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Christmas mythmaking, perfect strangers, natural wonders and Paul Theroux

Welcome to the sixth edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we’ve got a behind-the-scenes look at a beloved symbol of the holiday season, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. There’s the unlikely story of a man who set off on his first-ever long distance cycle – all the way to India – after a chance encounter in a London pub, and a series of astounding photographs from this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

Lastly, there’s a reflection on travelling to Burma over the course of 53 years by Paul Theroux, “who, it’s fair to say, reinvented travel writing as an art form.”

Russian tumbleweeds, spitting Germans and cardinal lies

Welcome to the fifth edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we face a hard truth: travel might not have the power to change the world. In fact NYT columnist Matt Gross calls the idea “horseshit”, and declares his life’s work a failure.

You’ll also find out why people still spit on a small stone in front of Bremen’s St Peter’s Cathedral, and follow the humble tumbleweed on its border-hopping adventures.

Last but not least, we’ve got excerpts from a fascinating new book about the history of direction, and how it’s more topsy-turvy than you’d expect.

American hospitality, mud-loving pigs and mile-high nostalgia

Welcome to the fourth edition of Senses of Direction, VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter.

As polls open in the United States, we’ve got an eye-opening new book about dodging tornadoes and crossbow-wielding weirdos to get up close and personal with an America that’s too often reduced to blue or red.

We’ve also got a story about the legend of Bath’s mud-loving pigs, a podcast about reading a book from every country in the world and, for your sense of nostalgia, a reflection on the in-flight magazine’s demise.

VoiceMap is ten

VoiceMap turned ten this month. Ten years is a milestone worth celebrating, but it also invites an uncomfortable question. Are we still a startup?

I’ll start with what I think is the most straightforward answer. In the last twelve months, we’ve paid out more royalties than we did over the previous nine years combined. If a startup is a company with a business model that works best at scale, and most of its growth still ahead of it, VoiceMap is definitely a startup.

Other metrics bear this out, from what has been a busy start to 2024:

We released version 11 of the VoiceMap app, with wishlisting, adjustable playback speeds and a redesigned library.
We published 90 tours in ten weeks. Our first 90 tours took almost 80 weeks.
We added new distribution channels, including Klook and direct listings with Google Things To Do. This is on top of what is already the widest and most flexible range of distribution options available for self-guided tours.

1,000 VoiceMap tours – and other rewards for craft, consistency and putting things in context

We reached an important milestone last Friday: 1,000 published tours. Friday was also our ninth birthday, coincidentally – but also usefully, because it reminded us that this took some doing.

Our tours now cover some 30,000 locations in well over 300 destinations, and our scripts add up to a fraction under 5.5 million words. If you started listening to all of our audio now, beginning with a Chao Phraya ferry ride published in June 2014, you’d still be listening halfway through March, more than 600 hours later.

Newsletter, March 2018: A marriage proposal via VoiceMap, free tours about (re)making two legendary ports, Boston’s Medal of Honor recipients, and more

There is so much in a single human voice. This simple fact jumps out at me with every new VoiceMap we publish, in each of the 46 countries where you can now plug in headphones, hit start, and explore.

Take, for example, some of our free audio tours, sponsored by tourism boards, attractions, community organisations, and others – along with one exception, which is also free, but was published privately by design.

The private audio tour was disguised as something public – an ordinary tour, for anyone – but it was actually made for a single, unsuspecting listener, and when a new voice cut in unexpectedly halfway through it, she recognised the voice instantly. It directed her through a magnificent garden to a bench, where the voice was joined by its owner, asking if the listener would, perhaps, be his wife. Continue reading Newsletter, March 2018: A marriage proposal via VoiceMap, free tours about (re)making two legendary ports, Boston’s Medal of Honor recipients, and more