After raising USD2.4 million in Series A funding last year, TechCrunch noted that social travel app Jetpac launched a visual guide feature called Jetpac City Guides. The report said the new feature will allow iPhone users to have visual guides of millions of venues in 5,000 cities all over the world. The app will be analyzing Instagram photos in order to produce a visual guide for each location.
Jetpac Chief Executive Officer Julian Green explained the rationale behind the development of the new feature. Green told TechCrunch, "What we learned from the iPad app, is that your friends' haven't been everywhere, and people want specific venue recommendations rather than just which friend has been to a city, and their photos. You can now search for places to go to in the way that you naturally visualize it, rather than reading through an amenities list or parsing text reviews. People use it to quickly get a sense of a place and the people who go there - photos don't lie."
The report also said that the app's ability to process public Instagram photos will be able to enhance user recommendations.
TechCrunch pointed out that Jetpac's decision to go with Instagram instead of Facebook for its new feature signaled the decline of apps based on the popular social networking site. Around the time Jetpac was launched, social travel sites like Trippy and social travel planner Gogobot had based its apps to the social network to improve its usefulness to its existing and potential users.
Green said that the Facebook-based Jetpac app for the iPad will not be going away soon, but the startup will no longer focus on developing its product around the social network. Green also revealed that it will be raising a new round of financing next year to aid the company with the transition. Moving forward, Jetpac's plan is to build out the app's social functions and capitalize them into a customized, social network-based guide unique to every user.
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