Worldmine: Travelmine

Travelmine is the destination guide portion of Worldmine's operation. Still in the works, Travelmine's concept was to make use of sound files encoded in mp3 format to accompany a virtual traveller in seek of places of interest. An audio guide will explain the key highlights of the virtual tour, which can be viewed in Flash format.

"I don't believe that what we see today is what we'll see in a year's time... the Internet is still in an embryonic stage - underdeveloped."

-Mark Weingard
Worldmine

The tour and audio accompanyment are also available in multiple languages - Japanese, German, Korean, French and Chinese.

The guide provides information for the traveller: available transportation (public transport, like buses), up-to-date currency rates, places for dining etc, as well as an S.O.S guide, in case of emergencies.

The company is targetting a total of 300 to 400 destinations to be covered by next year.

Worldmine is also looking into mobile device integration, WAP being one of the potential technologies to be employed. However Wiengard did point out that there were still difficulties in using WAP technology across different cities.

"I don't believe that what we see today is what we'll see in a year's time," says Weingard. "We believe as a company, that the Internet is still in an embryonic stage - underdeveloped."

Weingard indicates that there's an interest in WebTV and video-streaming. Future plans do include catering to narrow as well as broad band audiences. At present, Worldmine's content is packaged predominantly for the narrow band user (56k dial-up).