Asma Jaber and Sami Jitan, the co-founders of PIVOT have proved that you don’t have to be a archaeologist to preserve your heritage and culture. The duo is Palestinian-American, who imagined, what historic Palestine must have been like. Asma and Sami recognized the need to preserve the historical places, now engaged, are framing PIVOT.
PIVOT is a mobile app that allows users to peep into the ancient times. It is built by an award-winning start-up (PIVOTtheWorld) incubated at the Harvard Innovation Lab. PIVOT promotes and streamlines historical learning by allowing users to see a place from a specific vantage point through a tunnel of time.
Makings Of PIVOT!
Asma has previously worked with the United Nations Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine and on civil rights issues with the U.S. Department of Justice. She is passionate about preserving histories and cultures at risk of being extinct, as well as documenting history and using that to promote social justice.
Sami has experience in public-private partnerships in the Middle East in the realms of new media, NGO research, and corporate social responsibility. Sami manages PIVOT’s product development.
Asma Jaber was inspired to preserve her heritage after her father, a Palestinian refugee born in Nazareth, passed away in 2012. Her father grew up in Palestine and knew the area and history so intimately. Without her father by her side, Asma wanted to be able to appreciate the rich history beneath her feet when she visited her homeland.
While she took the time to heal, she got married to her passion, preserving history and educating people about her family history. This has now become PIVOT.
The Digitalization Of History
The new PIVOT proclaims to preserve and share histories and cultures, at risk of being lost. It is going to make its premiere launch in the Historic Palestine (Palestine/Israel), a place with rich historical, cultural, religious significance and a place where the preservation of Palestinian culture and history is under a threat.
“We plan to scale PIVOT because there are places with rich histories all across the world that need to come alive and be preserved in today’s digital era.”
The Existing Market
The tourism industry is on its way for transformation. The publishers of conventional tour books are beginning to digitize their content and technology firms are entrenching new products into the industry. The competitive space for the PIVOT is two-Dimensional.
The Traveller Engagement Style is peculiar type. Travellers range from being more independent, spontaneous and self- directed, preferring a curated and planned experience.
Product offering demands practical recommendations for daily activities, places of interest, lodging, and dining to providing deep insights about culture and place.
Contenders!
The traditional tour book companies like Fodor’s churn out general content for planning itinerary, finding restaurants and lodging and have developed apps priced around $10 per country/city. Recently, Google Field Trip entrant the segment, that promotes hyper-local activities and places to which only native residents would normally be privy.
Specialist publishers such as History Channel or Phaidon produce expert content that give travellers a detailed sense of history and place. Google Goggles uses object recognition to pull information from the internet about buildings. iNakba is a new competitor exploring the same location and history as PIVOT, but their content and non-profit model focuses on advocacy within a limited geography and lacks the intense chronological multimedia of PIVOT.
Traditional tour group operators are the only service providers in the curated space. They not only manage lodging and dining, but also, provide rich descriptions about history and place.
PIVOT provides rich historical pictures and information about the places travellers go and at a much more affordable price point than traditional guided tours. It serves as a complement to traditional tour operators by allowing their customers to preview the places where they will go, compare their surroundings on location, and review their experience post-trip. On the other hand, PIVOT also enables tour operators to package their expertise to sell to independent traveller.
Miles Stones To Cover
Once PIVOT is ensconced in Palestine-Israel, the plan is to launch it in around the world, especially in place famous for it’s history and culture. It also aims to cover regions facing potential cultural extinction, such as Kurdish regions in Turkey and the Basque regions of Spain.
PIVOT plans to offer an academic version tailored for scholarly research in cultural studies programs; PIVOT could even offer a version that will assist with political settlements and refugee repatriation.
The founders are planning to commercialize PIVOT by licensing “white label” versions to museums and historical preservation societies so that they can preserve the cultures of their constituents.
“We are also in the process of developing a temporal, spatial algorithm (patent pending) that will utilize the user’s historical data in order to create a customized tour based on the user’s ancestry” revealed Sami Jitan.
Tourists, Travellers, Tour Guides, Historians, and Curios minds are the potential users of PIVOT.
To checkout their offers click here
Visit the website to know more about it: http://www.pivottheworld.com/#app
