BL Blupath Ltd, a specialist software development startup based in Cyprus, launched its ‘Infopoint’ platform, a system developed to support small to medium sized cultural and tourism institutions such as museums, art galleries, and administrators of tourism landmarks.
The Infopoint platform is designed to be a multi-functional software solution that minimizes the need of institutions to utilize multiple different platforms for their various record-keeping and communication needs, with all the duplication of data that this entails, and all the challenges it represents for smaller institutions with limited resources.
The Infopoint platform is designed around the 3 core functional pillars of ‘Records Management’, ‘Communication’ and ‘Collaboration’.
At the core of the platform sits the ‘Records Management’ module, allowing an institution to maintain an organized and taxonomized internal database of records about the various cultural items and landmarks under its care, as well as an internal library of all its media items and documents.
Above the ‘Records Management’ module sit the various ‘Communication’ modules, developed to allow institutions to communicate and engage with their various audiences. An institution can export details about the cultural items and landmarks it manages to the Europeana library, publish them to an automatically generated web portal for access by researchers, or expose them to 3rd party mobile and web application developers through an API. The institution can also use the Infopoint platform to directly communicate with visitors to its own premises, eliminating the need for expensive solutions such as audio guides. The platform lets users quickly generate attractive, multi-media rich, and multi-lingual digital guides, as well as deploy ‘Infopoints’ within their premises – an inexpensive combination of QR codes and NFC tags that direct tourists and visitors to these digital guides by interacting with them via their mobile phones. Alternatively, the institution can also expose these digital guides to their visitors through tablet or hardware kiosks deployments within any space.
The ’Collaboration’ module finally allows an institution to share its various assets amongst multiple different members of its internal team, as well as different institutions to share assets between themselves by forming independent collaborative teams.
The Infopoint platform was developed with the support of the Research and Innovation Foundation under the ‘Research in Startups’ programme of the RESTART 2016 – 2020 initiative. RESTART 2016-2020 Programmes are a multi-annual development framework of Programmes for the support of Research, Technological Development and Innovation in Cyprus, which is co-funded by national and European resources and is implemented in conjunction with other national initiatives and Programmes.
The development of the platform was supported by a consortium of partners that included the Nicosia Tourism Board and the Makarios III Foundation. Both organizations provided their valuable feedback, support, and insights to the development of the platform, and will be utilizing it in their own independent projects to communicate with tourists and visitors to their premises. The Infopoint platform will be utilized to power information kiosks deployed within the city of Nicosia, and information points installed within the Byzantine Museum and Makarios III art gallery of Nicosia.