“The next generation travel guide will need to be curated, instant and visual.” said Edwyn Chan, co-founder of Spottly, a one-year old social travel app based in Hong Kong. With a seed round of US$850k backed by 500 Startups, Cherubic Ventures and Gobi Partners, Spottly launches its new version with the focus on videos and curated contents.
As a user of the Spottly 1.0, I can go through the former version briefly here. Basically it allows users to explore, create and share interesting travelling spots with photos. The app now, with a more polished look, enables users to share short videos of the beautiful life moments.
Now that people have been living on mobile, the habits of trip planning have been changing as well.
“More and more people use social media to share their travel finds instantaneously, we found that travellers increasingly prefer beautifully curated visual recommendations, served to you right away through social media, from trusted friends and local key opinion insiders.”
After a year’s observation of how users share travelling moments, Spottly now has a different interpretation of the word Traveller. “For us travelling is when you leave your home door. You don’t have to take a plane or a train to travel. It’s a lifestyle to be a traveller, not an activity that you have to squeeze time for.” The team believes that to keep the heart for exploring excitement in life and new adventures is what Travelling really means.
Currently Spottly has an editorial team that handpick the good contents for each category users can see in the Explore Section. All the contents you can see on Spottly, I have to say, look elegantly. It’s more like a life magazine with well-selected feature stories, and it’s interactive. “We did see some Spottly fans who have been creating fabulous travelling guides that even surprised us!” Edwyn introduced me an active user proudly and showed his Spottly lists to me, “Dan is a Spottly users. He is the co-founder of freshnessmag.com based in New York and his Spottly collections for New York is the best!”
I am going on a trip to New York very soon and I just followed Dan’s “Eat This in New York” collection. Yes, it works just like that.