GigaOM » travel site

Peek lets amateur tour guides plan a “perfect day” in their city of choice

Eliza Kern — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:00:54 +0000

Maybe you live in a popular city for tourism, like New York or San Francisco, and you’re used to giving your list of favorite activities to out-of-town visitors. Or maybe you took the best trip of your life to a distant city, and want to share your tips and tricks with friends. Either way, whether you’re a seasoned local or enthusiastic new visitor, Peek is a new travel site that lets you design your “perfect day” in a city and contribute to a growing travel site where people design their ideal days in cities across the globe. And beginning Tuesday, it will allow normal travelers to join celebrities in making recommendations on the site.

In many ways, Peek is the opposite of the travel guidebooks you might be used to. You won’t find long lists of restaurants, or a comprehensive guide to all kid-friendly activities within a single place. Instead, the site, which launched in October, goes under the assumption that people are overwhelmed with choices when it comes to travel, and they just want to be given a few high-quality options to choose from.

The site is optimized for mobile browsing but has no native apps, an odd choice in an industry that clearly hinges on searching and planning on the go. But Peek, which has the backing of an impressive list of investors including Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, SV Angel and Khosla Ventures, started out with a short list of curated city guides in California and Hawaii, as well as “Perfect Days” designed by celebrities including Piers Morgan (he likes the hot air balloons in San Diego), Tory Burch (she has tips for catching some Hawaiian music in Oahu), and Jack Dorsey (he likes the roasted chicken at San Francisco’s Zuni.) Changes coming to the site on Tuesday will allow anyone to contribute ideas as well.

At first, the ability to create “perfect days” was limited the famous and relatively famous, but Bashir said they had so many requests from people who wanted to post their own “perfect days” that they decided to create a separate version of the site where anyone can post their suggestions for a city. This new version debuts on Tuesday.

“The average person spends an hour planning a trip, and goes to up to 20 different websites,” said founder Ruzwana Bashir, the British CEO and founder of Peek. “In the end, you create a long list of things you want to do and you don’t know where to start.”

The suggestion page looks very much like Pinterest, and users can “re-plan” (like re-pin) suggestions from other people, creating their own “perfect day” as a compilation of other people’s suggestions. Even if you’re not currently planning a trip, it’s fun to browse the suggestions and photos, which can be organized by location around the globe.

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With Airbnb expanding in Europe, Wimdu cranks it up

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:30:15 +0000

A year ago, the peer to peer travel site Wimdu — a European version of Airbnb — didn’t even exist. Now the company’s CEO, Arne Bleckwenn, is presiding over a business that’s expanding rapidly and getting serious traction: one of the first things he proudly points out to me is that revenues have nearly quadrupled in the past three months, and there are now well in excess of 50,000 properties on the site, spread across dozens of countries.

That’s significant, since Airbnb is on a tear of its own. It’s pushing hard off the back of a monster $112m round of investment, and It’s just acquired British travel site Crashpadder as part of a plan to expand further into the European market ahead of the London Olympics.

The two seem destined for a headlong crash into each other, but Bleckwenn is quick to suggest that the market is big enough to support them both.

“I think there will be a couple of really big companies, and then a number of smaller ones too,” he says. “To me, the reality is that we’re both taking business away from the hotel industry.”

On the surface at least, the rangy German — a serial entrepreneur with a handful of previous web businesses behind him — is targeting the big hotel chains, with the hospitality industry heading towards half a trillion dollars. They are concerned about Wimdu and others, he says, because peer-to-peer accommodation not only cuts hotels out of the loop but it also offers people something that they can’t: the chance to feel like a local.

Another reason to focus on growth rather than competition, he suggests, is that while Wimdu thinks it is going mainstream, it’s still some distance away from being a household name yet.

“The fact is that if you ask people on the street what is Airbnb or what is Wimdu, most of them won’t know,” he admits.

Still, the company feels like it’s turned a corner. Since the start of the year things have cranked up, with visits growing dramatically and revenues now in “seven figures”.

So what accounts for the massive surge in growth over the past few months? It’s not really seasonal — unlike more traditional travel businesses — because the average Wimdu user largely books weekend city breaks at short notice rather than long-term holidays. Instead, he suggests, it’s largely down to smart marketing, he says: nothing revolutionary, but well-focused and well-funded.

Funding, of course, is not something Bleckwenn has to worry much about. The company raised a bumper $90 million last summer from Swedish investment Kinnevik and incubator Rocket Internet — the infamous German clone factory, which we have covered in plenty of detail here in the past. That money is what has helped Wimdu get the wheels spinning so fast, so soon, but it also comes with serious strings attached (Rocket companies are notorious for giving founders only a limited amount of equity, and pushing workers very, very hard.)

These days, says Bleckwenn, Rocket has less input in the way the company is run. They’re starting to develop their own identity, separate from the mothership, and exploring what they can do outside of the day-to-day business of getting up and running.

“They [Rocket] are really focused on short-term; getting the company started, building fast, executing quickly,” he says. “They have a lot of expertise in marketing and sales that has been useful. But bow we’re successful they do not get involved very much, and we are able to think more long-term and build our own company culture which is very different from Rocket’s.”

Still, he thinks the fact that Rocket focuses on building companies in Europe gives Wimdu other advantages, not just aggressive DNA and a different market to target from its American cousins. At the very least, the company has a deeper understanding of what it takes to launch in new countries, since the European market is so complex.

It’s an approach that has helped Wimdu spread into more than 100 countries, and led it to enter the Chinese market in a slightly different way, through a spin-off business called Airizu. This is something that European businesses should be using to their advantage more, he suggests.

“It’s not just about translating your website,” he says, shaking his head. “For example, when we looked at launching in Switzerland, there people there were immediately asking about insurance coverage. That’s something that Americans don’t tend to ask. You have to treat different countries, different cultures, in different ways.”

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Hipmunk comes to Android with a surprisingly slick app

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:00:48 +0000

Hipmunk's mascot with an Android spin

Hipmunk has finally brought its travel search application to the Android operating system, with a brand new mobile app that will hit the Android marketplace Thursday.

Hipmunk for Android, which for now only facilitates flight searches, is impressive because it retains all the slickness of the company’s existing web and mobile offerings. That’s no small feat for an app made for Android, an operating system that generally takes a backseat to Apple’s iOS when it comes to user interface design.

I played around with the new app at Hipmunk’s San Francisco headquarters this week, and it’s a pleasure to use. For lack of a better comparison, the experience is just as smooth as using an iPhone or iPad. That’s not an accident, said Hipmunk’s Android developer Ryan Oldenburg, who worked full-time on the app since joining the company in mid-June.

“The biggest thing about our Android app is it doesn’t not do anything the iOS app does,” Oldenburg told me in an interview. “We really went the extra mile on everything.” In fact, a couple of features — such as the ability to easily clear your flight search history — are currently only found on the Android app, and are likely to be added to the next version of Hipmunk for iOS.

Hipmunk’s Android debut could mark a significant inflection point for the year-old company, which has attracted a loyal following among the early adopter set. iPhones and iPad owners are certainly the choice of many influential folks in tech and media, but Android devices currently account for about half of all smartphones sold in the US. Now that Hipmunk can better serve that huge chunk of the mobile world, the travel app beloved by the cool kids could finally start to get the mainstream following it deserves.

Here are some screenshots of Hipmunk for Android (click to enlarge):

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Up and away! Trover travel app now in wide release

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:30:07 +0000

Trover, the travel app aimed at sharing off-the-beaten-path discoveries, has formally launched out of limited beta. The app, which was initially available only on iPhone for users connecting through their Facebook accounts, is now also open as a web app on Trover.com and accessible to anyone with a Facebook, Twitter, or email account.

The new developments are great to see from the Seattle-based company which, as we first reported last month, initiated as a project within a startup called Travelpost. Trover rolled out as a standalone app on May 4. The company has been funded with a portion of the $9.8 million that was initially invested in Travelpost, and all the development thus far has been attributable to Trover’s six-person team led by CEO Jason Karas. The company plans to debut an Android app this fall.

Despite its relatively humble beginnings as a feature within another startup, Trover has very quickly found a distinctive voice and a dedicated audience of its own. Trover has accumulated 70,000 users across 150 countries during its limited release alone, and has garnered Expedia founder Rich Barton as its chairman. “I’ve done lots of traveling around the world looking for hidden gems, and I’ve always dreamed of having a resource that was at my fingertips with all my friends’ resources and travel recommendations,” Barton told me in a joint interview along with Karas this week. “For me, and for many others, using Trover has very quickly become a state of mind.”

Essentially, Trover allows users to take photos of things they’ve seen and places they’ve been and share them with friends and neighbors. Entries are automatically geo-tagged to the location in which its photo was snapped. Trover aims to catalog the “discoveries” people make when exploring a certain place — Barton described a prototypical Trover entry as saying “park right there, and here’s a photo of the little hidden pathway to the great surf beach.”

Trover’s investors include General Catalyst Partners, Ignition Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Here are some screenshots of Trover in action (click to enlarge):

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Gogobot Turns Foursquare and Facebook Check-ins Into Travel Journal

Ryan Kim — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:30:29 +0000

The check-in was big last year though people are now questioning its basic usefulness as many look to what’s next beyond the simple act. But the check-in still has a lot of value, something social travel site Gogobot is illustrating with its new Foursquare and Facebook check-in integration.

Gogobot is tapping APIs from Facebook and Foursquare to use check-in data for users, helping them fill out their travel history and using the information to share with friends and travelers. It’s an interesting use of check-in data, helping people create a digital journal or scrapbook of their travels that can be easily organized and shared in a structured way with other travelers and friends who can leverage a person’s experience.

“We’re trying to take the game of checking in and turning it into something more lasting than a fleeting post,” said Travis Katz, the CEO and founder of Gogobot. “I can remember all the places I’ve been to and people can discover where to go through me.”

It’s all part of Gogobot’s larger promise of helping make travel planning and discovery more social. The company, which launched its site in November, already leverages Facebook and Twitter by allowing people to query their social networks to find answers about travel tips. Gogobot ingests the answers, recommendations and reviews from friends, and organizes it into structured data that people can use to help plan their trips. The site aggregates reviews for a location into passports that you can browse and share. Now with check-in data, it will quickly fill out a user’s passport for different places, allowing them to create special “collections” of favorite restaurants, hotels and travel spots that can be shared with friends.

Gogobot uses an algorithm and some manual editing to help reconcile and organize check-in data. The company has curated its own location database that is a hybrid of sources and also includes about 110,000 travel images. The algorithm is designed to help filter out less valuable information for travelers such as check-in data for a work place, office cafeteria or home. Katz said Gogobot will be introducing its own mobile apps soon, but it’s happy to rely on Facebook and Foursquare for check-ins because they cover most of the check-in activity going on.

I like what Gogobot is doing; leveraging check-in data and turning it into more of a lasting resource. Gowalla also tries to do some of that with its own passports. But with many location-based services, check-in data isn’t as organized or designed to be used as a broad travel tool. By ingesting and organizing check-ins, Gogobot can make them meaningful and useful in new ways, specifically for travelers. Check-ins don’t have to be all about offering deals or powering local recommendation engines. They can used for more prosaic things like family safety, as I wrote about with Life360, or they can help create important enduring databases.

The company, which hasn’t released user numbers, raised $4 million in June from Battery Ventures. Founded by Katz, formerly Managing Director (International) at MySpace and Ori Zaltzman, former Chief Architect of Yahoo’s BOSS search, Gogobot is also backed by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors.

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