Quick Pitch: TourWrist turns panoramic photos into virtual tours that are easy to embed on websites.
Genius Idea: Making the virtual tour an accessible marketing tool.
While 73% of homeowners say they're more likely to use a realtor who offers to make a video, just 12% of real estate professionals have YouTube accounts.
"What that says to me is that there’s a divide between consumer demand for a more comprehensive picture of the places that they’re paying for and the tools that marketers have to provide it," says Charles Armstrong, the CEO of TourWrist.
TourWrist aims to make adding comprehensive visual tours of any space easy for tourism, real estate and other businesses.
The company's website and iPhone app allow consumers to browse through collections, or "tours," of panoramic photos that they can spin, zoom and drag in any direction. The tours are embeddable, so marketers can add them to their websites in the same way that they'd add a YouTube video.
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An American Idol panorama on the TourWrist platform allows viewers to get a 360-degree view of the stage.
TourWrist has attracted panoramic photographers by focusing more on distribution -- a browser-friendly interface and tour format -- while other apps on creating the image. Since the startup launched in January, photographers have used a third-party panoramic image tool to create the photos they upload to TourWrist, but Armstrong says TourWrist will add its own image creator in December.
Its own image creation tool could help make the platform appealing to not just professionals and marketers, but also anybody visiting a space -- and that could result in a more honest view of the places people pay for.
As Armstrong puts it: "The average marketing person is getting pretty good at taking a picture of a room with a wide angle lens and making a dingy two-star hotel look like a five-star Ritz-Carlton,"
The bootstrapped startup isn't bringing in any revenue, despite having as many as 20,000 people download its free app in a week and counting organizations such as ReMax and the University of Florida among its users. Next year, it will add advertising and begin offering an ad-free premium service with additional interactive features.
While Google and Bing have both made moves toward providing panoramic views of businesses, Armstrong is betting that businesses and consumers will embrace the opportunity to show off their surroundings themselves if it can be done in a way that doesn't seem to require computer scientists.
"We’ve made it easy to do something that frankly we think should have been easy to do before," he says.
Image courtesy of MarketMeSuite, MarketMeSuite
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
