Brilliant Pivot app shows historical images and videos of your exact location

By Sania Aziz Rahman

Time travel isn’t possible yet, but this app could fill the gap in technology created and imagined by science fiction for the time being.

Pivot is a new, innovative app that acts as time portal on your phone and allows you to browse through innumerable pictures and videos of the place you are at, using GPS to locate your position. Simply raise your mobile phone when the app prompts you at a ‘pivot point’ and you will be able to view images and videos dating decades, or even centuries ago.

Developed by Boston-based Palestinian couple Asma Jaber and Sami Jitan, the app aims to preserve and celebrate the history of countries like Palestine, which are in constant danger of losing their culture and history.

Jaber’s father, who moved to the US with his family after being denied entry into the West Bank, was determined to share and preserve his homeland’s legacy and history by narrating stories about life there to Jaber. After the death of her father in 2012, Jaber decided to preserve these stories and many more using technology and modern media.

“My father used to tell me stories on the history of Palestine and all the cities we used to visit. After he died, I wanted to preserve and share all this information,” she said.

Jaber and Jitan’s plan is to first launch ‘pivot points’ in the Palestinian West Bank, “a place with rich historical, cultural and religious significance, and a place where the preservation of Palestinian culture and history is under threat,” according to the Pivot website. They also hope to move on to Boston and tourist destinations such as Rome and Paris, as well as bring the technology to countries such as Syria, Iraq, and other countries whose rich histories “need to come alive and be preserved in today’s digital era.”

In a world where globalization and migration to other countries are a regular occurrence, it is even more important to preserve the memories and history of one’s homeland, especially when modern technology has made it extremely easy and simple to do so.

Pivot, as an app, became a reality in the spring of 2014 when Jaber and Jitan created a prototype which won them the Dean’s Cultural Entrepreneurship Challenge at the Harvard Innovation Lab.

Pivot also recently launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to enhance app experience and has already crossed its goal of $30,000. Pivot currently uses open source data online archives to maintain the app – but will later transition into a crowd-sourcing mechanism – which the creators call ‘shoebox archiving.’ This shoebox archiving approach will allow people to upload old and even ancient pictures and other multimedia of different places, thereby preserving their homes’ history through their own memories.

For now, the app’s beta version relies on online data sources like Zochrot.org. Pivot is also currently working with Chicago-based Palestinian company, iConnect, and has also received funding from PalTel under their Corporate Social Responsibility program by the end of 2014.

The Pivot team says that the images uploaded (by individual users) will be supplemented by interviews of the older generation, so that the pictures are not lost without accompanying context. The uploaded pictures will also undergo extensive moderation and the approved images will be assigned to their specific longitudes and latitudes. The images will change when the position of the user changes, or if the user selects another time period.

“Some mentors advised us to follow the Wikipedia model, but we needed to control the information. We want all the views of the world, provided that they are validated and significant. It is as if we are archiving the ‘shoe box’ content,” Jitan said. “We want to dive in these pictures and upload them to the app.”

Although initially the idea was to preserve the historic Palestinian legacy, the Pivot team would like to see the app grow and boost tourism as well. In fact, people from Italy, Indonesia, Australia and across the US have already reached out to Jaber to preserve their own homes’ history as well.

Both Asma Jaber and Sami Jitan, the driving force of Pivot, bring plenty of experience in the cultural and humanities field to their new initiative. Jaber previously worked with the United Nations Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine and on civil rights issues with the U.S. Department of Justice.

On the other hand, Sami Jitan is a graduate in Cultural Anthropology and photo-elicitation. Sami also has experience in public-private partnerships in the Middle East in the realms of new media, NGO research, and corporate social responsibility.

It comes as no surprise that this talented duo could come up with a brilliant, long-awaited app that attempts to reconnect us with a past that might have long been forgotten in a beautiful and significant way.