by Jason Wilk on November 17, 2008
- VibeAgent
, a hotel information search engine, has closed a $3M Series A funding (individual investors not named)
- The site offers an extensive travel search engine for finding and booking hotels like Kayak.com, but only for hotels. It is different because it includes user generated reviews and a Wiki directory of hotels that can be edited.
- I hope their $3M is large enough to compete with the rest of the players in the space for search traffic. Kayak has raised over $200M.
TC
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by Jason Wilk on November 14, 2008
- The President says that the gradual rise in sea levels caused by global warming means the Maldives islanders may eventually be forced to resettle elsewhere.
- The Maldives is the lowest nation in the world, and its highest land is little more than two meters above sea level.
- The United Nations estimates that sea levels may rise globally by nearly 60 centimeters this century.
- This is a truly sad story for one, if not the most beautiful island chain in the entire world. Come on people, unite!
by Jason Wilk on November 12, 2008
- Technorati founder Dave Sifry has launched his new Travel Guide startup, OffBeat Guides.
- He came up with the idea while visiting Dalian, China, one of my favorite places in the world. He was looking for a guidebook and was surprised to find limited info about Dalian, and an influx on major attractions like The Great Wall and Terracotta Warriors. He wanted to change this.
- Concept: Once you to enter your name, travel plans, and where you are staying on OffBeatGuides.com, the system crawls various sites such as weather, professional travel sites, notes and articles by professional travel writers, etc. and displays essential guide book info about the area you are headed.
- The info is displayed in a Wikipedia style format and let’s you choose what kind of information you would like to include in your persona travel book (eat, sleep, attractions, dangers, etc.). If you know about the area already, then you can hide the history section, or if you already know what to see, you can hide the attractions section.
- Once you’ve built your book, you can download it as a PDF for $9.95 or purchase it in physical form for $24.95, which also includes the PDF. You can always refer back to it online need be.
- I don’t exactly know how Dave thinks he can compete in this arena. As an experienced world traveller, I can tell you that Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and more dominate the travel book industry. If I wanted to purchase one of those, I could do so online, buy it on Amazon used, or just pick one up when I go to my destination. Any non-westernized country will also have knock-off editions of all these travel guides that are around $5 once I get there. In addition, there are so many user generated travel resources out there, that I can print out myself if I wanted and make it into a nice little book. Wiki Travel guides, Bootnall Travel Network, Travel Blogs, Lonely Planet’s UG section, TripAdvisor, and so many more can give me this info for free. Come on, $24.95 for a printed version or $9.95 for a PDF? Sounds like you should have talked to a few more travellers before launching this thing. I just don’t see the appeal here. Nice functionality and design, but I give it a 2 on execution. Sorry.
TC
by Jason Wilk on October 11, 2008
- TravBuddy, which has been around for a couple years now is the top place to go for finding online info about certain places and other people on their way there.
- TravBuddy also lets you create travel blogs integrated with Google Maps so you can share future travel plans and connect with other travelers based on interests and travel routes.
- They boasted last year that they are the largest travel social network, with over 1,000,000 members, 13,000 blogs, and 500,000 pictures.
- So, if you want to take a break from this economy or have a website that runs itself, find someone travelling to Bali on TravBuddy and high tail it out of here.
TC
by Jason Wilk on September 30, 2008
- BlueMapia is a social network that let’s users input ‘Placemarks’ around the globe for places they currently are or have been. Add pictures, video or text to describe the location
- The editors of the site have already mapped out the main ‘Points Of Interest’ to populate the site with interesting or well travelled areas to go by sea.
- Their most valuable feature is enabling users to share information about nautical itineraries and destinations with other boat goers via mobile.
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