We wrote about Waymate and its rival GoEuro last month – both companies are trying to navigate the world of travel comparison services, but Waymate is taking the extra step of letting people book journeys directly from the service, rather than sending them off to the train or plane operators’ websites.

As we noted at the time, this is difficult from a data point of view, due to the complexity of the various services on offer. There’s an even greater barrier, though, in the unwillingness of many operators to let a third-party service handle their bookings.

Despite these hurdles, Waymate’s iOS app is now out and its website is fully up and running. In this initial version, users cannot book journeys directly from the app – instead, they can select a journey then email themselves a link, allowing them to complete the booking on Waymate’s website. The service is also yet to be internationalized, meaning long-distance journeys need to originate in the Eurozone and local journeys can only be searched within major German cities.

The chief benefit of Waymate is the ability to compare all sorts of travel modes: planes, trains and automobiles (car-sharing schemes and taxis are included), as well as metro services and buses. Price and journey duration are clearly displayed on a visual timeline. Sensibly, Waymate has scrapped earlier plans to have two separate apps for local and long-distance travel: this one folds in both ideas.

“Now the task is to expand the app and the website with thrilling new features — especially in social networking — and to internationalize,” Waymate CEO Maxim Nohroudi said in a statement. “In short, we want travel planning to be completely simple and joyful.”

It’s an ambitious aim and one that (as far as I am aware) no-one has been able to achieve so far. It would be no surprise to see the app that finally pulls it off come out of Europe, as the fragmented nature of the market creates a substantial need for a service like this. Now let’s see how far Waymate’s rivals dive into this space.

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But, as two Berlin-based startups called GoEuro and Waymate show, change is underway – a new generation of heavily algorithm-driven travel site promises to make it much easier to compare different types and combinations of transport type, from air to rail to bus, and perhaps even to book multimodal journeys through a unified portal. GoEuro announced the closure of a hefty $4 million seed financing round today, so let’s talk about them first.

Big solutions need big money

GoEuro’s idea is this: one search will show you your travel options between all European cities, towns and villages, including air, rail, bus and car rental. Customers can then choose which combination of these transport modes suits them best, based on criteria including price, convenience and total travel time. A closed beta should launch in a few weeks’ time and, all going well, the full service will open up a few weeks after that.

The seed round was led by Battery Ventures, which previously invested in travel and accommodation companies such as Hotel Tonight and GoGoBot, and Hasso Plattner Ventures, was set up by the SAP founder. Others involved include ITA Software’s Dave Baggett and Global Eagle Entertainment’s Jeff Sagansky – this is a serious crowd and, within Europe alone, GoEuro has a serious problem in its sights.

As GoEuro CEO Naren Shaam explained to me, travel across Europe can be particularly complex partly due to the sheer number of operators in those dozens of countries:

“The financing is mainly going to scale up the technology to integrate some of the partnerships we already have lined up into our platform. Within Europe the number of travel options is huge: train and bus infrastructure is as good as air. And with deregulation, there are a lot of travel providers across Europe.

“Air has a standardized platform – TXL is Berlin Tegel airport [whether you're booking from] Sydney or wherever, but train stations are different. The magnitude of integration is far different from building an air search platform. That requires resources that are able to tackle this challenge.”

A platform such as this would be a big step for Europe’s fragmented travel market, but at the same time GoEuro is still hewing to the traditional model of providing comparison transparency, then sending the user off to the operator’s site to actually book the various legs of their journey (Shaam said this was based on deep links, though, so the user should then be part-way through the booking process when they land on the operator’s site).

According to Shaam, GoEuro is holding back for now on taking that extra step because of the complexity it would entail, in terms of both infrastructure and customer service requirements. One country may allow electronic ticketing, for example, while another may not. Leaving the booking to the operator also removes the need to deal with what happens in the event of a partial cancellation – there, the customer will have to engage with the travel operator, much as they do now.

The next step

Waymate does not have $4 million in the bank – it’s currently angel-funded by Günther Lamperstorfer, co-founder of the IT services firm CompuNet – but that doesn’t stop it from having even more ambitious plans than its neighbor does.

Right now, Waymate lets web users buy tickets for Deutsche Bahn (DB), the German national rail operator. That in itself is a minor achievement – like many such companies, DB is notoriously tight-fisted with its station and timetable data, and not many startups have been chosen as approved partners with the ability to handle DB bookings (UK rail-booking outfit Loco2 trumpeted a similar deal back in January). These bookings are made on the intermediary’s website – customers don’t need to go through to the operator’s site, even to pick up the operator’s frequent traveller points.

But that’s only the start. Waymate wants to apply the same principle to two different use cases: intercity travel, of the sort GoEuro is involved in, and local travel. The company will soon produce apps for both purposes, and late this year or in early 2014 it wants to combine both into a single service – one app to book them all, if you like. As CEO Maxim Nohroudi told me when we spoke a month or so ago:

“We are working on integrating flights, but then we thought, let’s not forget about the door-to-door case. One you arrive in Munich, for example, you want to know the local transport options – all public transport, plus car-sharing, plus taxi.”

Waymate intends to allow the same kind of user criteria as GoEuro will allow. Now, there are some multimodal transport booking sites out there, but they tend to come from the transport firms themselves, particularly the rail operators, making their neutrality doubtful. The big issue is getting access to all the necessary players as a neutral party. In Waymate’s case, that was only made possible by winning an EU Smart Mobility Challenge last year.

And even then, Waymate CFO Tom Kirschbaum noted, you hit the data problem. Sure, you can scrape station and timetable information, but that kind of data needs to be regularly updated:

“Now we have managed to get over these entry barriers, to discuss with those public transport companies, and they said their data was all their own property. Many players… have established data regimes based on an API, but that’s not the end of the discussion. You have to convince them you’re a solid player.”

As a result, Waymate will build up its own infrastructure so that, in time, it can store and handle large amounts of data without relying on APIs. As all this data will need to be subject to a single algorithm in order to return speedy and useful results, this will be an essential move, and an expensive one.

What these companies are trying to do is really, really hard. The pitfalls are many – from massive complexity to closed-off data and competitors with vested interests. But the rewards will be huge, not only for those who can pull it off – if indeed they can pull it off – but also for the consumer. There is real value in increasing transparency and reducing complexity in the travel-booking business. Watch this space.

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The company will end the year with a total of 17 international cities, following the additions of hotels in the U.K., Netherlands and Canada earlier this year. The HotelTonight app is now translated, for the first time, into a handful of new languages: French, German, Italian and Spanish.

In addition to the other Tuesday announcements, Hotel Tonight is also adding gift certificates for the first time, in $25, $50, $100 and $250 increments.

The international expansion of HotelTonight caps off a pretty impressive year for the San Francisco startup, which also saw its first acquisition. In 2012 it has grown from offering hotel rooms in 28 cities to 72. It also grew from just under a million downloads of its apps to 3.7 million, and almost tripled its headcount, which is now at 90 employees. The app only launched on the iPhone in early 2011.
“We’ve been successful in the U.S., and the rest of the world should be more amenable to the HotelTonight value proposition. There are a lot more independent hotels,” CEO Sam Shank told me. Plus travelers in other countries generally are allotted more vacation than their U.S. counterparts, so “they have more flexible schedules to be spontaneous,” he noted.

It also helps that both iOS and Android — HotelTonight’s only platforms — are the two fastest-growing mobile platforms almost everywhere. Besides the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France and Canada are all in the top 10 countries in the world with the most Android and iOS device activations.

Despite the rapidly expanding list of cities, a new office in London, and the acquisition this year, HotelTonight has no plans to slow down in 2013.

“We’ll be expanding very aggressively in continental Europe, Mexico and other countries,” Shank said, declining to get specific about its next target.

A good guess? It would be rather odd to translate your app into Italian without planning a presence there.

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From the timeliness of a flight’s arrival, to the quality of the crew, to seat legroom, entertainment options, food quality, Wi-Fi and electrical outlets at each seat, Routehappy is attempting to do something that no other flight search aggregator does: put all that information about every single non-stop flight in one place. CEO and founder Robert Albert and his crew of seven have been working to combine the huge amounts of data out there about commercial airlines in a way that gives each flight a “happiness score” on its website and links to go purchase that flight somewhere else.

The happiness score is on a 10-point scale and shows up next to every flight listed on Routehappy.com. The scores are also color-coded and come with a happiness-level-appropriate emoticon. You can search at a glance based on the emoticon and score, or you can filter by specific amenity, like power outlets or roomiest seats.

But the fact that this product involves smiley faces belies the enormous undertaking involved. It’s quite a chore to get all that information to compile scores to begin with: there are 40,000 flight routes in the world, 700 airlines and 31 million flights every year. But there are also 200 types of aircraft in operation, and when accounting for each variation that a manufacturer makes, there are actually up to 800 different configured types of aircraft out there. And there’s more variation: “Each one of those subfleets has a different dimension of seats and amenities, and flyers rate all these things different,” said Albert. “So we’ve created a matching algorithm that’s collecting data from thousands of sources all over the world.”

In all, Routehappy’s algorithm matches every scheduled flight in the world, and scores every component of that flight, down to whether the in-flight entertainment is a seatback video player or an overhead monitor, as well as the space measurements of first class, business class and economy seating.

The goal is to help people looking for air travel to quickly make a decision based on all the pieces of data they’ve collected from around the world. The next step is sending them to a booking site. But even that act of linking all those flights is no small feat either. That’s because not every airline offers booking through its website — some only go through online travel sites, and there are some who don’t have websites at all. And that requires more work.

Albert cites one example: tourists who go to Burma have two airline options for flying within the country. For one of them, ”they don’t even have a website,” he said. “But we found a place to find a travel agent [to book a flight for] them.”

While a flight in Burma might seem as niche as it gets, that’s kind of the point: Routehappy’s service wants to be all things to all people, no matter where you want to fly.

“The devil is in the details,” said Albert, who is a travel industry veteran. “To do air travel well, you  have to care about the details.”

But all of this focus on the other things doesn’t mean Routehappy isn’t going to address users looking for deals. Far from it. Early next year when the product is scheduled to leave beta, the company is adding the next, big — and possibly most important detail of them all — price.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user kossy@finedays

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The fun Europe trip

The good:

myTaxi (iOS/Android/Windows, free)

I was amazed when our Airbnb host told us about myTaxi, which lets passengers hail a nearby cab, book it and track its approach on their phones. (There’s now a web booking option, too.) You can pay through a credit card linked to the app, or with cash or a credit card in the cab. And you can save your favorite drivers, make advance bookings and request cabs with certain features like credit card machines or hybrid cars. Unlike Uber, myTaxi works with regular city cab drivers so you just pay a regular cab fare. It’s basically street-hailing made easier. MyTaxi operates primarily in 30 cities worldwide, most of them in Germany, and just entered the U.S. for the first time with its launch in Washington, DC. I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival in New York, though considering the difficulties Uber has faced here, that could be a long time coming.

Tripit (iOS/Android/Blackberry/Windows/web, free for basic version)

I forwarded all our travel plans and email confirmations — hotel reservations, flight details, etc. — to Tripit. The app makes a custom itinerary for you and keeps all your stuff in one place.

Google Maps (on iOS 5) + data roaming

Apple released iOS 6 a couple weeks before I left for Europe, and as the terrible reviews of Apple Maps rolled in, I chose not to upgrade so that I’d be able to keep the Google Maps iPhone app on our trip. I was so glad I did. On our first few days in Europe, I was insistent that I wouldn’t shell out for an international data plan — I decided I’d stick to Wi-Fi and downloaded a few offline map apps. But the offline maps I tried were clunky and hard to use. So I paid for a small roaming package and from then on, wherever we walked, we used Google Maps to guide us. It worked perfectly and was a total lifesaver when we got lost after a visit to a coffee shop in Amsterdam.

TripAdvisor (iOS/Android/Nokia/Windows/web, free)

Using Trip Advisor for international travel seems roughly as cool as using a Rick Steves guide. I wondered if we were missing out by not using some cool local source —  and it’s true that all of the recommendations we got from local folks (like our Airbnb hosts in Frankfurt) were great. Yet TripAdvisor surpassed my expectations. Before we left, I tested its restaurant recommendations for my own neighborhood in Manhattan and they were, indeed, some of my favorite local places to eat, not total tourist traps. Abroad, TripAdvisor continued to serve us well and didn’t steer us to any duds. We also found that it had many, many more reviews than Yelp, at least in the cities we visited.

The bad:

Lonely Planet Berlin & Amsterdam Travel Guide apps (iOS, $3.99)

Despite our good experience with TripAdvisor, I was also looking for a more traditional guidebook experience — we weren’t in any city for very long and wanted to get a good basic overview so we could decide what to do. So I bought Lonely Planet app guides to Berlin and Amsterdam. At $3.99 each, they were cheaper than print guidebooks and, I figured, would give us the highlights.

They were better than nothing. Rather than taking a print guidebook and enhancing it through technology, though, the app guides were much more frustrating than a handful of paper would have been. I expected that the guides I bought would correspond with the most recent print editions. Instead, they were out of date, referring to museums that would re-open in 2010 and once or twice steering us to restaurants that no longer existed. The maps included with the apps were outrageously bad, and in general, none of the things that a digital guidebook can actually do better than a print book — reader reviews, up-to-the-minute (or at least up-to-the-year) updates, GPS integration, etc. — were included.

The unplanned road trip

The good:

Priceline Negotiator (iOS/Android)

This app came in handy when we needed to find motels outside Savannah, Ga. (after our first day of driving) and Washington, D.C. (after our second day of driving). We weren’t looking for fun boutique-y features in cool neighborhoods, just clean places right off the highway. Priceline has tons of user reviews and aggregated “guest scores” even for boring chain motels like that, so we knew we should choose the Comfort Suites in Richmond Hill, Ga. ($70) over the Travelodge ($30, “it was nasty roaches”) down the street. And you can book hotels directly through the app. Priceline Negotiator also recently added “tonight-only” hotel deals to compete with the Hotel Tonight app.

One limitation: We needed a one-way car rental from Tampa to New York, but the app doesn’t support one-way trips, so we had to book the car through Priceline’s website.

MotionX GPS Drive (iOS, $0.99)

By the time our unplanned road trip rolled around, I’d upgraded to iOS 6. I kept hearing that Apple Maps is not terrible for drivers, so it should have worked for the journey from Florida to New York. Yet while Apple Maps had a lovely interface and turn-by-turn directions, it kept giving us different — and longer — routes than Google Maps’ mobile site (I compared the sets of directions from the passenger seat). We would have just used Google Maps’ mobile site, but it kept getting glitchy and wouldn’t toggle between a map and text directions without requiring me to retype our destination each time. So we turned to MotionX GPS Drive, which is $0.99 and then costs an additional $2.99 per month (or $9.99 per year) for real-time live voice guidance.

MotionX GPS Drive got us safely back to a drenched Manhattan. I realized that over the past three days, the biggest problem I’d had was a few glitches on a fancy smartphone, and I felt grateful. There’s not an app for that. Instead, I texted money to the Red Cross.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Danny Smythe

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It’s how many people travel these days. Now Triposo has updated its travel guide app for iOS and Android  to 2.0 and brought in some smart ideas about how travelers can make the most of their iPad and smartphone while traveling. The company, started by some ex-Googlers, first made noise last year with its downloadable guides, which provide smart algorithm-based suggestions based on the time of day, weather, local business hours and other information.

Now with 2.0, users get a new iPad interface that allows them to bookmark places that they’d like to visit, which can be synced to their iPhone or Android. Then, when a user heads out and consults their downloadable guide on their smartphone, they can see what places they’ve bookmarked. They can then weigh those plans against new suggestions from Triposo based on where they are and what might be good for that time of the day and weather. That’s something I was missing on my last trip using my combination of notes and downloadable maps.

Triposo 2.0 also includes a new travel journal feature that lets you check-in to a location, associate pictures with a place and jot down notes, all while offline. Then when you return to Wi-Fi connectivity in your hotel, you can see your daily journal on Triposo’s website and share it out to Facebook. It’s a nice way to remember where you’ve gone and what you saw there.

I chatted with Richard Osinga, one of the co-founders of Triposo about the upgrades to 2.0 and he said it was about addressing the ways that people really travel today. So many people now tote iPads when they go on the road, but they don’t like to carry them while out on the street, instead relying on their smartphone.

“This release is about bringing together these two devices, which have different roles,” he said. “The new interface gives you a way to find the coolest things around you, which you take on your phone. Then we’ll suggest more things on your path.”

Triposo, which launched last year, has been on a roll and now has 3 million downloads. The company was started by Osinga, along with his brother Douwe and Jon Tirsen, who were part of the Google Wave team in Australia until the project was abandoned. The Berlin-based company is going up against a number of competitors, from traditional guides like LonelyPlanet and TripAdvisor to social travel startups like Gogobot and local exploration services like Foursquare. It took on $3.5 million in funding from InterWest in July. Chris Sacca, Google Wave co-founder Lars Rasmussen and Crunchfund put in $800,000 into Triposo’s seed round. 

Richard Osinga said Triposo is trying to make its mark by building a product made for real-world travelers, taking into account the limitations and behavior patterns of users. Ultimately, he said Triposo is trying to make a travel guide that’s as smart as the devices running them.

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PrimaTable was founded in early 2012. The two co-founders, CEO Jamie Davidson and Colin Zima (both former Googlers), will become VP of Product and Data Scientist, respectively, at Hotel Tonight. PrimaTable will also bring along its main developer. PrimaTable had done a limited beta of its software earlier this year and was looking to possibly raise another round of funding when their investors introduced them to Hotel Tonight chief Sam Shank.

Shank, meanwhile, had been looking to hire people to build out its platform — the system that helps hotels advertise their same-day room vacancies to consumers — when he had a fortuitous meeting with the PrimaTable guys, he said.

“We were really impressed by the caliber of these people, the amount of thinking they’ve done in this topic,” said Shank. “Instead of taking another round, we convinced them to join forces with us at HT and bring it to a much bigger audience.”

Shank would not disclose the price or any financial details of the acquisition. But he did say — without naming names — that Hotel Tonight beat out a large internet company for the acquisition. “Public internet companies were interested in the acquisition as well,” he told me. “To be able to acquire them in a competitive situation was pretty amazing.”

What will this mean for users of Hotel Tonight’s iOS or Android app? Hopefully nothing, Shank says. “From a consumer standpoint, our goal is for you not to notice this because our front-end apps are so simple, and we want to keep that experience effortless. Over time [users] will notice more hotels, better inventory with more relevance.”

Relevancy is a feature Hotel Tonight has been actively trying to improve. A few weeks ago the company released a significant app upgrade that introduced some limited user reviews and personalized recommendations of hotels they might like. As Hotel Tonight has grown from 29 hotels in just San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles when it launched in 2011 to the current 1,500 hotels in 50 cities in the U.S., Canada and U.K., figuring out how to help customers cut through too many options and clutter is paramount.

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Ameranth is accusing Apple of infringing four patents. The company says Passbook’s ability to store airline boarding documents, hotel reservations and movie tickets infringes on similar ideas patented by Ameranth between 1999 and 2005.

While Apple is often sued by companies that buy up patents only to enforce them later, Ameranth is not your average patent troll. First, this company does make products — online poker and restaurant software. And second, it’s got some pretty high-profile backers, some of which happen to be direct competitors with Apple. That would be Microsoft and Motorola, as VentureBeat reported earlier.

Microsoft and Motorola’s investments are described as “strategic,” which means they are probably small investments. But as VentureBeat points out, it could also be a way to avoid being a target.

A quick glance at Ameranth’s company news site shows that Apple is by no means Ameranth’s first target in enforcing these patents. The company sued a bunch of big names in travel and ticketing in July on similar grounds, including Hilton, Marriott, Best Western, Kayak, Travelocity, Hotels.com, Ticketmaster, StubHub, Fandango, Urbanspoon and others. Ameranth has been partly successful, too. It’s convinced several companies to license its patents, including at least one ticketing company, TicketMob.

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The $1.5 million comes from a variety of travel-focused VC firms, including High Peaks Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners and VoCap Ventures, and will be put toward scaling the huge amount of information Routehappy already has about routes, planes and airports.

Routehappy is both a website and a mobile app. CEO Robert Albert is a travel industry vet from Travelocity, and he knows that air travel can suck if you don’t know enough about it. As Albert put the company’s goal in a conversation last week: “We want you never to get stuck on a bad flight again.” That’s a tall order. But Routehappy says it has the answer: combining tons of data and the vast knowledge within the frequent traveler community.

The central piece of Routehappy is its “flight experience engine.” You don’t search for the cheapest flight like Kayak or Expedia, but the best flight: which seats are the roomiest, which planes have Wi-Fi, electrical outlets, and seatback video and who has the most on-time flights. Routehappy has collected all that data and with it ranks every flight from 60 airlines’ nonstop U.S. routes — it’ll be expanding to more in the future — and gives it a score out of 10.

Example: Best options for US Airways PHL to SFO routes.

Collecting the data was “a massive effort,” Albert told me. “We’ve taken every aircraft, down to the version, the cabin. We have so much more data than even airlines have.” For example, he said, “Instead of telling you a number, like a seat has 31 inches [of room], we said let’s analyze what’s a standard seat, what’s tight, what’s roomy, and tell people that.”

The road to Routehappy

When Albert resigned from Travelocity a few years back, he said was determined to find a better way to discover flight tips beyond googling. There are people who know Boston Logan to LAX or Seattle-Tacoma to Anchorage better than anyone. That’s why Routehappy has passenger reviews. Via the app, flyers can leave a review on any flight, including the service and condition of the plane, while the flight is happening. To encourage experts to share their knowledge, Routehappy has a fun, Foursquare-like aspect: the most frequent flyers of each route will be awarded “Route Expert” status.

In addition to reviewing flights, users are also encouraged to review airports too: the best airport food, the shortest security lines and more — anything that will help flyers get through the experience as happily as possible.

There are already 90,000 reviews, photos and ratings uploaded by users in more than 60 countries since the site has been in beta, he said.

There are apps like Hipmunk that have the “agony filter” that help travelers find the best flight, but that is still focused on price, and there’s no real community knowledge shared. As a frequent air traveler, I really like the user review aspect of Routehappy. Did you know Charlotte Douglas has nice, comfy rocking chairs to chill out in between flights? I did, and now I can tell other people. I had no idea that Detroit Metro is a brand-new airport with cutting edge amenities, or the location of the least-painful TSA security line in the United Terminal at SFO. These are things I should know, and are available via Routehappy.

I could probably find this stuff by googling or scanning frequent flyer or travel geek sites, but that’s a lot of work.  I think Routehappy has identified a real need air travelers have besides shopping by price. The promise of flight rankings should lure less frequent flyers in, while the gamification aspect will keep the experts around.

And even though it’s brand new, Routehappy is already aiming to target flyers who don’t come to its site or app: its ultimate goal is to eventually have its Routehappy ranking on every travel site, from Hipmunk to Kayak, Expedia, United.com and more to reach as many potentially unhappy or lost travelers as possible.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user twinxamot

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Irrive is the latest startup from New York entrepreneur Steven Cohn, who started BuyYourFriendaDrink.com and sold it to Living Social in 2009. This next venture is still in the social space, but it’s aimed at helping users seamlessly and easily share big life events, especially trips, instead of a beer. The idea, he says, is that we have all these great memories that we want to share, but the record of them is usually all over the place, out of sync, and easily lost. (There is something like this already for gathering info about your friend’s trips, using Tripl, but Irrive is focused on scrapbooking your own trip.)

“The current sharing platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, etc. are basicaly all feed-based products. You share in the moment and it kind of goes to the bottom of the feed and the moment is lost,” Cohn said in a phone call last month. “You miss your friends’ updates sometimes because it goes to the bottom of the feed and it comes in bits and pieces and it loses context.”

And that’s not really how we tell life stories, he argues. We tell them in a streamlined manner. That’s the aim of Irrive. “If you think about it,” he added, “when you get back from a trip, you go to lunch with a friend and they say, ‘How was your trip?’ You tell them in a story format.”

I love travel and I get to write about travel tools and services quite a bit. But Irrive is one of my new favorites. Here’s why:

It’s stupidly easy to use. I tested it out with my April trip to Greece. All I had to do once signed up was connect Irrive to any of the following accounts: Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr and Twitter. To create a new scrapbook, simply give Irrive the dates of your trip. From there it will automatically suck in any update, status, photo or check-in uploaded during those dates. If you want to delete any of the ones Irrive finds from your scrapbook, you can. You can add itinerary details too — just forward any airline, hotel or restaurant reservations or ticket email to a special Irrive address and the information will be filled into your scrapbook.

It gives needed context to a singular event or experience. I don’t put everything on Instagram because I have random followers who I don’t think need that level of detail about my travels or life. But I also don’t put everything on Facebook for fear of spamming close friends with a stream of my trip photos in their News Feed. Irrive fills in those blanks and captures everything that happened in one place and gives it the context of a single event. This is sorely missing today, and it’s why I liked the idea of Kullect — adding context — but Irrive is so much more effortless on the part of the user, which is key.

It lets you share beyond the confines of each social service. Not all of the people who care about my travels and important life events, like family and close friends, are following me on all these services I use — my dad is on Facebook, but my mom isn’t. My husband doesn’t use Instagram. None of my family is on Foursquare or Twitter. But in approximately 10 minutes I can collect everything that happened on a trip or over a period of time and show real-life important people what I experienced through an emailed link — which everyone can easily access.

It makes a scrapbook and trip slideshow super simple. You actually end up with a tangible product once each time you compile a trip. You don’t have to do anything to make the slideshow — Irrive builds it for you automatically. If you want, you can decide to add or subtract images, and add music. But it’s optional. And it literally takes like 10 minutes max to do all of this. iPhoto for iOS has a great Journal feature that will automatically turn your photos into scrapbooks, with maps, dates, memories, weather, etc. But it’s based mainly on photos, and it’s not naturally social.

Irrive is not an app yet — it’s built for the web using HTML5. It was a conscious decision by Cohn and his team to go to the web first, so anyone you’re friends with on Irrive can see and comment regardless of the device they’re using (if you mark it as public). Any user you invite can comment on your scrapbook memories too, even if they’re marked private.

This is cool as is, but the seven-person team behind Irrive is just getting started. Though it’s a sharing and organizing tool for your digital memories now, Cohen says there’s more to come and eventually it’s going to move into more of a planning tool too.

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