SCVNGR: Woo hoo, now we can go buy some vowels!
Mobile location has always lent itself so well to real world real world guided tours and scavenger hunts. This summer I came across a company Plott.me which was looking to create a platform for anyone wishing to create their own guided city tour, and a few weeks back I chatted with another company Toura with a similar goal, but largely focused on creating similar experiences for museums and attractions, albeit with location as a secondary element.
But the one that seems to be getting the most attention is a Boston company called SCVNGR, thanks to a $4 million investment from Google Ventures, and word that they’re already generating over $1 million in revenue and are profitable in their first year of operation.
SCVNGR has created a platform that allows individuals or groups such as businesses and schools to create their own location based scavenger hunt games. Early customers are using the service for things like corporate team building, or on campuses for orientations and tours.
Two things that seem designed to help SCVNGR stand out are the super friendly, easy to use interface and also the broad cross section of devices supported meaning that that most anyone can set up a game and play. Although I spent 30 minutes playing around with the beta version for individuals, and had mixed feeling on it.
Getting into the system was pretty easy and the interface was slick and friendly, although as I was trying to set up a scavenger hunt I quickly realized that it was a bit more complicated than I was hoping for, which I should have suspected when I saw that the welcome screen included not one but three help documents to peruse before getting started.
In all fairness the product targeted at individuals is still officially in beta, but getting through the eight tabs , just setting up a hunt with a single hunt objective, was quite a process. At the end of the set-up I set out to test it by visiting the park at the end of my street where I had created the clue and using the iPhone application I wasn’t even able to search and find my mission keyword… so that mission was aborted before it even began.
I then decided that I’d just try to play one of the existing games. Again the iPhone version was indeed a pretty slick application but it was a bit cumbersome to navigate around in. While I was playing via the iPhone application, I was forced to pretend I was still using a Motorla RAZR, by continually having to manually type in and send arcane command like “NEXT” just to progress through screens of the game. I even played the first few clues of one game related to the Museum of Natural History from the comfort of my couch, so the use of location seemed optional… I suppose to allow absolutely anyone to play, even if all you can do is send SMSs from your phone and nothing else.
If my experience is any indication I suspect that the $1 million in revenue that the company is making is largely from custom game creation that the company offers as a well advertised alternative to the self service pricing of a few hundred dollars depending on the number of players and number of scavenger hunts you want to create.
All in all, it seems like an interesting idea and one that I can see a ton of people being interested in… how many team building exercises, conferences and tours couldn’t use a little technological spicing up? A lot I am sure! Come to think of it, at my last company event like this, we did a scavenger hunt inside Dave and Buster’s… scavenger hunts must be chapter one in the “how to do team building” handbook.
The execution of the product on the self service side doesn’t seem to quite be there yet, but its shortcoming are nothing insurmountable, they just need to simplify and streamline it another notch or two.
I also noticed a new product coming soon called Radius, that frankly feels like an out of place add on… potentially devised in search of a larger more lucrative business model. While still under development, Radius will be designed to allow “small local advertisers to effectively utilize sophisticated location-based mobile advertising techniques to deliver targeted mobile coupons to mobile consumers within a certain radius of their store.”
If you’re in the market for a mobile scavenger hunt game, it seems worth it to give it a whirl. It will be interesting to see how the small business location based advertising product works when its released, so stay tuned.
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