One of the things we really take for granted is the fact that we are now connected over global distances with something we carry around with us all the time. No, not our car keys, we’re talking about the phone of course. What we haven’t done yet is explore exactly what that means to our lives, which is why this new online service is actually rather interesting.

Lopeca is a service which lets you hire yourself and your camera phone out as a remote guide to the city you live in. The idea is for you to add your details, location etc, to the database, and anyone can sign up to rent your time and camera for a guided tour around the area you live.

It’s free for the first 2 minutes, after which you pay $4.90 for a five minutes tour, going up to $9.90 for a full 15 minute experience. Payment is via Paypal, and the tours are guaranteed or your money back. You can elect to use Facetime, Skype or any other form of tour as long as your tour guide can support it.

And if on the other hand you want to offer your own tour services for your city or location, you can just sign up and become a guide yourself. Neat idea. It’s clearly Day One for the service at the moment, because there are no demos, or examples to look at, which is a good sign of a startup, and we’re not too enthusiastic that your first encounter with it has to be as a guide, not a potential viewer, but hey, these are kinks.

As with all these new services, it will depend very much on how much traction they can get in the early days, or how much marketing budget they have, but it’s definitely an interesting idea.