Sighter is a geolocation smartphone game for iphone and Android billed as a social, outdoor treasure hunting activity, where you can hide and seek interesting Sights, simply by taking and sharing photos. Think of these photos as virtual Geocaches, or Sights. To find a Sight, just download the app, open it up, and you will see the closest Sights, with their distances and direction displayed, as well as a compass arrow. The goal is to find these sights, and take a photograph of it as proof of your find.
The creators of Sighter were featured on The UK Geocaching Podcast Show #24, November 2013 and on The GeoGearHeads Podcast Episode #106, January 11th, 2014. We here at the OCNA Blog figured we’d contact them to see if they were interested in a print interview, to which they graciously agreed. This is the first part of a two part interview.
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| Nearest Sights Screen |
OCNA Blog: We understand you’re from Budapest, Hungary, but are currently living in Santiago, Chile?
Sighter: Attila Szaló and Krisztián Kusper are the founders of Sighter. They met at university in Budapest. They are both Hungarians. Attila is in Santiago, Chile now because 6 months ago Sighter won a place in StartupChile, which is a program funded by the Chilean state.
In a nutshell, participating startups in the program receive equity free funding of 40 K USD. One of the stipulations is that at least one founder must relocate to Chile for the duration of the program. There were 1,570 applications from 28 countries for Startup Chile VII and Sighter was one of the 100 selected participants.
OCNA Blog: How long have you been Geocaching? Do you primarily use Geocaching.com, Geocaching.hu, or both?
Sighter: We’ve all played around with Geocaching.com and Geocaching.hu although the founders are not exactly hardcore geocachers. However, we’re delighted and thankful that the geocaching community is embracing us and helping us to get the word out.
OCNA Blog: The Official Sighter video (below) is great, and very professionally done. Who’s that girl? Was the whole video shot in Berlin?
Sighter: Indeed, who is THAT girl?? 🙂 That’s the first question everyone asks us. 🙂 Her name is Gabi and she’s a Hungarian actress. The entire video was shot in Berlin by a friend of ours, Matyás Kálmán.
OCNA Blog: You mention that you’ve received some Venture Capital or “Seed” funding for the Sighter project. There was more on top of that?
Sighter: Last year Sighter participated in the Propeller Venture Accelerator, which is a prestigious 3-month accelerator program in Dublin.We received 30,000 EUR in funding as well well as mentoring and business development assistance. Sighter also received further modest investment from the Enterprise Ireland Competitive Startup Fund.
OCNA Blog: When did the app become available for Android? How about ios? Any plans for Windows Phone? (The blogger is a Windows Phone user).
Sighter: An early prototype of the app has been available on iOSsince last March and on Android since September. As for Windows phone, we’re certainly interested in developing one. However, it’s a questions of allocating resources.
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OCNA Blog: Sighter is still in Beta of course, but you currently support only Hungarian and English? How many languages do you plan on supporting? Are you looking for user help in translations?
Sighter: There are currently localized versions of Sighter in Spanish, Hungarian and German (we have a very active German community). The German and Spanish versions (on Android only for now but coming soon to iOS) were translated by local users, so we’d welcome more user translation help in the future for sure.
French, Chinese and Korean are part of our roadmap too. Right now it’s a question of prioritising our time and rolling out new features before we can really focus on language localization more.
OCNA Blog: Any other future plans for the app while it’s in beta that you can share with us? Is a website for the game (with profiles, leaderboard statistics, maps of sites etc..) a high priority in the future?
Sighter: Everything in your question is on the list. The next update will see maps and next week we begin private testing of push notifications for Android, i.e.notify me if someone follows me, finds one of my sights, likes my sight, comments on my sight, etc. There will be a staged rollout of push notifications, the first of which you’ll start seeing in about 4-5 weeks.There’s also a big update for iOS coming soon with social features, sight-maps, new languages and the new iOS look.
OCNA Blog: We’ve given an overview of how to find individual sights in the introduction to this blog post, and it’s shown in the video. Is creating your own Sights easy? I understand you can set up a secret message, or show the finder a bonus photo?
Sighter: Absolutely, creating sights is as easy as snapping a photo. You just have to push one button and Sighter takes care of the rest. Users can add texts, hints and even secret secondary photos at any time afterwards by using the edit function.
That is certainly nice to hear! The Blogger is going on a multi State vacation in about 7 weeks, and the ability to later edit your Sight would be a well needed feature. Sure, I can snap a picture of something interesting in say Virginia, for example, but not being a local, chances are I’m not going to know very much information about it, and will have to research the object later on the internet. Well, thanks to Sighter for the interview. As we said, it’s part one of a two parter, we will delve more deeply into creating Sights for others to find, amongst other things, next week. You can find them on the web at http://www.sightergame.com, and of course there are links to Google Play and the ios App store. Be sure to check back here for part two of the interview!
Great interview!
As someone who’s very much been enjoying Sighter, I really enjoyed the interview!
Interesting. Similar in some ways to SplitP’s “ISpy iphone game.