Falcon mobile app powers off-grid navigation with users’ points of interest

Falcon is a navigation app best used for finding local points of interest when road maps and turn-by-turn directions are of no help. Think college campuses, music festivals, or even foreign cities where you can’t read street names.

Falcon’s navigation works like a compass.

The app launched at Coachella this year and the event serves as a great example of how the app works. The Coachella fairgrounds is a location created by a Falcon user that anyone can access and within the map are points of interest like stages, water stations, and bathrooms.

Friends can save their current location or designate a meeting spot that other users can see and navigate to using the full screen compass. Users can choose to share their location publicly or to send it to a single person. The app is similar to Mapsy in that it allows users to add their own places of interest.

Beyond music festivals, the app collects local points of interests within a city. This could anything from pub crawls to art walks to the best picnic spots in Central Park. The app relies on users adding their own places of interest; therefore, the team’s biggest challenge will be building a large enough user base to generate these points and make the app worthwhile for travelers to consult.

Falcon is helping generate interest and build up customized maps by partnering with organizations and groups who add their own places and introduce the app to event participants.

In the future, the team behind Falcon thinks the app can be a fun way for tourists to explore a new city by using maps with points of interest like “tourist attractions in downtown LA.” The app doesn’t rely on an Internet connection, which is helpful if traveling overseas.

Falcon’s three co-founders are currently participating in startup accelerator Startup UCLA. Below is a short video created by the founders on how to use the app, which is only available on iOS.