MuseTrek About Us
Adding you to the cultural conversation
Ever been in a museum, listened to the audio guide and tuned out after three sentences about the color palette or the linear perspective? Ever wished you could walk around and get local info that interested YOU? Want cultural recommendations based on the places you visit and things you do? If so, MuseTrek is for you.
Use MuseTrek as a cultural guide and whiteboard. Follow other people's Treks and start publishing your own thoughts, trails, treasure hunts and games, letting others follow in your footsteps.
MuseTrek makes you the tour guide, the curator and the storyteller using the world's museums and cultural treasures as your medium.
MuseTrek transforms how you explore museums, cities, cultural resources around the world. It is a collection of ever expanding ‘Treks’ created by anyone from renowned artists, to the person next to you at the museum. MuseTrek is your interactive guide available online and on your own iPhone or iPod Touch.
Looking for something fresh to do or to learn? With MuseTrek, you’ll choose your destination, and start exploring. Here you will find a community of Trekkers sharing their thoughts, ideas, and adventures through treks they have created or comments and connections made with other trekkers. And if you are feeling inspired to share your own favorite places, art insights, or personal journey join the MuseTrek community and create your own trek.
Team
The MuseTrek team is a diverse group of successful entrepreneurs, students, educators, and cultural enthusiasts who are no longer satisfied with simply observing cultural venues or accepting the traditional wisdom on what culture is, or ought to be. Instead, we now seek a conversation; we want to participate in creating culture.
Origins
MuseTrek emerged out of the Idea Translation Lab at Harvard University as an idea, seeded in the fall of 2007 by Harvard Professor David Edwards in his Idea Translation class, and subsequently transformed and developed by Harvard students Mishy Harman, Tarik Umar, and Aviva Presser, and Brandeis University student Roee Gilron. MuseTrek was further developed in the Idea Translation Lab Workshop at Edwards' Le Laboratoire in Paris, in the summer of 2008, with the participation of design students from Strate College, where it was first tested in a small preliminary experiment at the Louvre.
In the fall of 2008 Bill Jacobson of TechPoint Ventures in Boston joined MuseTrek as founding CEO to form the company and explore the business potential of MuseTrek’s concepts with the original student founders. MuseTrek grew through the spring of 2009 with the museum partnerships formed by Noemie Tassel, in France, the iPhone application development of Cashman Andrus, and the Internet technology platform of Imperial Consulting, Inc. The efforts resulted in a major public experiment at the Louvre, in partnership with Edwards' Le Laboratoire and the Edwards-founded Cloud Foundation in Boston.
The Cloud Foundation assumed partial ownership of MuseTrek in 2009 and invited urban teens from the Boston Public Schools to participate in the company's development as part of its newly announced ArtScience Prize. The creators of MuseTrek, including the student founders, the Boston teens, and Tassel and Andrus, embody the spirit of MuseTrek as a socially-engaged, grassroots, international organization aimed to carry the world's cultural heritage into the creative minds that will shape and define the 21st century.
