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VisitEarth wins 'Best New Business Stand 2004' at Business Scotland

5th July 2004

Borders-based VisitEarth has scooped a top award at the recent Business Scotland Exhibition at Glasgow’s SECC.

The two day exhibition was part of Growing Business Week 2004’s national events and VisitEarth won Best New Business Stand.

The Duns company provides e-business solutions for travel and tourism and the exhibition saw the launch of its new Virtual Tours Service which offered, for the first time, a 360º view of the exhibition online.

Owner David Dalgety said: “Our stand featured a creative layout against a dark starry background complimented by some creative lighting. We were showcasing our Virtual Tours, Web Site Design, Online Marketing and Online Booking Solution.

“It was fantastic to win the award as recognition for all the hard work which went into creating the stand. The whole experience of taking part in the exhibition opened my eyes as to how we can grow the business and move it forward.

“We had around 30 inquiries for our services, a number of which look very promising. Virtual tours is a specialist market and we are aiming for the top end of it by putting emphasis upon quality offering true spherical 360º Virtual Tours. Other companies in the market will take a couple of standard images and stitch them together to form a traditional cylindrical image whereas we capture at least three fisheye images for each hemisphere and carefully blend them together before the stitching process even begins. The results are amazing in that the viewer can really appreciate say the interior of a room while admiring the view through the window.

 

"They get a complete immersive image experience. This means that you can zoom in on detail, look up and down as well as rotate around. These Tours can be used on the Web, interactive CD brochures, e-mail and within visitor kiosks. We believe these tours will be of real value to such enterprises as visitor attractions and hotels, although we had inquiries from other types of business including a helicopter tour company, a major luxury car dealer, someone selling boats on Loch Lomond, a car chauffeur firm and a psychotherapy centre.”

VisitEarth.com, which was supported by Business Gateway to attend the exhibition, has completed a Virtual Tour of Ettrick Riverside, Scottish Enterprise Borders’ business centre at Selkirk and this is expected to go online very soon.

Geoff Leask, Business Gateway Advisor, explained: “The support that Business Gateway gave David with his attendance at the Business Scotland Exhibition provided a great platform for him to launch his new Virtual Tours Service. I know that the contacts he made at the exhibition were of a high quality and will help to grow the business further."