THE WATERFORD Institute of Technology’s spin-out Zolk C has landed €500,000 in seed funding from Kernel Capital to expand its mobile GPS-driven tourism platform globally.

The investment comes through the Bank of Ireland Seed and Early Stage Equity Fund and will help to develop the company’s international market, starting with Canada. Zolk C is already in talks to provide a guide to the Jasper Tramways high in the Rockies, according to managing director Paul Savage.

Zolk C emerged from the institute’s Telecommunications Software and Systems Group and got its start in 2007 when it heard the National Trust for Scotland was looking to tell the story of the Culloden battle, the final conflict of the Jacobite rising.

For preservation purposes, Mr Savage said the site could not be interfered with physically so the traditional audio tour approach could not be used.

“We wrote a paper about how this could be achieved but current technology providers said it was more advanced than anything they could do. The National Trust asked us to build it and it grew from there.”

The original hand-held guide for heritage sites and museums had not changed much since the 1970s, Mr Savage added. “The Culloden guide uses GPS to automatically trigger events and tell the story as the user walks around the battlefield. This was something that had never been done at the time.”

As a result, Zolk C won a Museums and Heritage Award in 2008, beating international competition including Time Warner. Since then, Mr Savage said, a new generation of tourism technology had been created, to include iPhone and Android apps, as well as augmented reality interfaces.

The next Zolk C project is the Viking triangle in Waterford city. The tour will blend indoor and outdoor points of interest with the option to travel back in time to various historic periods with the help of hand-held devices. It is expected to go live this summer.