When it comes to mobile travel apps, it’s a buyer’s market at the junkyard. There is not shortage of half-baked, vaguely useful apps that you may use once or twice then forget they existed.

So many location-based apps that suggest attractions close to you have incomplete and often outdated databases. Place-specific guides also tend to be limited, often listing the most obvious attractions.

According to some important-sounding economists you should know about, the leading cities of the future will those with the most creative populations. The measure of an economy’s importance is shifting from knowledge and information to inventiveness. The innovators, the dreamers, the right brainers will win.

Governments are listening and tinkering with their economies to foster creative industries like design, architecture, software, video games, and film. The benefits, those important-sounding economists say, are multiple: urban regeneration, higher wages as jobs upgrade from service and manufacturing, flourishing cultural scenes that attract tourism, modernized educational programs that generate talent… the list goes on.

Please allow us to introduce ourselves. We’re Roberto and Bianca. We’re a couple. We’re both from Brazil and we both chose Canada as our adopted nation. We’re also both journalists, and together we’ll travel around the world for one year starting February 2010.