Wednesday, August 02, 2006

stop me if you've heard this one.

I had a brainstorm for an awesome website last night, and a glance at the first few google results doesn't reveal anything *quite* like it, so I'm not sure it's been done but let me know if it has:

let's say you're planning a road trip (CEDARPOINT!!!!11W00TBBQOWL), and you're not sure yet when you want to stop but you know that you want to visit a certain type of attraction (e.g., a waffle house, barnes & noble or megachurch) along the way. with this website, you would plug in the endpoints of your trip, select or type in the places you want to visit, and the website would either return a route which includes one of each place (say, the closest waffle house, piggly-wiggly, etc.) or show you a direct route and plot ALL of the places you picked. either way, you would then print out the results and bring them on the trip.

then, continuing the example, once you were in the middle of pennsylvania and craving an ice cream break, you would just look at your map and say, "hey! there's a dairy queen just 3 miles from the next exit" (i.e., just far enough from the highway to not be included in the road signs). think of it as a printable version of a car GPS system (and also one which does not require purchasing and/or installing an expensive piece of equipment in your car).

so...assuming this idea makes ANY sense, do we know if this has already been done? if not, this could be an excellent way to establish our brand before publishing our "Amusement Parks of the US" travel guide/memoir. what does everyone else think?

1 comment:

ericat13 said...

yes, but the point is that you don't need GPS -- it's free! it's less convenient than GPS because you have to print it out ahead of time and you're flipping through paper instead of using a handy-dandy electronic display, but that's a trade-off for getting it free. economically it's a pretty good idea (if I do say so myself) because people who could afford GPS wouldn't have the patience for the website, and people who use the website might eventually decide to spend money to get GPS (and in the meantime we'd make money off advertising on the site). I'll keep thinking...