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
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by Jason Wilk on October 21, 2008
- Wikia is letting go 30% of its current 43-person workforce that work on the ‘for profit’ Wikia Search and Wiki software projects.
- The revenue nor traffic is there yet to support Jimmy Wale’s attempt to make money on a project outside of donations.
- The company has raised $14M to date from Marc Andreessen, Joi Ito, and Ron Conway, as well as Bessemer Venture Partners, the Omidyar Network and Amazon.’
Update: Mr. Wales confirmed to me that the Valleywag story about his layoffs was false. He said he is in the process of hiring still and not firing. This may have been in an effort to throw off TechCrunch’s scrutinized LayOff Tracker.
Webware.com, WebProNews, TC, ValleyWag
by Jason Wilk on October 9, 2008
- Wikinvest Wire takes high traffic financial blogs and syndicates their headlines across a network of related WikiInvest articles, other blog posts, and potentially mainstream media sites writing on similar topics.
- WikiInvest is the Wikipedia for financial news, giving readers an in depth look at topics and news not found in everyday mainstream financial sources.
- With their ‘blogwire’, they hope to help content creators come together on related topics to help investors make rash markket decisions in the bad weather.
- Two Questions:
- By having relative links to other sites at the bottom of my blog, won’t I stand to lose readers?
- Thanks for the potential traffic help, but will the traffic I send out to other blogs ever have a chance to be monetized?
I dont think it is relative info that everday investors need help with, its intelligent stock picks in this bad market. Places like Covestor need to become more mainstream (if their site was easier to use), so that we don’t have 2M viewers a day watching Mad Money. Its better to pay attention to multiple people’s portfolios who aren’t on television, because those are about as reliable as ESPN’s pick of the week.
TC
by Jason Wilk on September 13, 2008
- Open Trace aims to be the Wikipedia for the environmental impact of consumer goods.
- Products are added into the system by the simple scan or input of a bar code
- Started by two Japanese programmers, the site provides awareness to the public of what ingredients are contained in consumer goods (including food.
- Benioff recommended that they partner with human rights companies to see where the food came from, if the ingredients are fair trade, etc.
- Amazon.com might be a nice partnership as well.
Made tiny from: TechCrunch50 Conference
by John Jorgensen on September 9, 2008
- Wikia Green is just like Wikipedia except with a focus on green/environment info.
- Aims to stay away from political spin and instead to provide a general consensus on green topics.
- More than just research: Wikia Gren focuses on actions that can be taken by readers to lend a hand in helping the environment.
- CNET interview with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder here.
Made tiny from: Mashable.com original post
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