great takes on family travel in the U.S.

From guest blogger Marsha Takeda-Morrison of Sweatpantsmom

If you haven’t already, chances are you’ll soon be receiving one of those tax rebate checks from the government, intended to “stimulate our economy.” I think that’s just fancy talk for “buy lots of stuff” and I plan to do just that. Not sure how to spend yours? If you’re coming to L.A., there are many ways, depending on who you talk to…

If you’re my husband, the first stop would be Amoeba Records in Hollywood. I’m not sure what happens, but immediately after walking through the doors of this cavernous record store he gets a glazed look in his eyes and then disappears for hours, lost in the aisles of vintage vinyl and import cds. I’m betting if he had a supply of water and granola bars in his pocket he could stay in there for weeks at a time.

His next stop would be Guitar Center on Sunset. Even though it’s a chain, apparently the only true Guitar Center experience can be found in its flagship store in Hollywood. I have to agree, since from what I’ve seen the metal rockers there really do have the biggest hair.

My tween daughters would have a totally different plan for their windfall. (This of course, would be a fantasy sequence, where children actually had a say in how their parents’ tax rebate checks were spent.) They’d grab their Hello Kitty purses and head straight to Sugoi Life in Northridge, a mecca for anyone who loves manga and anything Japanese. They’d buy a few Pokémon figures, indulge in some Pocky Sticks (thin wafer sticks dipped in chocolate) and buy at least one plushy from their favorite movie, Totoro.

Then they’d talk me into driving across town to Menchies, where they would get the large, not the small, size of frozen yogurt. It’s a serve yourself place, where you dispense any one of their eight flavors of yogurt (they change daily) and then pile on your toppings, everything from caramel sauce to fresh fruit to Cap’n Crunch. They charge by weight, and with the remainder of the stimulus check burning a hole in their pockets my girls would heap on the gummi bears like there was no tomorrow. I’m thinking each of their cups would weigh fourteen pounds.

As for me, I hate to admit it but I would go straight to Target and spend at least half of that check. But for once, I wouldn’t spend it on detergent, or toothpaste, or Swiffer cloths or anything even remotely practical. No, I’d spend it all on myself - purses, clothes, big rings and that cute Mizrahi jacket I was eyeing the last time I was there buying detergent.

With what is leftover I would make a no-holds-barred trip to a good sushi restaurant, either Yabu or Matsuda. Usually I restrain myself from ordering too much since the bill at either of these pricey joints can easily run up into the hundreds. But with that rebate check sitting pretty in my new Target bag, I wouldn’t have to choose between the spicy tuna with jalapeño or the Kobe beef tataki – I could order it all.

How will you spend your rebate check?

From guest blogger, Andy Boyd of ProTraveller

What comes to mind when you think of summer and the sunshine it (should) bring? For many the first thing that comes into their mind is spending some time down at the beach, enjoying a swim in the sea and generally relaxing. For others, especially families with children off school, beaches have to take a humble second place behind the water park.

The attraction is easy to see. The best water parks in the world are designed to have something for everyone. Bring your friends, take your children or go by yourself; these parks are packed full of things to see and do.

If I had to choose 5 water parks worth visiting, they’d include these:

Chimelong Water Park, Guangzhou, China

Here’s somewhere that looks so much that it may even be worth enduring the smog! Chimelong Water Park’s premier attraction is the aptly named Behemoth Bowl, which is basically more than a massive bowl where can you slide round and eventually drop into a pool below. If that sounds like too much action, grab a donut try chilling out on the world’s longest lazy river!

World Water Park, West Edmonton, Canada

You might have a hard time getting your girlfriend to have a go on the slides at some water parks, but there should be no problem enticing her to this place. World Water Park is actually situated indoor, right next to the West Edmonton Mall. There’s something for everyone here with pools through to 85ft tall slides.

Sunway Lagoon, Selangor, Malaysia

This outdoor park enjoys great weather most of the year and has all the usual slides you’d expect. However, it does have one trick up it’s arm that you may not have been expecting: an outdoor wave pool with surfable waves!

Wet ‘n Wild, Orlando, Florida

Ask anyone where they think the best theme parks in the world are and most of them will say Florida, which is why I’ve include Wet ‘n Wild. This iconic water park is famed around the world for some of the most thrilling slides you can dream of with everything covered from vertical kamikazes to more relaxing slides and pools. If you’re in Florida this is a must!

Tropical Islands, Krausnick, Germany

Yep, you read that right. Germany may be mostly landlocked but thanks to modern architecture they managed to create an indoor park thermostatically controlled at paradisiacal temperatures. Fortunately it’s not all about sitting back and relaxing under the domed roof. As attractive as that may be, we’re sure the choice of slides will be worth the trip alone, even in January!

What is your favorite water park for summer fun?

I have a fear of small confined spaces. When in this kind of situation my heart starts to race and I am filled with a deep primal panic that dismisses all rational thought. So, why I ever decided to go caving in Yosemite recently is a mystery. I often commit to daring or unique adventures before considering what it is I am actually involving myself in. I owe this tendency to the fact that I am an “experience junky”. I love to try new things, to see the world from a new perspective, to get outside my comfort zone. It makes life interesting…and usually makes for a great story too!

So, last weekend my husband and I accompanied a co-worker (and avid caver) to the Stanislaus National Forest located on Yosemite’s doorstep. The objective of the weekend was to find remote areas with promising topography (in which caves were likely to be found) and bush-wack off trail in search of these “said” caves. Then, upon discovery, crawl inside and explore or start digging if the opening is too small. I came prepared with my headlamp, bug repellent, some old clothes, and tons of enthusiasm.

It was a lot of fun. But, I did learn a thing or two that I feel I should pass on to all you adventurous travelers out there. If you are thinking of going on a wild caving expedition in the near future, here are some tips: see more »

Charles Knight of Read/Write/Web launched the first Alt Search Engine Day at the Intercontinental Hotel on April 21, 2008. I discussed the first three presenting panels in a post yesterday. This is a continuation of that post and is a recap of the remaining three panel discussions. It was a captivating day because of the different approaches, philosophies and personalities of the participating companies. As a result. I tried to capture the Q&A from each participant as closely as possible rather than trying to summarize each panel to provide a sense of the event. The differing opinions also did not lead succinct summarization. The panels were:

Panel 4–Intent, Monetization and the Next Five Years
Panel 5–Visualization of Search
Panel 6–It is all about semantic search

Panel 4–Intent, Monetization And The Next Five Years

Laurieanne Lassek of Seeqpod (not in photo)
Peter Adams of Matchpoint
Tom Eng of Healia
Ravi N. Raj of Kosmix
Chase Norlin, Pixsy Corporation
Kasian Franks, Seeqpod

Q: What is your site’s defining characteristics?
Pixsy-we are more about prospect of discovery than relevance
Healia-because we are in the health industry, the quality and trustworthiness of the information are very important as well as personalization
Matchpoint-our users wish to make a transaction; they are interested in speed and relevance
Kosmix-we are for people who want to dig deeper, who want to go beyond a cursory five minute search Seeqpod-determining intent is critical for relevance and vertical search is better at pre-determining intent

Q: How can a site monetize beyond advertising?
Matchpoint-we enable verticals to monetize beyond display ads with a provider form
Pixsy-we are a service provider, we only want to generate search query volume on their partner sites, the sites already monetize, we create pages for them to monetize
Kosmix-user experience and monetization are closely tied together for us
Seeqpod-offer contextually relevant product search, and make the steps very close for finding related merchandise, after all, the product or service may be more relevant than the original search

Q: What do we see for vertical search in five years from now?
Seeqpod-we will be competing with Google on the vertical level. There are large portions of the web without links. The question is how does the technology and how does a algorithm reach the deep web and organize it? In addition, we may also want people to interact with their search results over time-share, carry, tag, etc.
Pixsy-the biggest trend is advertiser blend, content is starting to look more like ads, ads are looking more like content,this may influence search results..
Kosmix-vertical search will be offer much deeper content than a major search engines
Healia-it will be formed by context, predicting intent will be the Holy Grail
Matchpoint-the ability to ask about intent may make it more relevant, will improve ambiguity in the search stream

Q: What are you going to do when Google decides to roll into your market?
Matchpoint-they are already in our market, but we have differentiated ourselves and continue to innovate at a high velocity. The biggest barrier is to keep innovating. “Search” is giant market, it can handle more than one player

Kosmix-we are synergistic with Google
Pixsy-they are not in our business yet,if you can you build audience and monetize, you are in good shape
Seeqpod- it is raw competition algorithmically, other companies have models that will succeed where Google will not, much on the web can’t be indexed

I think Healia said it best, think of technology as solving problems, five to ten years it maybe a different company we are discussing, not Google…

Panel 5–Visualization Of Search

Laurent Baleydier of KartOO
Alex Zivkovic of Cluuz.com (Sprylogics)
Randy Smith-KoolTorch

The panel suggested two new opportunities are semantic search and visualization. They believe people will adapt visualized search because it captures much more information in a single screen and makes the search process more efficient. I have yet to try it out, but found the concept fascinating.

Kartoo–in quick review, there are three new strategies for visualization:
1. Get the full picture using semantic maps
2. Animate graphs to allow a user to jump from place to place
3. Facet mapping (KVisu.com)

Cluuz.com-everything they do involves networks or graphs. They use meta-search , extract, then disambiguation to create a graph showing the relationships. They have found users enjoy using the diagram.

KoolTorch-provides an aesthetically balanced view of extensive research results. The founder, wanted a better way to find results rather than scrolling past the top ten, etc. Only search engine that shows more than 100 results in one view, grouped into categories (Ebay becomes circles of books, collectibles, etc. WILD!)

It is possible to drill down through each group and keep going through every level of the database..

This panel did not follow a formal Q&A. As a result I tried to summarize the conversation.

Q: What is the added value of a map versus list of text?
It is more efficient manner of showing extensive information. The goal is too show a large amount of search results in one screen and help the user arrive where they want to go more quickly.

Q: What is the goal of semantics?
It is about showing the right stuff. We can complete semantic analysis to make the “maps” deliver better results. Semantics is a means to improve the search function and deliver better results. Allows us to start at a more accurate level. At some point, semantics with visualization will work together.

Q: How do you protect your interface from your competitors
Patent it!

Q: How are you going to gain users? What search queries have you seen users use to use a visual?
It must be really intuitive. If you have to educate, it is a problem. Users will use a map to eliminate the noise, when there are many meanings to a word. There will be an education phase. But if it is more efficient and more productive, it will be readily adapted..

Q: How do you answer a simple query?
We offer a hybrid which includes the visualization and a list of results.

Q; How many entities can you show?
The maximum is 50 otherwise it can be confusing. Color and shape can also be used to represent different concepts.

Overall, the panel suggested that the use of semantics and visualization together will create the best interface.

Panel 6. It’s All About Semantic Search

Nagaraju Bandaru of BooRah (on left)
Frank of Eeggi (on right)
Barney Pell of Powerset
William Tunstall-Pedoe of True Knowledge
Kathleen Dahlgren of Cognition

Q: What is your biggest challenge?
True Knowledge-key challenge is building the structured content to answer the questions properly.

Q: What can be done now that couldn’t be done before your site was created?
Eeggie-we can really search the internet in any language, we are building a real world wide engine, we are introducing the tail searches and can be very specific, you can talk to the machines now
BooRah-words mean different things to different people, we can now add in personal preferences, we can extract relevant results
Cognition-can find only relevant results based on a map of the English language, most search results now are irrelevant, we deliver high precision and high recall
True Knowledge-we can answer any question through inference and enable users to contribute to the site
Power Set–better reflection of the results of the search and synthesized results

Q: What percentage of search is semantic based?
Powerset-if you look at natural search engine questions-2 to 4%, linguistic query is 50% or so, 50% failure is due to linguistic mismatches

Q: What is one thing you believe that others may doubt?
Cognition-pure math is hopeless due to the symbology of language
Eeggie-we can handle the language questions very easily
BooRah-can this really be that smart?
True Knowledge-people will respond rapidly to change

Q: How many people today think search is perfectly sufficient?
Audience-no one.
BooRah-Intent for local search is clear. Solve relevance first. Information must be synthesized because there is so much more information available on everything now.

Q:How do you get in front of the user?
Compelling user features, viral marketing and quality over quantity.

With that, the event concluded. It was a day of learning about innovation, ideas and networking and lots of discussion about ontologies and the semantic web.

I wonder if five years from now, if we will be discussing one of the sites in the room ad nauseum or if will we still be talking about “the Google.” What do you think?

We recently argued that online travel is not “done” and that there were plenty of needs not served by Expedia or Travelocity. New companies, like TravelMuse, NileGuide, TripIt, and Dopplr are aiming to address some of these needs.

Facilitating the travel planning workflow is a huge opportunity

One area that is ripe for innovation is the development of new travel planning tools. Travel planning is actually a complex workflow with many different steps: inspiration, discovery, decision on destination, air travel comparison shopping, decision on lodging, itinerary tracking, decision on activities, booking everything…you get the idea.

Two stealth (private beta) and two recently launched companies are likely to provide some cool planning tools to make the planning process easier. Part 1 will cover TravelMuse, NileGuide, and Yahoo! Trip Planner. Part 2 will cover Dopplr, TripIt and some other company TBD.

TravelMuse

Travel Muse (blog) is trying to make travel planning easier through:

• Creating high quality editorial content, like their Chicago travel guide, mostly around city guides(launched)
• Providing a personalized trip planner (private alpha)

We asked CEO Kevin Fliess to comment on the secret trip planner:

Our planner is currently open to only a couple of hundred users so we are not communicating specifically how it works or what it does. Suffice it to say that it is very open and enables people to quickly organize all of their trip research.

(Disclosure: we are in discussions about potential business partnership opportunities with TravelMuse)

TravelMuse’s initial launch was by providing rich destination, activity and theme guides written by their editorial team. In some ways, it is reminiscent of Away.com, About.com, and Concierge.com in its richness. The next phase is to help people move from inspiration to planning through this widget, via a button located in the blank space above the print button:

Once the items are “clipped”, they can likely be added to itineraries, or dream lists, that can be organized and shared with other people. It seems that TravelMuse believes that planning trips “collaboratively with your friends and family” and “store all your travel research in one place” are the key things people are looking for in travel planning tools.

Because TravelMuse’s content is tagged, its likely to that trip planning tools will make recommendations for additional tagged activities in their database. Since their goal is to help people “get ideas of where to travel — based on likes or dislikes,” I speculate there will be more voting features available to allow users to indicate their preferences as they are browsing.

We’ll see if I’m right. By the way, they have a number of editorially-driven themes and activities. In fact, they even have one activity called “sleep” — a vacation activity that I long for!

NileGuide (aka The Nile Project)

Nile Guide is relatively more stealthy, but also promises to “revolutionize the way we all plan travel — one trip at a time.”

(Disclosure: we are not in any discussions with Nile Guide at this time and this is based solely on public information and speculation.)

Like UpTake (formerly Kango) and TravelMuse, Nile Guide recognizes that travel is NOT just about Air, Car, and Hotel:

Josh Stenitz is CEO of the Nile Project, Inc. aka Nile Guide, and formerly an executive at Cendant Partner Marketing, Away.com, and Parthenon Group. His co-founder John Monson was an Intuit executive in the mid-90s. John’s LinkedIn profile describes the company as follows:

We’re revolutionizing how travelers plan trips. Our website, NileGuide provides travelers with highly relevant recommendations for hotels, restaurants, sights, activities and nightlife. Travelers select the places they want to go and can drag and drop them into an itinerary and see their trip in a calendar, map or list. And, they can print a custom guide for their trip to take with them.

Norm Rose at Travel Technology Blog first blogged about Nile Project on 11/29/2006:

The consumer explicitly choosers an area of interest, then by using Ajax, the Nile project presents the consumer a limited number of preferences related to those interest. The application uses an Ajax slider (chose a value within a range) allowing the consumer to rate an attribute on a scale (e.g. cost from budget to most expensive). These than act as dynamic filters that present content that meets a consumer’s requirements. Additionally the site acts as an aggregator of ratings from other sites (e.g Trip Advisor, Travelpost). As with other Travel 2.0 sites, trips can be shared with friend, relatives and travel companions. Once the itinerary is set, the Nile Project creates a customized itinerary in a PDF file so the consumer can take it along with them on the trip.

And at AboutUs.org,

We’re developing a revolutionary way to plan great travel experiences combining personalized recommendations with interactive planning tools and custom guidebook creation. Check back soon to start experiencing the best travel planning the web has to offer!

We believe they are ready to come out of private Beta any day now, and we expect to see some interesting Ajax sliders (first made famous by Kayak) to refine the recommendations that they make to users. Unlike a more traditional “clip” widget like TravelMuse (or what we are planning at UpTake), Nile Guide is likely to come out with some “drag and drop” controls that allow you to pick travel products and drop them into a “bucket” or “wallet” or “folder” of some sort. Then that folder will support various views, like list view, chronological view, map view, or calendar view.

Yahoo! Trip Planner

Hardly new to the scene, Yahoo! Trip Planner launched in July 2006 and as of December 2006, there were 600,000 itineraries in Yahoo! Trip Planner already.

But this TripPlanner, with Farechase air ticket metasearc, Flickr photos, and Yahoo! Answers integration, is a great example of the potential of travel planning tools.

You can create trips with lodging and activities on the trip. I created a trip to Grand Bahama Island for my family (it was a destination wedding). 39 people gave this itinerary the thumbs up!

I was dreaming about going to the 2008 Olympics but unfortunately I’m too busy with this startup to go!

In the trip plan, you can bookmark hotels and activities…

I added “swim with the dolphins” at UNEXSO because the database did not have that product.

The travel plan also links to the hotel guides that Yahoo! has:

I expect that NileGuide and TravelMuse will take the best of Yahoo! Trip Planner and try to top it. TravelMuse will be more oriented toward destinations, activities, and themes (including sleep!) and NileGuide will be more oriented toward rich internet application (RIA) style controls that will allow for drag and drop functionality. Think NetVibes meets Yahoo! Travel Planner.

How does UpTake fit in?

As a meta-search engine for destinations, activities, and lodging, we intend to build a comprehensive index of all travel information. We will enable users to express their preferences so we can match them to the best products and sites. We can work well with TravelMuse and NileGuide by linking to editorial or user-generated content on their site, and thus enabling these new services to be discoverable alongside TripAdvisor, Virtual Tourist, Expedia, MyTravelGuide, Fodors and many other existing travel sites.

I would love to explore integrating our data with 3rd party planning tools, so we can provide lots of choices of travel planning tools for the diverse set of lifestyles and trip types that we will support. For example, family reunions might choose TripHub, destination weddings might choose Wedding Mapper, and other groups might choose Nile Guide. An open systems approach might be interesting, but may not be for some time as everyone is just focused on getting a good product to market.

Anyone who has seen TravelMuse or NileGuide willing to spill the beans on what they are doing? (Just kidding–we’re dying of curiosity but don’t violate your NDAs please)

Charles Knight of Read/Write/Web launched the first Alt Search Engine Day at the Intercontinental Hotel today. Nearly 100 representatives from the alt search world attended.

The day consisted of a series of panels, interspersed with networking opportunities. This is a brief recap of the event. The gathering was casual, collaborative environment. No powerpoints, panel discussions only. If you want to see photos of the event, go here. The main topics discussed were:

1. Federated search for alt search–finding us all in one place
2. User’s First: Give them WHAT they want, the WAY they want (and need)–How to improve user experience
3. Re-aggregation of User Generated Content Intent–how to use all the UGC efficiently
4. Monetization and the Next Five Years–a round-up and more in depth discussion of earler panelist’s points
5. Making Search Visual–no more lists of irrelevent results, visuals instead with better results
6. Semantic search–creating ontologies that work

The key opportunity for alt search is to improve relevancy overall. The question remains, once we accomplish that, will the users embrace us? The first three panels will be recapped today and the following three tomorrow.

see more »