Walking Tour Guide On Your Mobile Phone

It's always fun meeting other entrepreneurs; I just love listening to the how-it-all-started stories. Today I had lunch with Stefan White, one of the founders of Mobile Adventures that produces Walk The Talk mobile phone walking tour guides for Hong Kong and Macau. Last week, I had been searching for audio guide service providers for an upcoming project. I had loved the audio/video guide for Tate Modern's Gilbert & George exhibition, but that involved passing out handhelds. Then I remembered that the Matthew Barney exhibition at SF MoMA last summer had visitors dialing into the exhibition's audio guide with mobile phones. So I googled "museum audio guide provider" expecting to find a lot of overseas companies. But to my surprise, the first company to come up on the search was Hong Kong-based Mobile Adventures. And when I clicked in, I just knew I had heard of the company before. So I dashed off an email to the founders and after a few back-and-forth emails, SW, to my great relief, solved the mystery of how I had first heard of them last year. The connection was NL (we also found out we had a couple more tenuous links). I remember having thought it was a cool concept then, but hadn't really followed up by checking out the company's websites. But this time around, with a few clicks, I realized that Mobile Adventures would be able to deliver the solution that we were looking for. Now that the content-delivery system has been found, I just need to get cracking on the more time-consuming content creation side of things.

On another note, I ventured to Kowloon Bay to check out the newly-opened DIY shop B&Q (kind of the UK-equivalent of Home Depot) at the very new MegaBox shopping mall (the mall only just opened on 1 June, so a lot of shops still aren't ready yet). Not that I'm much of a DIY person (Ran into MP & CH though, who had spent nearly 4 hours there. And MP ended up buying a trunk-load full of things like power drills so that he could rehinge his doors!), but I found it fun walking around Megabox's three floors of home-improvement shops (aside from B&Q, there was also Australia's Spotlight among other smaller stores). MegaBox was quite clever to bring home improvement into a mainstream mall. Up to now, Hong Kong's fixer-uppers had to deal with the hassle and heat of walking shop-to-shop along Morrison Hill Road for lighting fixtures or Lockhart Road for everything else. Now, it's all to be found under one air-conditioned roof, even though it might be considered a bit out-of-the-way for some. But that's the definition of destination shopping. And there's the added attraction of MOS Burger!