SCVNGR: Build Your Own Location-Based Mobile Games
SCVNGR is an awesomely successful mobile start-up based in Boston. As a company, SCVNGR’s mission is to create the world’s first platform to enable anyone, anywhere to design, develop, and deploy sophisticated interactive location-based mobile games, tours and experiences.
Based loosely around the traditional Scavenger Hunt game, each SCVNGR – the unit of game play – can be played from any mobile device, with clues and location-based riddles sent back and forth between phones. The technology can be used for mobile experiences that range from high-tech scavenger hunts run by universities to introduce students to campus-life, to fully interactive mobile tours through museums and cities.
SCVNGR was founded by a guy named Seth Priebatsch, who dropped out of Princeton at age 19 to follow his entrepreneurial passion – location based games. In 2008, as a freshman, Priebatsch won the $5,000 top prize in the Princeton Tigerlaunch business competition. From there, he grabbed the attention of investors at DreamIt Ventures, a seed-financing firm in Philadelphia. That summer, with $35,000 in equity capital and three months of space and support in the DreamIt accelerator program, Seth was off and running.
In the last year or so, since the company launched, SCVNGR’s technology has been adopted by over 350 corporations, museums and universities, including Harvard and Princeton, across 44 states. But, this innovative geo-gaming startup, is not just getting users, it’s making money. By the end of 2009, the company turned cash flow positive and brought in $1 million in revenues. And, in January 2010, SCVNGR received a $4MM investment from Google Ventures and Highland Capital, which Priebatsch and team will use to grow SCVNGR bigger, better, faster, and more global.New features launching soon include an augmented reality layer to enhance the game‐play experience. Players will be able to use their devices camera as a real‐world viewer to see virtual data and markers overlaid onto the real‐world.
At Startl, we believe the era of mobile geo-based games and geo-location services is just beginning. Look around you, people are increasingly reporting on, retrieving from, and interacting with their physical locations through their phones. And, while many of us think about these new mobile geo- games and services primarily as social phenomena, we shouldn’t underestimate the learning potential and promise – from thinking beyond mobile-based educational tours of museums or treasure hunts of cities to thinking more deeply about how to turn every locale into a dynamic, interactive learning context by enabling learners to collect and create real-world data and information by curating and converting them interesting and exciting learning experiences.
As Vicki Davis (aka Cool Cat Teacher) noted: “We need to make our world mashable….” This is the promise of mobile based learning. We now have the opportunity to go where the learning happens –24/7, any place, any time, any way. SCNVGR is a prime example of the realization of that promise and we are cheering them on.
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Category: Mobile, Social Networking
