MILTON — Today’s the day to get your hands on a floating map. Special pop-up sales of these items will take place at 114 S. Front St. Milton from 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
The sale will continue Saturday
“Floating Maps are simple prints that we make and sell,” said Kevin Langdon. “They are made to be something you’d want to hang on your wall, just simple, beautiful cartography of local towns.”
Megan Langdon and Kevin Langdon founded the small business.
“You take any phone, Android or iPhone, and point it at the QR code in the corner and it opens our map and lets you view aerial photography floating on top of the map that’s hanging on your wall,” said Kevin. “Inside the app, you can move back in time. So you can move through eight-year increments, usually from today and all the way back to 1937; and see how all those town formed over time from agricultural, to manufacturing, to what they are today.”
The pop-up shop will display some of the map prints Floating maps has to offer.
“A lot of times people don’t understand either what augmented reality is or how our products works,” said Megan. “We found that in person, people get super excited and are amazed by it, but if they’re just hearing the words described they can’t really picture it. It’s a chance to try it. We’re going to have multiple devices there so that people can try any and every town that they want to. We’re going to have 13 of the 14 towns on the walls for people to try.”
Bucknell University Small Business Development Center (SBDC) awarded the grant to the Langdons. The grant is part the Creative Entrepreneurship Program through Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts.
Megan and Kevin received a grant of $2,000 and plan to use the money for Floating Maps printers.
“Instead of outsourcing the printing to somewhere outside of the area, we want to be able to print ourselves and hopefully someday be able to hire people that can do printing and shipping, and even software development,” said Kevin.
“Right now, we have a printer that only prints our smaller map sizes,” said Megan. “We’re hoping to get a printer that will print the largest size, the 16-by-20 size, which is a larger format printer. It’s hard when you’re making something and you can’t print it out and actually see it, so it will help with that.”
A printer is also beneficial to get the product out on demand rather than having to wait for someone to print them.
Their current map locations are Milton, Lewisburg. Watsontown. Northumberland. Sunbury. Muncy. State College. Harrisburg. Carlisle. Millersburg. Conneaut Lake. Media. Conshohocken.