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.

So today we had an intrepid but nameless blogger follow our jobs posts on Craigslist to piece together a story about what Kango is doing. Since they have comments disabled (boo-hiss), I thought I’d thank them for the post by responding. As the reader of this blog will know, I am passionate about travel and also the father of 2 young kids. So in particular to satisfy my own need, we have a special interest on family vacations and kid-friendly travel.

But we are hardly just about kid-friendly travel at Kango. In our Authorized Personnel Only Kango Labs, we are working on some extremely exciting developments that we think will change the world of travel planning.

We’re all super short on time (especially stay at home moms/dads who basically have the hardest job in the world!) and none of us have as much vacation time as we’ed like. So we create a lot of expectations of ourselves of what we need to get out of our limited vacation time. And when the trip doesn’t live up to those expectations, we return back to our everyday lives with a sense that it could have been a lot better.

Well, we intend to change that! We have the audacious goal of helping people do better travel planning (with the limited time that they have) so they can have memorable, satisfying, and fulfilling trips.

So if you’re interested in this mission, sign up for the beta waiting list.

Part of who we’ll decide to join the beta will be based on your interest in helping us achieve this mission. Tell us what kind of vacations are most difficult to plan.

Tell us what information is difficult to find. Tell us how we can help you make the most of your vacation time. We’ed be thrilled to have some fellow travelers on this journey. So allow us to hit the snooze button on the general announce of

what we are doing until we are ready! But for now, let us share a picture of the prototype of what we are building.