Ford vehicles now offer another way to improve car rides and road trips, enjoy the great outdoors, or rediscover neighborhoods after more than a year of lockdowns and restrictions. The Mappo app is a new way to explore the world through the lens of history, popular culture, architecture, sports, and more – all supported by audio content from literary icons, historians, authors, musicians, and others.
Now available for iOS and Android devices, the Mappo app includes themed routes and is expected to expand quickly through crowd-sourced, user-generated content from people around the world.
“People love telling their friends about interesting places in books, movies, and music – now they can share these passions with the world through Mappo,” said Stuart Taylor, global director, Ford enterprise connectivity. “Mappo makes long drives or brief escapes richer experiences, whether people stay inside their vehicle or step out to experience a landmark.”
After supporting the development of the app, Ford is the first automaker to offer its customers an in-vehicle Mappo experience. Customers who have vehicles equipped with SYNC 3 or SYNC 4 technology will be able to use Mappo through voice commands, giving them an easy way to experience the app as they travel. Mappo also will be available for the all-new 2021 Ford F-150, Ford Mustang Mach-E, Ford Bronco, and other future Ford vehicles.
While many mapping apps relay a park location or the hours of a restaurant, Mappo offers people a different look at the world around them. Powered by an innovative software engine, plus the ability for users to add notable locations, Mappo lets travelers explore cities by getting to know cultural, historical, and heritage sites. Points of interest aren’t just marked on a map but are supported with content such as quotes, book clips, and trivia.
Mappo launches with more than 30,000 point-of-interest cultural references across more than a dozen major cities in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The app allows users to browse points of interest nearby, or use the search box to look up themed routes based on a place, the name of an author or book, or several other filters such as movies, music, and history. That means users can find routes that take them through various historical locations in Philadelphia or find a walking tour through Central Park that highlights famous scenes from literature.
“Mappo developed a new way to consume culture-related content, in a way that is compatible with the most updated generation,” said Deddi Zucker, Mappo founder and CEO. “Our vision is to create unique experiences in every destination.”
While Mappo is regularly adding points of interest to cities around the world, it also allows people to highlight locations in places the app hasn’t directly supported yet. When noting a point of interest, users can upload quotes from books, movies, letters, and authors to mark local sites – giving cities and their residents everywhere the chance to provide locals and visitors with curated routes to follow that explore their heritage and legacy.
Ford in-vehicle integration makes the experience even easier. Led by the Ford connected vehicle platform and products team in Germany, in-vehicle integration enables seamless, voice-controlled use for customers as they drive, whether they’re looking to discover interesting new places or trying to shed light on underrated aspects of their own neighborhood.
Vehicles equipped with optional navigation technology can even use SYNC AppLink for the unique capability of creating routes to the points of interest found in the Mappo app.
Ford and Mappo worked closely to help ensure that taking a journey in and out of a Ford vehicle is easy as well. Any saved route on a smartphone can be easily selected once running the app inside the vehicle, and users can quickly pick up where they left off – whether leaving a vehicle to explore or coming back to continue to their next destination.
Mappo is a startup company based in Tel Aviv that developed technology to extract quotes along with locations from any text, in order to create a layer on a map. This technology selects only relevant and exciting quotes to share with people, enabling Mappo to create location-based content layers globally from books, music, and video. Mappo prompts users around the globe to upload stories from local writers and others.
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