Vacations Blog

VentureBeat calls us “opinions super-site.” I like it, even though I didn’t come up with it.

VentureBeat just posted a great overview of the information out there on UpTake (formerly Kango) to date while we’ve been in private beta, and shared (with our permission) the launch date, May 14. We’re getting close! The team is really excited!

The post called us an “opinions super-site” for travel. I like it! I love this description and wonder why none of us ever thought of this term! But, in fact, that is exactly what we are doing: aggregating opinions and word of mouth. This is open-source marketing at its best…

This post is a great close to our private beta period, and I’m getting nostalgic about this period already!

…and some thoughts on press and blogger outreach since that’s what I’m doing right now before our May 14 announcement

As we’ve been moving into high gear in preparation for our launch, we’ve been touching base with a diverse group of mainstream media, tech and travel industry press and bloggers. For other startups, I would like to propose this:

Elliott’s proposed Golden Rule of PR and Blogger Outreach:

If you don’t think you can learn something from a reporter or blogger, then you probably shouldn’t be pitching them.

In figuring out who to contact, I’ve been asking myself these Golden Questions:

1. Can I learn anything interesting by reading their blog?
2. Are there posts that relate to our story? If they wrote about us, what other previous posts on their blog could they link to?
3. If I were them, what would my post be about? How would I make it unique and fit the focus of their blog?

This is much harder work than a massive email blast. But back to the Golden Rule. Talk to people that you can learn from. Don’t talk to people that have nothing to teach.

Pitchmeme: Teh tricky new world of pitching bloggers and media

I’ve been on Twitter following the growing “pitchmeme” of bloggers complaining about PR people. Follow enough people on Twitter and you’ll hear the complaints. So for all the other startups, let me save you some pain and suffering and provide you with some pointers on how to pitch and how not to pitch from bloggers and the experts themselves:

Brian Solis

If you only read 1 post, read this one from Brian Solis. He sums up the opinions of Marshall Kirkpatrick, Adam Ostrow, Tom Forenski, Robert Scoble, Merlin Mann, and Allen Stern. Guess what? They all want you to do something different! Read this post!

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb

In Five Wrong Ways to Pitch RWW and One Great Way, Marshall outlines these 5 no-no’s:

1. Email the wrong email address
2. Phone calls
3. Twitter, Especially DM
4. Facebook
5. IM

A Great Way to Do It: By RSS. Wow. A great idea. Bloggers live inside of Google Reader. Why not send them info via RSS feedreader? Of course this doesn’t handle embargo’ed news like what we will be announcing May 14!

By the way, if you really want to irk ReadWriteWeb, call them “RRW” instead of “RWW”!

Louis Gray

If you’re pitching Louis Gray, you can only pitch me in reverse polish notation or pig latin. Louis is one of my favorite bloggers but the UpTake story just doesn’t fit into his coverage area of RSS addicts, FriendFeed addicts, Twitterholics, and the earliest of the early adopters. He covers Stowe Boyd, Robert Scoble (2007), and Marshall Kirkpatrick’s directions.

So what do we have here, just in these three examples? We have three prominent bloggers with three very highly differentiated, inefficient ways of soliciting engagement with public relations and companies…

Do you really think companies are going to remember to pitch Marshall at ReadWriteWeb via RSS and Stowe Boyd by TwitPitch and Scoble by Facebook? Knowing PR companies, I know they won’t. Most of them still believe in the spray and pray method of e-mailing all contacts under the sun. There needs to be change, but making everybody jump through hoops while losing the personal engagement, exclusivity and timing won’t work.

Anyway, Scoble (2008) moved on from Facebook and now wants to get the pitches by Twitter. But not DM in twitter, @ message him. And if you don’t know what I just said, you’re hosed cause you aren’t on Twitter!

Chris Brogan

On What Tom Could Learn from Facebook, Chris gently chides Tom of Cxxxx who blasted him an embargo’ed press release without permission: “Opt in. SOCIAL network. It’s about getting to know me before you fart in my face.”

Chris then offers some insight (with my paraphrase) into Some Differences Between Pitching Mainstream Press and Bloggers:

• Bloggers often write from passion. This is a huge insight. Many bloggers do it as a labor of love for the topic. This can be different from some journalists covering a beat in a professional capacity.
• Bloggers have a bit more ego feeding required. take an effort to understand “what makes a certain blogger tick,” accordin to Chris.
• Bloggers like free prize inside experiences. What can you do to give me something special?
• Bloggers don’t have to be polite. (Then again I don’t have to pitch impolite people!)

TIP FOR MARKETERS AND PR PEOPLE: Best way to really grok this is to just start blogging. That’s what I did at CNReviews on China-related topics that have nothing to do with UpTake.

Rafe Needleman

Simple. Use email. Don’t use Facebook. And no matter what don’t use Plaxo!

Adam Ostrow

Adam Ostrow of Mashable and ReadBurner fame offers 12 tips for getting your Statup Featured on Mashable:

1. Be a cool product
2. Fit into Mashable’s “coverage universe”
3. Have not already been covered to death elsewhere
4. Submit to our Startup Review series
5. Personalize your pitch
6. Be concise
7. Come to our events…and pitch us your story in-person

He also offers 12 things not to do when pitching a story to Mashable:

1. Sending an invite from your app
2. referencing your media coverage on Mashable Competitors X, Y, Z
3. Private Message on Social Network
4. Trying a Backdoor…in other words, use their intake email at news@mashanble .com
5. Contacting Pete.
6. Unsolicited Phone CAalls
7. USING ALL CAPS
8. Misspelling our Names. Kristen Nicole i s Kristen, not Nicole. and Not Kristin either.
9. Trying to Setup a Lunch.
10. Not Including a URL
11. Not Offering a Preview of Your Private Beta
12. Pitching Old News.

Great advice, Adam.

CityMama

Here’s a Johnson and Johnson Blogger Relations disaster. Don’t throw an all-expenses paid blogger junket for Moms called Baby Camp and then disinvite bloggers for needing to attend BlogHer, having a breastfeeding baby, or a slung baby.

Stowe Boyd and the Twitpitches.

Don’t pitch Stowe Boyd except via Twitter. And here’s how:

Basically, I want companies to get their story down to a one-liner ‘escalator’ pitch — like 10 seconds long — which is going to force them to drop the superlatives and buzzwords and get to the heart of the matter.

A twitpitch takes the following form:

1. A twitter message of the form “@stoweboyd [pitch goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. (Note the #hashtag means that these will be accessible at www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.)
2. A second, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [single URL goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. Just one URL, please.
3. A third, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [proposed time(s) to meet or call go here without the brackets] #twitpitch”.

That’s it.

Twitpitches that work — that interest me enough to warrant spending some time to find out more — will be retwittered on my @stoweboyd account, and here on my blog.

OK, not sure how this works for embargo’ed news. I’m confused. So I guess we won’t be talking to Stowe until the press release is out! Or maybe I’ll try twitpitching and just see what happens.

Fellow startup entrepreneurs, welcome to the new world of the pitchmeme! And watch out for our news on May 14!

Curious how travel bloggers and travel-interested Twitterers are using Twitter? I was, so I looked at the usage patterns of the 112 Twitter members of the T-List.

About the T-List Twitterati

First, some background. On 4/8, with the help of Guido van den Elshout of HappyHotelier, we created the T-list account (http://www.twitter.com/tlist) on Twitter that would represent a list of travel-interested bloggers and Twitterers. We created a list of the T-List Twitterati based on the original T-List concept pioneered by Kevin May, Mathieu Ouellet, Jens Threanhart, and HappyHotelier.

If you don’t know what the T-List is, what Twitter is, or what the T-List Twitterati is, start by reading our post on T-List does Twitter. Then check out TravelTwit, a cool Facebook like aggregator created by Chris Clarke (@Chrispitality) to see all the feeds of the T-List bloggers. BTW, if you want to join the T-List on Twitter, just Follow T-List and we’ll add you.

So how does the T-List Twitterati use Twitter?

During the past 10 days, triggered by a post by Louis Gray, the blogosphere had been vibrating with various methods of characterizing the use of Twitter by its many users. But first, a few disclaimers:

• Disclaimer 1: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. There is just not a lot of data available: just followers, uptakes, and followed for a given point in time. We collected this data around 4/29 or so.
• Disclaimer 2: Do not take this stuff too seriously or risk the charge of self-reflective narcissism. On the other hand, if you find this stuff interesting, then you are truly in the social media echo chamber!

Chart 1: Number of Followers by Twitterer

A small number of active Twitterers that have most of these followers. Here are a few statistics to illustrate this:

• The total count of followers in the entire list is 71,802. (Note: if 1 person follows 70 accounts, he would be counted 70 times in this number)
• JasonCalacanis, founder of Mahalo, has 22843 followers, or 32% of the total on the Twitterati T-List!
• The top 10 accounts have 79% of the followers.
• The top 20 accounts have 86% of the followers.

Leaderboard 1: Top 20 Twitterers by Followers

Excluding JasonCalacanis, here are the top 20 Twitterers as ranked by followers:

Twitter Name – Followers – URL

1. jakemarsh 13132 http://thejakemarsh.com/
2. bloggersblog 7741 http://www.bloggersblog.com/
3. musaaykac 4664 http://www.seotops.com/
4. tradingnothing 3173 http://www.tradingnothing.com/
5. jetblue 1844 http://www.jetblue.com/
6. jrosell 1315 http://www.sistemakiwi.com/
7. southwestair 880 http://www.southwest.com/
8. hostelcolonial 714 http://hostelbuenosaires.blogspot.com/
9. sheilas 673 http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Seafarer/
10. morrisey 663 http://www.blogdeviajes.com.ar/
11. travelrants 591 http://www.travel-rants.com/
12. shirleyjohn 582 http://livingthelifeofmydreams.blogspot.com/
13. elliottng 520 http://www.uptake.com/blog
14. Glennia 478 http://glenniacampbell.typepad.com/
15. chris2x 468 http://amateurtraveler.com/
16. parkylondon 396 http://www.thisweekinlondon.co.uk/
17. tarabrown 396 http://tarabrown.pbwiki.com/
18. leannecook 385 http://tripsforless.gop1d.com/
19. reckon 363 http://reckonwordwide.com/
20. everywheretrip 321 http://everything-everywhere.com/

Chart 2: Number of Updates by Twitterer

Updates are less skewed toward the top 10, and for the T-List Twitterati might be a better indication of who is active on Twitter and for how long.

Leaderboard 2: Top 20 Twitterers by Updates

1. sheilas 3715 http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Seafarer/
2. agcblog 2630 http://agcblog.wordpress.com/
3. mvdkooi 2588
4. morrisey 2430 http://www.blogdeviajes.com.ar/
5. hostelcolonial 2049 http://hostelbuenosaires.blogspot.com/
6. nerdseyeview 1877 http://www.nerdseyeview.com/
7. bloggersblog 1557 http://www.bloggersblog.com/
8. whiteraven13 1425
9. albertbarra 1378 http://www.albertbarra.com/
10. chris2x 1258 http://amateurtraveler.com/
11. parkylondon 1221 http://www.thisweekinlondon.co.uk/
12. Glennia 1220 http://glenniacampbell.typepad.com/
13. darrindickey 1195 http://blog.brandingfire.com/
14. reckon 1119 http://reckonwordwide.com/
15. everywheretrip 1087 http://everything-everywhere.com/
16. nyt_travel 1087 http://www.nytimes.com/travel
17. latimestravel 892 http://travel.latimes.com/
18. tarabrown 871 http://tarabrown.pbwiki.com/
19. akasylvia 869 http://backspace.blog.me.uk/
20. elliottng 809 http://www.uptake.com/blog

Twitter Noise Factor: Who is Tweeting the Most?

Last week, Louis Gray suggested a metric of Twitter Noise, as defined as a ratio of Updates/Followers. Cleverly named to generate buzz and interest, the Louis Gray metric was not actually designed to criticize those most “noisy” but to highlight that people use Twitter. No different for the T-List.

• Median Twitter Noise Factor is 1.63, or 1.6 updates per follower.
• Top 20 people are updating at a 12.5 Twitter Noise Factor, or about 7.6X times the median

Twitter Quotient

Sarah Perez of sarahintampa suggested another way to classify Twitter users and applied it to Louis’ original post. I did the Twitter Noise analysis for the China Twitterati, Louis also shared with me another tool called Twitter Quotient that also allows you to check your Twitter Noise quotient. Here’s mine:

Here’s the complete T-List Twitterati ranked by Followers:

UPDATE: note: if your URL is missing, add it to your Twitter account and leave a comment on this blog and I’ll add it!

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.

Read More »

Question: Why the new interest in online travel? Isn’t online travel “done”?

Based on the number of analyst and due diligence calls I received recently, it looks like there are a number of new travel sites looking to help consumers research and plan their trips. Is this the sign of a Web 2.0 Bubble in Travel?

My Answer: Yes and No. Online travel is only partially “done.”

After all, travel is the biggest e-commerce category at $91B. But, growth rates are slowing and price shopping and online bookings are increasingly concentrated at a few sites. Travel is partially “done” – for consumers who know what they want to book. There is little need for another travel offering of this type. The world doesn’t need another Expedia or Orbitz.

However, there remains a huge unaddressed consumer need–helping consumers decide what to book.

There is an increase in awareness of this unaddressed consumer need. When I ran Yahoo! Travel I saw clearly what consumers were searching for: information like things to do, places to stay, consumer advice, photos, locations, maps etc. Consumers have a lot of needs that are not being served by online travel agencies like Expedia or Travelocity. The “first click” doesn’t start at Expedia…it starts at Web search.

Want to address this need? Make sure you meet these three criteria.

Based on our travel experience and consumer research, we believe three key criteria need to be met to address this “what to book” problem:

1. Offer comprehensive information - offer one stop shopping of places to stay, things to do and detailed information (e.g. descriptions, photos, maps, location, reviews, etc.) Consumers should not have to sift through multiple sites to find relevant bits of information on possible places to stay and things to do.

2. Provide filters and personalization – enable consumers to search based on who they are traveling with and why they are traveling and don’t assume they already know where and when they want to go. Give them the filters they need to get relevant results.

3. Make word of mouth easily available – people prefer information & feedback from other people (reviews, blogs, ratings, etc.) Unfortunately, most sites that have reviews, blogs etc. still force their visitors to browse to find the most relevant feedback and do not yet analyze that word of mouth to make specific recommendations.

The travel site that meets these three criteria will become the “first click.” Why? Because once these three criteria are met the “what to book” decision can be made easily and travel planning can be a more enjoyable and efficient experience. It is quite simple for a consumer to then move into the booking & price comparing phase of trip planning.

That’s how we think about it. How about you?

OK, so we put our cards on the table. What are other innovators in travel thinking? What problem are they trying to solve? What opportunity is there to go after where “travel” is not done? Is there solid consumer need out there (and for what) or is everything getting just a bit too frothy for your taste?

This $115M acquisition has journalists and travel insiders scratching their heads especially given how much smaller Farecast is than Sidestep, the $180M Kayak paid for Sidestep and because MSN hasn’t shown prior interest in travel. But the confusion about the rationale is because the strategic driver for the purchase likely isn’t about travel per se, it’s about something bigger, much bigger – search. Why search? Because travel is a huge category within web search and travel is an even bigger category for paid search. And the last time we checked, Microsoft is really, really serious about closing the very large gap between the MSN web and paid search offerings and those from Google and Yahoo. How should we quantify “huge”? Internal analysis at web/paid search companies indicate between 3-5% of web searches are travel related. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given 79% of travelers search before booking.

Travel paid search spend on just Google and Yahoo is over a billion dollars a year, again, not surprisingly given there is $8.7B spent annually on online marketing and over $90B booked online (U.S.).

So, let’s get back to Farecast/Microsoft. Farecast gives Microsoft an opportunity to slow, and then reverse market share losses in this critical category of search. How? Because Farecast’s “smart search” technology should enable Microsoft to deliver on the holy grail of paid and web search – ‘contextual targeting.’ By understanding more about what consumers are searching for (e.g. their dates of travel) and about the relevant pages (e.g. real time prices – or even better, price predictions), Microsoft should be able to offer a significantly more relevant set of results then Google can.

Google’s current SRP (search results page) for “flights to Boston” points to a bunch of pages all over the web where a consumer would type in their trip context on each.

Microsoft’s SRP (like Yahoo’s today) could offer consumers the ability to give more context like dates, number of folks traveling etc. With this context, Microsoft could return a much more relevant set of integrated results.

That’s a better consumer experience, but Microsoft has an even bigger opportunity around targeting paid search advertisements – especially given Farecast’s ability to predict prices. As Rick at Motley Fool points out, “there is no easier lay-up in the online advertising industry than serving sponsored leads to folks ready to spend money.” With Farecast, Microsoft can hyper target those ads to make it more compelling for consumers to click and make more money per click given Farecast’s existing relationships with travel advertisers.

Well done Steve Ballmer, well done Hugh Crean! Good luck executing on your vision – and good luck acquiring companies to enable your next vertical categories.

Note: This post is based on internal UpTake analysis, and does NOT include data or context from discussions with Hugh or anyone on the Farecast management team, nor Brad, Erick or anyone on the Farecast board.

UPDATE on 4/22: More coverage at WebWare on 4/17 by Ina Fried, the FareCast blog on 4/17 by Hugh Crean, the 4/17 SeattlePI post on Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog, John Cook’s original news break, Profy 4/17 post by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, TechCrunch post on 4/17, Seattle Times on 4/17, CenterNetworks on Farcast acquired Microsoft, WebGuild on 4/18, PaidContent.org on 4/17, Venture Beat on 4/17, SearchEngineLand on 4/17, Rev2.0rg on 4/18.

On Monday April 21, I’m moderating a panel on Reaggregating User Generated Content at the invite only Alternative Search Engine get-together hosted by Read Write Web. Charles Knight of AltSeachEngines.com.

What questions should I ask the panelists? Drop a comment here and I’ll try to get the questions answered!

Here’s some info on the panel and panelists:

Q: Who are the panelists?

Jay Bhatti, Co-Founder of Spock

http://www.spock.com/jay

Yen Lee, Co-Founder and CEO of UpTake

http://www.uptake.com/team

Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of FriendFeed

http://friendfeed.com/about/team

http://friendfeed.com/bret

Steven Marder, Co-Founder and CEO of Eurekster

http://www.eurekster.com/about/management

Q: What is the panel about?

The Panel Topic is “Vertical Search Opportunity: Reaggregating User Generated Content”

Through blogs, social networks, and review communities, more and more user generated content is being created. Problem is, that it is increasingly getting fragmented at multiple sites. This content can be useful to people for discovery, research, and decision-making on what information to consume, what music to listen to, or what products to buy. What are the opportunities for vertical search to bring all this user generated content together?

Panelists: Your mission (if you choose to accept it) is to learn from each other and force each person in the audience to rethink their approach to user generated content because of what they have heard.

Q: What questions are you going to ask?

NOTE: I would love to get questions from you to ask. Drop a comment here to let me know what is on your mind.

Panelists: I’m only going to ask questions if the audience doesn’t. But just in case, here’s what I had in mind:

1. How does your company aggregate user generated content?
2. What are the most valuable sources of user generated content in your vertical space? What are the challenges of getting at those sources?
3. How much do you rely on automated machine approaches vs. human approaches? Why did you choose one vs. the other?
4. Is what you are doing complementary with the sources you are aggregating? Who is threatened by what you do?
5. How do you use user generated content to (a) get traffic from Google, social networks, and the blogosphere?
6. How do you use UGC to acquire customers? To keep them? To engage them?

Why FriendFeed belongs on this panel:

FriendFeed is a lifestream aggregator that pulls together feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, your blog, etc. By connecting with other friends, it is organizing user generated content around people…their interests…and their friends. It also has a new search feature that is desperately needed to help people use FriendFeed for discovery and search on specific topics. This is critical especially because there is more and more comments (UGC) that are entered straight into FriendFeed itself.

Why Eurekster belongs on this panel:

Eurekster allows people to create specialized search applications focused on a specific community or area of interest. It is enabling subject matter experts to layer human intelligence on top of automated search. Swikis provide a system for injecting user generated content and user contribution into a search engine. Many of the same themes are here as for FriendFeed.

Why Spock belongs on this panel:

Spock is aggregating structured and unstructured information about people. But beyond just being a people search engine, Spock also enables people and their friends and fans to participating in creating high quality people information on Spock. How machine intelligence and human participation can work together to solve people search has a similar feel to what FriendFeed is doing and Eurekster as well.

Why UpTake belongs on this panel:

UpTake is capitalizing on the increasing fragmentation of user generated content in the form of reviews, opinions, travel blogs. There is an opportunity to reaggregate and use machine intelligence to help people find the right reviews and recommendations for travel planning. Just as FriendFeed aggregates digital lifestyle, UpTake aggregates digital reviews and reputation for travel products and services.

OK your turn: What questions do you have for any of these companies? What is most interesting about the issue of reaggregating user generated content and how vertical search plays into it?

Drop a comment here by Sun 4/20 midnight and I’ll try to ask the question!