Nike iPhone App: True City Uses Crowdsourced Info For City Guide

by amyellensoden | January 15, 2010 at 04:28 pm

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Nike is delving into the world of mobile marketing with their very own iPhone app - True City. This iPhone app is aimed at creating a tiered kind of travel or city guide for six prominent European cities. The unique thing about this app is that it involves users directly in that the information for the app comes from people in the cities who generate it.

The top curator in each city is the host, of which there is one per city. They point out interesting attractions and main city sights. Below the host is a level of contributors and below them are civilian contributors. The neat thing is that civilians can generate the content of the app by geo-tagging their own finds for other app users. Basically this is an app for the people by the people.

With each city comes a host ‘tastemaker’ to guide users to lesser known community attractions. For Paris, it is BKRW founder Jay Smith. Of course Jay’s perspective alone is not enough, as an addition to each host there is a second tier of designated contributors and a third of so called ‘civilian’ contributors.

The Nike True City iPhone app also somewhat crosses over into the gaming zone as it involves a QR code reader that gives users the capability to unlock secrets in each city such as event announcements. It sounds like Nike has managed to create an app that is both social and informative as it operates in real time via crowdsourced information.

Responses are already on both side of the fence when considering a social city app from Nike. Some people are wondering why Nike is heading in this direction and why individuals would use a sportswear company for their go-to city guide. Others think it is innovative and a creative way to build a new kind of social network within major cities. The True City iPhone app is said to combine Facebook and Twitter styles with the kind of functionality that Yelp has.

Whether or not Nike's True City will be able to compete with Yelp or other city networking platforms remains to be seen, but it does sound creative and useful.