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Stuart Garfield
NECN: Scvngr tours explore cities, campuses by cell phone
Scvngr, a Boston-based startup founded by a 19-year-old entrepreneur — or should that be ntrprnr? — wants you to follow its clues all around the city.
Scvngr is the brainchild of Seth Priebatsch, a native of Boston’s South End. Priebatsch is on a leave of absence from Princeton University, where Scvngr took first place at Princeton’s TigerLaunch business plan competition last spring. The company’s five employees moved into a Harrison Avenue office in the South End last week and are planning on a full launch in the spring. Scvngr has an undisclosed amount of funding from Dreamit Ventures, an incubator based in Philadelphia, where the Scvngr team spent the summer, Priebatsch said.
Scvngr’s product is a game engine that runs mobile phone-based scavenger hunts, and the company has already signed on as customers Princeton, MIT, Tufts University and Drexel University, which use the campus-specific scavenger hunts for orientations and special events, Priebatsch said. The company also has signed up three museums — two in Boston and one in Philadelphia — though Priebatsch would not disclose their names. Scvngr hosts the games and provides them to customers as a service.
Scvngr also plans to offer a free, public version of its game, which would playable by anyone in Boston with a cell phone. Priebatsch said he hopes to monetize it by attracting advertising from hotels, concierge services, guidebooks and other tourism businesses.
“We think it could make a lot of money, or it could make no money and just be fun,” he said.
Scvngr is holding a “dry run” of its public scavenger hunt today, as part of the Boston Ahts Festival. About 50 people will play an abridged version to promote the company and work some of the kinks out of the software. Players will answer a series of questions on their mobile phones, which will guide them to different locations throughout the city. Priebatsch plans to use GPS in future versions of the hunt, but for now the software tracks a player’s location according to the questions he’s answered. Priebatsch said the nature of the questions would require the player to go to the location to answer them, keeping the game moving.
Christopher Cook, director of education and outreach at the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism & Special Events, which runs the Ahts festival, said Priebatsch had approached him about using Priebatsch’s other company, PostcardTech, when Priebatsch was a senior at Noble & Greenough High School in Dedham. PostcardTech makes postcards that come with CD-ROMs that play interactive city tours. The city of Boston will begin using the Boston tour next year, Cook said.
The city also plans to link to the Scvngr game from its website, Cook said, and use Scvngr to draw attention to Boston sights that don’t get the attention of Quincy Market or Cheers.
“Something maybe you pass every day, but haven’t stopped into for quite a while,” he said.
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