Groupon founder’s new journey: audio tour app

SAN FRANCISCO — Two years after his ouster as Groupon’s CEO, Andrew Mason is embarking on a new entrepreneurial journey selling unconventional audio tours of major cities on a new iPhone app called Detour.

The initial selection of seven different San Francisco expeditions released Tuesday meander from the city’s beatnik bars to the weathered docks of the bay while regaling listeners with colorful tales about local lore. Each excursion costs $5.

If Detour follows the course being charted by Mason, the audio tours will span the world within the next five years and the app will become a standard accessory for vacationers or city dwellers just looking for a fun way to learn more about where they live.

“Most of the audio tours that exist today are about what’s popular inside museums,” Mason says. “So what we are trying to do is turn the world into a museum.”

When it’s open, Detour tracks a listener’s location to allow the tours to be taken as quickly or as slowly as desired. The flexibility means the app can automatically adjust for pit stops in restaurants and bars or other distractions. This feature threatens to raise privacy worries, but Mason says Detour only tracks user’s locations to steer them through their journeys.

Detour also uses Bluetooth signals to connect multiple people on different phones to they can simultaneously listen to audio tours that look beyond famous San Francisco landmarks.