Since our launch in December, we have had thousands of people request a private beta invitation to visit our site. We appreciate everyone’s participation, comments and reviews. It has helped direct our development, given us new ideas and provided encouragement in the midnight hours. Here is a review of blog post coverage we received recently:
Rob Lovitt, at MSNBC in his Online Comparison Sites Move Beyond Price asks you to, “consider the newest kid on the meta-search block, Kango.com, which should probably be called a meta-research site. Currently in private beta, it’s being built on the proposition that finding the right trip is as important as finding the lowest price.” We think Rob has described us well with his newly coined term, “meta-research.”
Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed Venture Partners wrote about the Semantic Web in Travel. He agreed with our approach to the semantic web. He stated, “I am a believer in approaching the semantic web top down rather than bottom up, i.e. by inferring structure from domain knowledge rather than requiring all websites to mark up their content in RDF.” He subsequently pointed to the only two firms in travel taking this approach, TripIt and Kango.
EyeForTravel.com commented that Kango “aggregates and organizes the myriad of the Internet’s travel community and review sites into one place.”
SmartBlog described us as “a resource that brings all your choices to ONE place, filters them based on your preferences, and helps you make a faster, better decision based on more than 20M opinions from 1,000+ web sites.”
I have recapped a list of all the blogs and analyst coverage for quick review right here. If you would like to see more discussion on this coverage, go here and here.
December, 2007–Private Beta Coverage
- Dan Kaplan at VentureBeat
- Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch
- Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim.
- Rafe Needleman of Webware (CNET)
- Anne Zelenka from GigaOm
January, 2008– Analyst and Blog Feedback From Kango’s Private Beta,
- Diane from Jupiter Research
- Tim from Business of Online Travel
- Claude from Les Explorers
- Blog Search Engine
- HotelMarketing.com
- Jens from Tourism Internet Marketing
We hope some of this coverage piqued your interest and you too will join our private beta and the conversations about Kango. Invitations are still sent out periodically to coincide with new features on our site. As HotelMarketing said, visit Kango to discover “a more satisfying vacation experience”.
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6 Responses
[...] joining the blogging community. I’m looking forward to this expansion of their website. And Kango Blog is getting some attention. I love Kango Blog (see the search feature in my sidebar) and it is [...]
Glad that Kango is getting such well-deserved attention…we need travel sites like this on the web!
True that if you offer the right alternatives, price is not that important. I read about this travel search site which searches for flights based on leg room, speed of the flight and other comfort aspects.
So glad to see an alternative that will have my family’s interests in mind instead of just my pocketbook!
[...] help you make trip planning faster. That’s what resonated the most with private beta users, press and bloggers with the Kango.com private beta [...]
When it comes to true top-down semantic analysis of content on the web, it seems that Kango is not just the new kid on the block, you’re the ONLY kid on the block.