introducing GeoTours Premium

by Scott Rock - 11/25/07 5:29 PM

We're proud to announce the latest addition to the GeoTours family -- GeoTours Premium. GeoTours Premium adds many features that can be useful in promoting and sharing your GPS tours across the web.

These new features include:

  • Tour Widgets - embed your GPS tours in any web page or blog of your choice. You customize exactly how your tour will look. more information
  • Mini-Sites - create and configure your very own Mini-Site with up to six pages to showcase your GPS tours. The page content, layout, color scheme are all fully configurable and up to you. more information
  • Increased File Storage Limit - GeoTours Premium offers you 250MB; that's 10 times as much as your normal GeoTours account! more information
  • Enhanced Tour Reporting - now you can see detailed information about how your tours are being accessed. You'll get dynamic, up-to-date charts and graphs depicting your tour statistics such as the number of views, downloads, download types, and more! more information
  • Personalized Branding - you choose exactly how you want your tours, Mini-Site, and Tour Widgets to appear. The branding feature allows you to choose the color of more than 10 page components and upload your own custom header image. more information
  • Professional Tour Creation Services - whether you need help with audio engineering, graphic design, copy editing/creation, or even if you would like someone to come to your location to create a tour for you, we can help! more information

We all know that GPS devices are the way of the future, and with GPS devices comes GPS tourism. GeoTours Premium offers you all the tools you need to create, showcase, and promote your destination through GPS tourism. Start using GeoTours Premium to begin driving traffic to your destination today!

GeoTours Premium is a paid service with a free 1-month trial available. To view more information or to sign up, click here.

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Taking GPS Tours to New Heights

by Scott Rock - 10/19/07 9:22 PM

Scott Rock, Mark Rowlands, and Randy Waldman

Mark Rowlands is taking GPS tours to new heights. Mark uses GeoTours Web to create GPS tours that he then downloads to his Garmin nuvi. But here's the kicker--rather than taking his tour in a car or on foot like the rest of us, he takes it in his helicopter! Mark already rents his Robinson R44 helicopter for movie shoots, aerial photos, training, and more, but he hopes to find a new niche for his helicopter--GPS tours over Los Angeles and surrounding areas. During a recent trip to California, I had the opportunity to meet up with Mark and take an aerial tour.

We put a quick video together showcasing the GPS tour here:



Mark found the Geovative.com site a while back after seeking a solution that would allow him to create and give GPS tours on his Garmin iQue 3600. GeoTours iQue was a perfect fit for him. After creating a tour and trying it out on his iQue, he quickly came up wtih the idea of giving GPS tours from his helicopter.

Since then, Mark has upgraded to a Garmin nuvi 350 and uses the Garmin TourGuide feature. Along with the TourGuide feature, Mark also uses the nuvi's MP3 player. "I like being able to play background audio during the tour and have the tour location audio cut in when we pass the location," says Mark. The helicopter has an auxilary audio input which Mark plugs the nuvi into so all occupants can hear the audio.

Because the nuvi is an automotive unit, it still has its quirks when being used in the air, such as "snapping" to the nearest road or displaying "Driving South" even though you're in the air, but these issues are easily overcome by changing the nuvi's settings. The other tweak mark has to make is setting the proximity to a much larger distance than would be used for a driving tour.




We at Geovative Solutions wish to thank Mark for sharing his story with us as well as for the sample tour. We wish you luck on your endeavor, and thanks for using GeoTours!


Have your own innovative idea for using GPS tours? Let us know and we may showcase it on our blog!


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Location Proximity

by Scott Rock - 10/17/07 1:35 PM

In a recent blog post, we announced the ability to set the proximity in which a Garmin TourGuide location triggers. We initially put this setting at the tour level. Since then, we've had requests for a more granular approach to setting location proximity. A simple example is if you have a tour that includes a mountain peak in the distance and a restaurant. You don't want to use the same proximity for each location. Instead, you'd want to use a smaller proximity for the restaurant and a larger proximity for the mountain peak.

Thus, we have recently added support to set the proximity on a location-by-location basis. You'll still see the same proximity field when creating a new tour. However, the meaning of this field has changed. It now serves as the "default" proximity distance for all locations in the tour. When you add a new location to a tour, the default proximity distance will be auto-populated in the Proximity field on the Add Location form (you'll have to click "More Options" first). If you wish to make that location's distance different than the default value, go ahead! Only that specific location will be affected.

If you want to change a location's proximity in the future, simply click the Edit Location button and you can easily change the location. Want to change the default tour-level proximity? Then simply click the "Edit Tour Settings" option in the Tour Options drop-down menu.

In adding this new feature, we set the proximity for each location to it's current tour proximity distance, so you should see no change in your tour's performance.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

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New Tour Features

by Scott Rock - 8/2/07 9:46 PM

We've been hard at work to make GeoTours Web even more user-friendly and have incorporated some suggestions received from our users. We believe these features will be a tremendous help in creating and administering your tours. Check out the new features below!

  • If you haven't already noticed, the tour menu has been improved and turned into a drop-down menu. The left side gives tour options that allow you to perform various tasks on the tour, and the right side allows you to quickly download the tour into a format of your choice.

  • Within the new Tour Options drop-down menu, you'll now see a new option called Edit Tour Order. This option allows you to quickly and easily modify the order of your tour locations. Simply move them up or down, then click Update and your tour order is now in the order you specified.



  • You'll also notice two new options on the Edit Tour page. The first, Proximity, allows you to specify, in feet, the distance you need to be from the tour location when the associated multimedia is displayed. Once set, the distance will carry through in the various download formats. The second, Show Route, allows you to specify whether you want the driving route automatically displayed (or not displayed) on your tour.


  • Another update we've made is the ability to be automatically notified via e-mail whenever someone posts a comment to a tour you've created. Now you'll know the moment you have a new comment posted on any of your tours.

Enjoy these new features, and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them to our forum or contact us.

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Improved Downloads!

by Scott Rock - 7/23/07 11:30 AM

Downloading a tour just got even easier! We've made a few key improvements to the way tours are downloaded which should make it even easier and quicker to take your tour offline and into the "real" world.

The improvements include:

  • Garmin TourGuide Files - no longer must you download the files necessary to load using Garmin POI Loader. Instead, you can directly download the tour's Garmin TourGuide POI file in .GPI format. Simply save it to your GPS device's Garmin\POI directory, and off you go! If you'd rather download the GPS Exchange (GPX) file and media files to use POI Loader, that feature is still available.

  • Quick Downloads From Tour Page - now, you can go to a tour's download page with one click by clicking the "Download As..." dropdown box at the top of any tour web page. From this dropdown, select the type or format that you want to download the tour in. If you'd rather choose your download type by looking at a list of compatible devices, then choose the "Choose by Device" option.

  • GPX Only and Media Only Download Options - if you want to download the GPX file or media files separately, now you can. Just choose the appropriate option in the "Download As..." dropdown box.


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Easily Import Tour Locations

by Scott Rock - 7/2/07 10:27 PM

We just finished developing two new methods to add locations to your tours:

  • Import from a Garmin GPS Device - using the new Garmin Communicator Plugin, you can upload any saved point on your compatible Garmin device to your tour. This makes it extremely simple to log locations and create tours! Garmin Communicator Plugin is compatible with any Garmin device that connects to your computer via a USB cable.


  • Upload a GPS Exchange (GPX) File - already have GPS information stored in a GPX file? Now you can simply upload the file to GeoTours Web and it will be automatically detect the locations and allow you to add them to your tour. For more information on the GPX format, click here.

For both methods, after the tour locations are detected, you will be presented with a list of them. From this list, you can select one or multiple locations, then click "Import" and the locations will be automatically added to your tour.

You will see these two new options on the Add Tour Location section on your tour's page (see below).


As always, if you have any questions or problems with these new features, contact us.

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GeoTours Mobile

by Scott Rock - 7/1/07 12:43 AM


Please join us in welcoming the latest addition to the GeoTours family--GeoTours Mobile!! GeoTours Mobile allows you to turn your mobile device (Smartphone or PDA) into a digital GPS tour guide. With GeoTours Mobile, you can import tours created with GeoTours Web. At each tour location, the associated media (audio, image, or text) will be automatically played. You can also see how far and in which direction each tour location is from your current location.

GeoTours Mobile is compatible with any device running Windows Mobile 5.0 or Pocket PC 2003. Integrated or attached GPS receivers are supported. However, a GPS receiver is not required since tour locations can be "previewed" without a valid GPS signal.

GeoTours Mobile is shareware. To download a free trial, click here. To purchase a full version for $29.99, click here.

Click here for much more information on GeoTours Mobile.

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