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.