RouteYou, the company
Table of contents
- How to contact us
- Info about RouteYou, the company
- Our approach
- Concepts & thoughts on which RouteYou based its ideas
How to contact us
Info about RouteYou, the company
RouteYou is a company providing solutions on the domain of recreative navigation and geo-information display. RouteYou offers digital map data and web-tools for tourism, cyclists, hikers, motorbike drivers,... Probably, you know us from our websites. But RouteYou is much more.
- RouteYou is a set of technology (websites, apps, plugins, web services,...) related to the functionalilty of recreational routes, sportive and tourism information in terms of maintenance, content management, output (prints, downloads) and usagee (GPS, smartphone), which you can use
- within your own website(s)
- within your own channel on www.routeyou.com
- within your own app
- within your own (mobile) website and app that we set up for you (MySite/MyApp)
- RouteYou is also a large and fast growing community where you can create visibility for your routes, POIs, maps, events,.... Many of our customers have more exposure to their content through RouteYou than through their own channels/sites. That makes RouteYou also a very powerful promotional tool. We have more than 18 million unique visitors to the platform every year (for more stats, check out this link).
- Routeyou is also a whole set of content that you can also use such as
- map layers (e.g. topo maps, OSM maps, Google Maps maps, your own map layers,...)
- digital routable networks such as cycling and walking nodes networks that we maintain for you and for which you do not have to do anything extra,...
- more than 2 million POIs and more than 5 million routes you can use as a reference or to enrich your own content
We provide specific services to support you and let you make use of the technology, the content and the community.
A main overview of our products can be found here.
Let's have here a more conceptual overview how we see the challenges for recreational navigation and how we solve these:
Which route or trip?... Which area?... Which places to see... And why?
The first problem is to get people from a passive state to the active state of recreation (walking, cycling, touring, visiting,...). The question is how you can inform them where they should go to (which area, which places to see), doing what kind of activity. And why would they go there?
It's the phase of
- search
- first impression
- convincing people to visit an area, location or a specific trip.
How to get through the area... Going from place to place...
Once you know which area and which places to visit, you want to find a route or path which fits you. Are you cycling, walking, mountainbiking, inline skating,... Are you fit, less fit,...
All these factors define the way to go from A, to B to C,... There is no one type of routing but the routing should be tuned to many circumstances.
Get informed once you are there... Or get surprised with what you see
Once you are on the way, there are plenty of places and stories to learn about. Even of the places you know.
But also that information should fit your interest, or the message you want to bring across.
Share and give feedback
Once you have experienced something nice or bad, you also want to share your info (positive or negative) with your friends, or with the author of the route, owner of a place, organization,...
Our approach
The community website RouteYou.com displays a few of the products RouteYou (the company) offers. Web 2.0 concepts are combined with geo-information display,route-visualisation and route-planning techniques.
On RouteYou.com, users can interactively search for recreational routes and tracks, linked to locations and their geo-information with their specific characteristics. Users can interactively explore the information, print it on maps and/or download in their GPS. But users can also create and add their own information related to routs, tracks or geo-locations and add multimedia content. They are encouraged to set-up sub-communities and interact with the provided information of others.
Widgets are provided to the user so they can embed the created information (routes, routenetworks and routeplanners) in their own websites or blogs.
RouteYou also converts 'traditional' non-topologigical and/or analogue data to structured digital routes, 'semantic-savy' geolocations and routenetworks which can be used in digital geo-applications such as GPS sensitive devices (navigation systems, GPS enables mobile devices such as iPhones and Android devices,...) and geomatics applications on the web.
This functionality is provided and integrated on the side of the customer.
RouteYou also provides navigable data as digital routeable maps for navigation devices in the format of those devices (e.g. Garmin). The difference with the traditional navigation data is that is is focussed on the needs of the recreative user (cyclist, hiker).
Some great product examples
Check out here an extensive list of great examples of project we did with several organizations.
Concepts & thoughts on which RouteYou based its ideas
- Howard Moskowitz: Multiple spaghetti sauce concept (read here all about it)
- Chris Anderson: The Long tail
- Surowievki: Wisdom of the crowds vs stupidity of the crowds (read more about it here)
- Umberto Eco: Any fact becomes important when it is connected to another
- Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty (learn more about it here)
- People and machines, community and crowdsourcing
- Dunbar's number: A limited brain (learn more about it here)
- Kevin Kelly: Linking the web with the real world: the next 5000 days of the internet (learn more about it here)
- Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider: Man–Computer Symbiosis (learn more about it here)
- David Cope, emeritus professor of music creating new music based on analogy (learn more about it here)
- Cars (Pixar): The beauty of roads
- The IKEA effect (reference 1, reference 2)