The Delaware Tourism Office and Delaware State Parks are turning to a new smartphone app to highlight events and activities in the First State.
It’s a smartphone app called “Geoswap” that was created by three University of Delaware students. Using GPS, the app drops pins onto nearby locations, showing users everything there is to do around them.
UD finance major Jordan Gonzalez, one of the app’s creators, said when he came to UD, he noticed there were many things going on he just didn’t know about it.
“One thing that we like to talk about is that ‘fear of missing out’ became a term that’s so widely used — it’s in every major dictionary now,” Gonzalez said. “There’s so much happening in this area that you can’t possibly know about it, so you are still missing out on something that you could enjoy doing.”
Now, with a $19,000 deal allowing Delaware Tourism Office and Delaware State Parks to team up with the app for two years, the students’ app is getting real-world exposure. But it will also benefit in- and out-of-state residents - helping them see all that Delaware has to offer, said State Tourism Director Linda Parkowski.
“People like to have apps - and instead of going to three different, four different websites, this is one quick way to see ‘hey, Delaware has a lot going on,’” Parkowski said.
The students created the app as part of UD Horn Program of Entrepreneurship’s Summer Founders Program last year. Students selected for the program develop technologies that have the potential to be expanded or put to use after their college careers.
Jason Bamford, a biomedical engineering student, said there was no real vision for Geoswap in the beginning; the students just wanted to “unlock digital content in a physical location.”
“It’s kind of like taking the cloud - all this space in the cloud - like all the internet pages, all this information, and just putting it onto the ground where you get the most relevant information depending on where you are,” Bamford said. “And that’s where it started and since then we’ve been able to mold it into this unique technology that allows users to see everything that’s going on and organizations to successfully reach out to them and entice them into what they’re doing.”
The mobile app works on both Android and Apple devices. The students say it has already had more than 1,000 downloads.
