Launch: Around The World For Free

Here’s a big one… We just finished collaborating with BrightRedPixels on the interactive map for CBS’s second season of Around The World For Free! The show follows Jeff Schroeder of Big Brother & Amazing Race fame as he makes his way around the world without any money, just some help from the people using our app.

We display Jeff’s location on a Google Map and we plot his journey by connecting the bits of media he uploads from his GPS enabled devices. Users can see where he’s been and where he’s trying to get to and drop tips or photos along the way to help him out.

We’d like to thank Anthony Tripaldi and Brian Maci, the flash developers on our team for kicking major butt on this project. For more insight into the technical side of things, read Anthony’s blog post. They worked closely with Grant at Grail Interactive who created the custom CMS that sends us the info we need to display. Unfortunately I don’t know the name of the design company that created the look and feel, but maybe someone reading this can comment below for the record.

Some of the ATWFF’s features

• Sending SMS texts to Jeff’s phone
• We ping a weather service to show the weather icons behind jeff’s image
• We interfaced with CBS’s login and video modules so they could deliver content to the app that also lives on their site
• Facebook integration
• We use SWFAddress to deep link all the content on the site
• Lots of user interaction tracking
• much much more, stop reading and check it out already!