Maybe you’ve heard about of the bison roaming San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park but don’t know where to find them? Or, you might want to locate the headquarters of the world’s seventh most visited English language Web site so you can show your visiting parents in-person what that “Craigslist thing” is you keep mentioning.
With the new smart phone application Unbeaten Path, you could be your own tour guide – mapping historical sites, reading and editing descriptions of common and not-so-common attractions, and sharing location photos and ratings. It’s all part of a new smart phone application conceived of (but not yet launched) by four University of San Francisco businesses students, turned graduates, for their senior entrepreneurship and business plan development project – for which they won first prize in the USF Undergraduate Business Plan Competition this spring.
After winning the USF competition, the team – made up of Mellice Hackett ’09, Morgan Walton ’09, Kelly Kaufman ’09, and Emmeline Tran ’09 – was invited to make a 90-second fast-pitch presentation to real investors at Silicon Valley’s SDForum: Tech Titans of Tomorrow conference in May.
“The Uneaten Path is a GPS-based iPhone and Blackberry application that offers a travel map with ‘fact dots’ providing user-generated information about unique points of interest, as well as popular attractions in major cities throughout the United States,” Tran said.
While generally embracing an open source approach, new “fact dots” would be edited and verified by Unbeaten Path before publication. Users could sort the dots by the categories that most interest them, such as arts, architecture, or music.
While some potential investors at the conference worried Unbeaten Path might be too easily duplicated, the idea garnered attention in the Wall Street Journal’s “Venture Capital Dispatch” blog on May 14, and at least one investor has invited the team to meet privately, Tran said.
