Last year I started working for a company here in San Francisco that writes apps for the iPhone and Android. Specifically there’s one app that’s their big seller and I’m going to tell you about HearPlanet today. It’s a cool little app that replaces those guidebooks you would need to use when you travel around and it does a very good job of it.
I should know, I did quite a few of the voiceovers for the app in my home studio. It uses GPS location and pops up the places around you and gives you a little background story on the places. Not only is there custom content that we created, but there’s also works drawn from Wikipedia and CitySearch to add to the list so that no matter where you are there’s something to hear. While there’s a large amount of data on San Francisco because the company started here, there are cities served around the world.
If you download the app for your iPhone or Android phone and you happen to be traveling around San Francisco or New York you might hear my voice pop up. [hint, the links are to samples I’ve done.] There are special featured places and they now have it set up so that you can join their site and upload your own content of places you like around the city, or whatever city you’re in.
The app itself costs $4.99 for iPhone [$2.99 for Android], but there is a free lite version of the app that has the banner ads on the screen. It’s well worth the price. Some of the businesses also offer special deals when you look them up in the app.
HearPlanet taught me a lot of things, like how to virtually run a company. We’d all meet up on Mondays or if we couldn’t we’d join in on a Skype conference call to see what our work was going to be for the week, then some of us at least, would go home and do the work. I learned the joys of using dropbox to transfer files that we were working on and how to work in the cloud. This was new to me and it was a really great innovation for a way to work.
I also learned how to better manage CSS and uploading the content to the backend of the system. It was a very cool process to be involved in and now you can be involved to. Everyone loves to tweet reviews of places, now you can actually write up a review of a place and upload a picture and audio. I think this is going to take off very soon. Check it out.
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