I am excited to announce our latest product, EveryTrail version 3.1 for iPhone, which went live last week. This is our best mobile product to date, and will strongly shape the future of EveryTrail. Before diving into details about our new iPhone app, let’s take a step back to see what led us to where we are today.
A Short History of EveryTrail
I started EveryTrail in 2006 because I had a vision for how location-aware devices could change the way we travel. I believed that GPS technology would have the potential to greatly improve the way we tell travel stories, find inspiration for new places to go to, and plan trips.
Four years later we are well on the way to making this vision a reality. EveryTrail members have collectively uploaded more than 235,000 trips from over 160 countries, creating an incredibly rich library of trips based on real GPS tracks, photos and stories. Even more than the sheer quantity, the real strength of the combined collection of EveryTrail trips is the fact that trips are captured and presented in a visually unique and compelling way, with the exact track recorded by a GPS device or smartphone providing both the silent evidence of traveler’s footsteps as well as the basic narrative of a trip. The best proof of the strength of our solution are our most active users, many of who have created hundreds of trips each, uploaded thousands of photos and helped us grow by spreading the word and telling their friends. The New York Times described EveryTrail’s most avid users in its article about GPS drawing:
… neo-cartographers, jumbo-size doodlers and bipedal pencils, mapping their track lines across cities, roads and farms, and sharing them online.
Better Structure, More Context
With more and more trips being uploaded every day (we crossed 1,000 trips per day last Summer and it looks like this year will be much, much bigger), the way trips are organized at EveryTrail becomes increasingly important. The launch of EveryTrail Destinations and Guides is helping create more context around trips, making it easier to find your way through the vast amount of trips to enable you to discover the world, find new places to go, and plan trips.
Mobile Apps
Increasingly powerful mobile apps are another important driver of improved utility and usability of EveryTrail. As Techcrunch wrote:
The web service is quite feature rich already, but it’s the mobile apps that make EveryTrail unique and very fun to use.
We launched our first generation iPhone app in September 2008, shortly after Apple’s iPhone platform opened up to 3rd party app developers. Our first iPhone app was a basic “track & share” utility that enabled people to easily upload trips from their iPhones. We also launched mobile apps for Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Over time we improved our mobile apps, and specifically the iPhone app. We launched an important upgrade in December 2009, in which we added trip search.
EveryTrail Version 3.1 for iPhone
With the launch of EveryTrail 3.1 we are introducing several key features that bring the app to an entire new level of usefulness.
The most important one is synchronization between mobile and web. This makes the EveryTrail solution into a true cloud-powered mobile service. It ensures that all user data is stored centrally, and pushed out to mobile apps whenever requested by the user. And it will finally enable a core use case that many of you have been waiting for (or didn’t even know you wanted): As you become more and more active on EveryTrail, creating trips, friending other users, voting on trips, marking trips as favorites, you are in fact really starting to build your travel “profile”. The next time you find yourself at a destination, harnessed with your iPhone you can fire up the EveryTrail app, and request nearby information that is relevant to you. Which of your favorite trips are nearby? Who of my friends has been to this specific location? You now have the tools to not only get the information you need, but more importantly to act on it by selecting and then following your favorite trip, while capturing your own experience at the same time. In this new version we enable synching of My Trips and Favorite Trips, but of course you can expect more in the future.
Another key improvement in this new version is the new tabbed interface, making multitasking easier. When you travel you tend to do several things simultaneously, for example tracking a trip while following one or more trips. This new tabbed interface now fully supports multitasking while also streamlining key use cases such as tracking a trip, searching for nearby trips and browsing your own trips and favorite trips.
And we’ve created a useful and gorgeous full-screen map mode that gives you the largest possible map view, which is ideal for when your trip is in progress and all you want to focus on is the map.
What’s Next?
This latest iPhone App points the way to the future for us. Initial reviews have been great (thanks for your reviews and feedback!), but much more is still possible, and we are already working on the next set of improvements, so stay tuned!
Happy Trails,
Joost Schreve – Founder EveryTrail













EveryTrail for Blackberry is now live!