Vacations Blog

From guest blogger Marsha Takeda-Morrison of Sweatpantsmom

Here is my Thursday Thirteen list, a suggestion of things to do with tweens in L.A. I thought up most of it at the mall last week, as I was waiting outside a store for my two tween girls to emerge with their purchases. It’s amazing what you can get accomplished in seven hours.

1. Hot Topic - This could really cover items 1 – 13 on this list, since as far as my two girls are concerned there isn’t any need to venture anywhere else. Give them a backpack full of snacks and a fully-charged cell phone and they could probably stay in there for weeks spending my hard earned cash on Juno t-shirts and black glitter nail polish.

2. Art Museums – We’ve been taking our kids to art museums since they were babies, but it’s gotten particularly entertaining lately to hear their expert commentary. It’s always amusing to hear things like, “OMG – naked!” when standing before a majestic sculpture by Rodin, or “I TOTALLY want that for my new bunk bed comforter” while contemplating a canvas by Jackson Pollack.

3. Soup Kitchen –I’ve never actually visited a soup kitchen with my tweens, but it’s something all the PC parenting guides say you should do in order to teach your kids to be grateful for what they have. In all honesty, I’m not sure how my two girls would fare – I’d really be embarrassed if they sat down at a table, waited for a menu and then asked the homeless guy sitting next to them if he recommends the buffalo wings or the grilled cheese.

4. The movies – Any movie will do. Just sitting in a nice cool theater chowing down on hot buttered popcorn and Junior Mints is enough to keep them happy. The 9 – 12 year old set aren’t very discerning moviegoers; In fact, it may be the only time you’ll hear “Garfield: The Movie” and “awesome” in the same sentence.

5. Target – Maybe this is only applicable to tween girls, but mine love the aisles filled with cheap loot, cds and video games. Also, lots of eco t-shirts that say things like ‘Tree Hugger’ which is apparently all the rage now. You might just get them to listen to your Hendrix albums after all.

6. Yogurt shop – Yogurt is the new black. Menchies is our favorite, but Pinkberry or any other one will do. But try and take them to Baskin-Robbins and be prepared for much eye-rolling as they’re forced to mingle with the four-year-olds enjoying a scoop of Shrek Swirl with their grandpas.

7. Starbucks – This is the new version of sneaking a sip of your mom’s wine when you were seven. Tweens like the idea of sipping a grown-up coffee drink (I order decaf for mine) and it’s great for coffee addicts like me who can get their daily fix guilt-free. You know, it’s for the children.

8. Bowling Alley – They may last for one game of bowling, but what they really want to do is head to the arcade for some DDR (Dance Dance Revolution for you total squares.) Bring a bat or rolled-up newspaper if you have girls, though – the last time I was there a small crowd of teen boys gathered to watch my daughters and their friends bouncing around to the music until I shooed them away.

9. California Pizza Kitchen –According to the highly scientific poll I conducted with my girls and their friends while driving back from the mall in my van last week, this is the sanctioned eatery to dine with your parents. Added bonus – it’s the only place they don’t feel embarrassed about ordering from the kids menu since “the macaroni and cheese, like, rules.”

10. The Library – Believe it or not, tweens are rediscovering the library, mainly for the treasure trove of manga books they have there. At $9.99 each, it gets expensive to keep buying them at Barnes & Noble. However, do not even suggest they try out any of the library-sponsored teen events such as cupcake making or scrapbooking – you may as well tell them to invite their crowd over for a rousing game of rummy.

11. The beach – The beach is ideal for tweens and their unpredictable moods. They can indulge both their sloth-ly instincts by laying on their towels all day, or burn off energy by hitting the waves for some boogie-boarding. Also, the close proximity of a snack bar serving pizza and every variety of greasy, deep fried food will make them think they’ve died and gone to heaven

12. The park – My girls are just starting to notice boys, and members of the opposite sex are in abundance here, especially during soccer season. Bring along that bat that you took to the bowling alley

13. At home, with their parents – They’re not going to want to be seen with their dad and me for long, so we’re savoring all these days just hanging out together. So what if they roll their eyes when I suggest the fifth game of CandyLand?

Take off. Take a vacation. Take a break. Take flight. Get up and go.

These are a few well known phrases that we use in our daily lives when we talk about travel. We all want to “take” a break from the routine or simply get “up”, go and leave it all behind. To us, these two words–”up” and “take”–get across the idea of action, discovery and potential that comes along with planning travel.

We decided to change our name from Kango to UpTake.

We loved the name Kango for the positive energy it conveyed. However there were several other brands that had similar names Kaango Classifieds , Kangoo Shoes, Kangol Hats, Kango Wines, Kango Jack-Hammers and we felt this was just too confusing.

Also, we also wanted something that tied more directly to what we do. “Uptake,” as a common word, means quick understanding and comprehension; and gathering up of key facts. We want our new brand UpTake to convey our ability to gather, organize and deliver the web’s collective travel wisdom to 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 launch.

What’s going to happen to Kango.com?

Kango.com will still be available and identical to UpTake.com for some time. You may be redirected to one domain or the other during our transition period as we migrate content/databases etc. Don’t worry though, the site content will be the same, and your experience will be the same regardless of the domain name! (If you happen to be Googlebot or the Yahoo! Slurp crawler, our robots.txt on each site will aim to ensure that you don’t run into duplicate content.)

There is an explosion of user generated travel content on the Web, which is screaming out to be gathered up, organized, and made searchable so people can use it to plan better trips. I’m excited about the new name because this is exactly what UpTake is all about! Come visit us at http://www.uptake.com. Please start coming to UpTake and tell us what you think about our new brand! Our hope for you: that you get a great take on your next trip with UpTake.

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”.

Kango just announced the launch of our private beta yesterday morning and we would like to know what you think of our site. Please sign up for a private beta invitation and let us know what you like and what we can improve.

We recognize we have a long way to go to achieve our vision of becoming your first step for planning your trip. We look forward to your feedback.

In the meantime, the blogosphere has started giving us their candid opinions:

• Dan Kaplan at VentureBeat says, we have built “a technology with a refreshing spin on travel search…so someone looking for a family vacation in, say, Big Sur will see a different set of results than someone seeking romance or adventure. Kango’s technology extracts the sentiment from the postings it indexes and only shows results for locations that get positive buzz. If you’re looking for activities, you can filter using a number of criteria, including theme parks, playgrounds, wineries and breweries, and spas.”

• Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch highlights that Kango “looks at travel reviews and other information across the Web and automatically generates tags so it can categorize results by how “kid friendly” or “romantic” they may be.”

• Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim says ”if you have been waiting for social media to take on the travel industry, your wait is over” with Kango’s debut.

• Rafe Needleman of Webware (CNET) “found the search results page excellent” and that “the product philosophy makes sense.”

• Anne Zelenka from GigaOm says, “Kango could eliminate some of the multi-web site research that many vacationers undertake.”

But it’s not all rosy of course (otherwise we wouldn’t be in private beta!). Rafe points out that our search experience isn’t quite there, for example, we don’t cover surfing in Hawaii. Most bloggers commented that they would like Kango to cover more than California and Hawaii.

How do we do what the bloggers are talking about? We have aggregated and analyzed more than 20 million traveler opinions from more than 1,000 sites across the Web. We use natural language analysis and travel-specific term mapping to deliver reliable, relevant recommendations for you. This means you can now include subjective criteria like ‘romantic’ or objective criteria like price and ‘internet access’ and get relevant results.

With Kango, if you are looking for a romantic getaway in San Francisco, you will get different hotel and activity recommendations than if you are looking for a family vacation in San Francisco. We try to deliver search results by understanding your intention, so ‘good for kids’ is interpreted the same way as ‘child friendly’ or ‘family vacation’. The result of all this is Kango – a travel search application that helps you discover new travel choices and make better decisions.For more details about how and what we do, read more here.

We look forward to getting your feedback about how we can improve Kango.

Gene & I founded Kango to make it easy and fun for you to discover information about your travel options and to make better travel decisions. Our mission is for Kango to be your first step to a great trip.

Travel is the largest e-commerce category on the internet with almost $90 billion booked online in 2007. But you still have to buy travel online largely on the basis of “facts”, such as travel dates and price. However, you probably make many your decisions about where to go, where to stay and what to do based on “feelings” –subjective criteria for the kind of experience you wish to have. At Kango, you can discover the right options based on facts and feelings.

Unlike today’s travel sites, we allow you to shop for things to do as well as for lodging – for well-known attractions like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and for hidden gems that locals know about like Dennis the Menace Park. We enable you to get filtered recommendations for things to do and for lodging based on your subjective themes (e.g. romantic San Francisco hotels or family friendly things to do in San Francisco) rather than having to pick through a one-size-fits-all top 10 list.

Unlike web search engines like Google and Yahoo, we do “entity extraction” to organize structured information around specific activity and lodging products. For example, when you type in “Hotel Vitale Embarcadero,” Google returns 12,700 links to different pages on different sites. We return an integrated snapshot of the Hotel Vitale Embarcadero that include descriptions, photos, over 200 reviews, amenities, address and phone number from over 12 sources as well as the official hotel site.

We have a lofty vision about helping you discover the trip that is right for you. This can be a difficult task, like finding a (your) needle in the haystack. We realize we are just getting started. With this in mind, we welcome your feedback. Please sign up for private beta and let us know what you like and more importantly, what we can improve.

If you have not yet heard, Al gore won the Nobel Peace Prize today!

Well, he happened to be in the SF Bay area at the time and decided to hold a press conference only 5 blocks from the Kango Offices

After receiving the Tip from a friend the Kango Blogger news crew (3 people and one Digital SLR camera) traveled the 5 blocks to see if the tip was real (Alex von Oech got the tip).

With ~ 30+ news crews we figured that the former Vice President would soon be arriving. People from the community came out to catch a glimpse of Gore including some young children with signs.

For a few minutes we went down a hall labeled “Press” and were politely asked to leave;

But we heard a tip that he would be arriving on the other side of the building; this tip also proved true and we were able to catch a glimpse of Gore as we stepped out of his Mercedes sedan “Eco 10” (powered by bio-diesel)

The Vice President was very polite to the press, and to the locals who had come out to support him; he stayed briefly outside the Alliance for Climate Protection offices and shook the hands of the children and their parents and thanked them for their support.

The place was buzzing after Gore arrived; and we went down the hall to the press room, going to the back door entrance we were welcomed inside by the “Alliance for Climate Protection” staff (despite our lack of press badges), climbing some steps in the back of the room already crowded by 10-15 journalists) we waited for Al Gore to deliver his speech.

His spokesperson entered the room first saying that Mr. Gore would be coming in 2 minutes to give a short speech and that he would not be answering questions; when he arrived he was hailed by the sound of 60+ cameras snapping photo’s (which failed to cease throughout the five minute speech) and the glare of the lights.

First the former vice president acknowledged the Nobel Prize committee for selecting him the (shared) winner and announced that he would be donating the prize to combat the climate crisis; he also said that he would travel to accept the prize in person.

Then he spoke briefly about the continuing effects of global warming on the polar ice caps “polar scientists are now warning that at current rates the polar ice caps will be completely gone within 23 years” (or language very similar, this humble blogger is relying only on memory)

He then spoke from a place of his own passion delivering a call in the form of an African proverb

Gore said:

“There is an old African proverb, If you want to go fast; go alone, if you want to go far; go together we need to act both quickly and together if we are going to put an end to the climate crisis” (Again I quote from memory)

With that, he concluded the press conference and thanked everyone for coming.

As he walked out of the room he was met with shouts from the press “Mr. Vice President Do you plan to run for president after winning this award?… Mr Vice president!”

With that; he left the room and he went to a private meeting with members of the Alliance for Climate Protection.

His message was loud and clear it sends a strong message that this years’ Nobel Prize is awarded to Al Gore. The world’s most important institutions are recognizing the urgency of the problem that we all face, for my part; I hope that we are able to make the simple green choices that will make that difference.

All photographs in this story may be republished under the creative commons attribution license, if you would like to republish any of the photo’s please link each one to this blog post and http://www.kango.com from any web-page using them. Thank you.

I have spent many months with my fellow Kangos collecting and documenting the best ideas for helping travelers like you plan fun getaways and unforgettable vacations. We have worked very hard to produce a site that is extremely useful and easy to use. Now the time has finally come to see if our hard work has paid off. Take a sneak peak at our site through our Private Beta!

I want your feedback, both positive and constructive to make our site even better. All you have to do is sign up for private beta by clicking the button in the upper right corner or here. My co-Kango, Alex, will send you a password so you can take it for a test drive. We’d love to hear from you!

Elliott, Min and Alex have all given their introductions, so now it is time to tell you a little about me. I was born in Tennessee, a state in the southeast part of the U.S., and home to Al Gore. I now live in California, on the west coast of the U.S., and now also home to Al Gore (detecting a trend?). No… I am not stalking the former vice president. I do share some of his ideas, like improving the environment, and I believe there is no better way to instill a desire to preserve nature than to experience its beauty and wonder first hand. I think traveling outside your familiar surroundings and your comfort zone can be an education as well as an adventure.

Living in San Francisco provides me with a wealth of cultural and historical nourishment, (not to mention amazing views) but it also gives me easy access to completely different settings. Two hours south, I am on the beaches of Santa Cruz; three hours east, I am in the mountains surrounding Lake Tahoe. I have also been blessed to live in very different parts of the country such as Florida, Texas and Utah. Moving around a lot has given me an appreciation for different climates and cuisines, but it has also taught me that stereotypes are for the mentally lazy – there is always something to learn or discover.

San Francisco, California — Marina District

I am excited to be building a travel product from the ground up. Having worked in other online start-ups as well as the travel industry, I have an appreciation for the limitless possibilities the web brings to the traveler. Whether it’s a 2 day road trip or 2 weeks abroad, I want to give you the tools to inspire a great experience and prevent any pitfalls.