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Prague 360 shoots for the world

Site launches new franchises in five cities, with more to come

By Ailee Slater
For The Prague Post
May 2nd, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST
Jeffrey Martin created the site, which allows a virtual walk-through of the city's landmarks and hot spots.
When a city is as heavily photographed as Prague, it’s hard to find a new way of seeing what has become a typical and clichéd beauty. However, for the past two years, Jeffrey Martin, creator of the Web site Prague360.com, has been sharing with his visitors a way of looking at the city from a different angle — or, rather, from every angle.
Using 360-degree photography, Martin has documented more than 800 venues and panoramas all around the city, allowing a virtual walk-through — complete with Google Map — of the city’s restaurants, bars, clubs, landmarks, real estate and more. At each location, users can view seamless representations of life in the city at a particular moment and from any angle: up, down, all around.
Photo by Jeffrey Martin
Prague 360's panoramas include this view from the castle gates. Click here for 360-degree view.
“It’s not like real life, but it’s something between normal photography and our normal perception,” said Martin.
The site has a wide appeal, and its target audience is a hodgepodge of Prague visitors, residents and “people who will never come here but would like to see it anyway.” And, while these visitors daydream online, they support a steady stream of advertising on the site.
Martin’s model has been so successful, in fact, that he launched a new umbrella site May 1 that will provide similar virtual tours of other cities around the world, including Vienna, Venice, Moscow, Damascus and Los Angeles. Collaborating with photographers in each city, Martin has plans to see his franchises spread across other major cities, all collated at his new site,
360cities.net.
“The idea is to aggregate all of the VR [virtual reality] in the world,” Martin said. “It’s nice and all to have this site in Prague, with these 360 photos, but it’s a thousand times more interesting to have 10 or 20 or 50 of these cities all together in the same place.
“It’s a huge job. But we’re trying to do it right away because it’s the next logical step in what’s happening with these technologies. This is going to be done, and I have to be the one to do it.”
Virtual sell
Martin arrived in Prague seven years ago, “like anyone else, to teach English.” Two years ago, however, his background in photography and a chance discovery of VR picture technology led the now-30-year-old expat to try something new.
“I discovered this form of photography kind of by accident,” he said. But he was quickly hooked by how he could stitch together his shots into a complete virtual sphere, a pinhole into how people experience an environment.
At the time, Martin was looking to display his photography online, with a flash presentation. He then went to one of his designers, Adam Trachtman, with the idea of making a 360-degree tour of Prague, and the two decided to try and make it work. It took much longer than it was supposed to, but, with Prague 360’s expansion, the two have something to show for it, Martin said.
Like many expats starting businesses abroad, Martin admits that running the site has been a challenge, though he doesn’t attribute that to the language barrier, which he muddles through.
Instead, the hard sell for Martin has been the discrepancy between the technology his advertisers are familiar with and the technology Prague 360 uses. While VR photography is common in the United Kingdom and the United States, many potential clients in Prague were apprehensive of the site’s unfamiliar media and business model.
“It’s a business based on new technologies,” he said. “This is very difficult to sell anywhere, and even more so here.”
According to Dean Bedford, a nonvested business adviser to Prague 360, Martin should find even more willing audiences elsewhere, and he’s taking the right steps: Spending less time finding small-time advertisers and more time setting up global infrastructure. YouTube, the video-sharing goliath, is an example of the type of “aggregator” site that first became popular and then later began to pull in profits, Bedford said.
Martin has a solid starting point with his infrastructure, Bedford said. Global implementation, with the help of other VR photographers, is a realizable dream, especially if Prague 360 is able to land a big-time investor, Martin’s top priority.
With that and successful partnerships, 360cities.net could become the spot for VR technology, Bedford said. “Then, [Martin] can sell masthead ads to big advertisers, and make money on transactions with his partners.” A potential acquisition by an Internet giant shouldn’t be ruled out as well, Bedford said.
“My advice to him is to go for the world.”

Ailee Slater can be reached at business@praguepost.com


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