Woodstock Early Birds, a beautiful new “app” for your iPhone — if you have one –called YONDER from our outdoor friends at Green Mountain Digital here in Woodstock.
These are the folks who, in the past couple of years, have also brought us Audubon Bird and Orvis Fly Fishing apps and other forms of digital nature information sharing.
Green Mountain Digital Principal Charlie Rattigan — never seen on Central Street without his iPhone 5 — describes this interactive app as a combination of Yelp meets Instagram where you can view and upload your “beauty shots”, use a filter to change their “look”, categorize them by activity, give a brief description as they are instantly geo-tagged with a map to show where they were taken.
You can search a database of some 20,000 different locations to see and learn what you might find and experience there. Major work to do that if you ask us. Impressive!
We are told and, in fact, experienced a few technical bugs that are still to be worked out to make the Yonder experience smoother. Nonetheless, this is a beautiful way to combine technology and nature. We fully support a company that makes hay of intellectual capital in such a wonderful way!
Woodstock Early Bird would just add that like all internet social media sharing sites and apps, there is always the issue of having to flip through someone’s baby photos or other very personal activities/photo uploads that used to be TMI. But that, alas, is the nature of our current culture and the burdensome “beast” of connected life.
We DID find this lovely little ad for Yonder on YouTube. Note the local references throughout as our character/friend goes on a hike up Mt. Ascutney!
For your own Yonder experience, here are a few links. Right now, the app is just available for iPhone users. It is available for FREE at the Apple Store.
Julia Carlisle
Woodstock Early Bird 