There’s a mini-boom of sorts in audio guides with guidebook providers creating GPS-enabled audio content for mobile apps.

Lonely Planet Audio Walking Tours

First, Lonely Planet announced its audio walking tours in London for iPhone and iPod users. The five tours for Central London currently available have been developed from scratch in joint partnership with AudioGo and BBC.

“This is the first mobile product which we have created without using any pre-existing book content,” said Jeremy Kreitler, Lonely Planet’s vice president of wireless services. “It has been created with the on-the-go traveler in mind.”

The content includes expert reviews by Lonely Planet authors and historical audio from the BBC Archive. The guided tours take users through each place using GPS-location maps. The guides can be downloaded and used offline, so users can stop or adjust them as required.

Next up was Rick Steves’ Audio Europe for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The collection includes 25 audio walking tours of sights in Europe and 200 tracks of travel tips and cultural insights from his radio shows.

“This app thrills the tour guide in me,” explains Steves. “The combination of hearing about the art as you see it heightens your ability to really appreciate it. It frees you up to maximize your focus and be in the artistic moment.”

Steves’ app also works offline and was developed in partnership with Seattle-based Treemo Labs. “This new technology is unique in the market because users can download and play not only audio files, but guided audio tours segmented by chapters with photos,” says founder and CEO Brent Brookler. “We leveraged our existing platform to match the needs of a traveler using Rick Steves’ content on the road. The end result was a very sophisticated, custom, audio-file download system.”

Where there’s a location-based app, there’s bound to be social media and user-generated content. This is where Broadcastr comes in. The social media start-up has just released a free iPhone app for “location-aware audio and storytelling.”

The app’s geoplay feature helps stream stories related to the user’s physical surroundings into their headphones. In addition to location, stories on Broadcastr can also be discovered by keyword, category, creator, rating or date. Users can create playlists, record and upload their own audio stories on the go, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and follow friends and listen to their stories.

Broadcastr is in public beta now, currently has more than 6,000 stories, and has formed partnerships with more than 100 cultural, historic and arts organizations. Co-founder and president Scott Lindenbaum is demonstrating the platform at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi).

Photo – Lonely Planet

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