UPDATE: 10:15 AM - thoughtful coverage from AltSearchEngines (interview, announcement), ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, The Semantic Web, Search Engine Land, AppScout, Creative Think, Mashable, Washington Post, Budget Travel, Blissful Travel, TechBays, CNReviews (Elliott’s blog), L-Experiences, Moraaz.org, E-Marketing, Winser-Traveller, Ibis Cluster, Rootly, NoBosh, Les Explorers, MarketWire, Zedomax Network, Texas Word Tangle, WebGuild, ChristineLu, Wandalust, HomeExchangeTravel, FlyAway Weblog, WebSearchGuide.ca, WebWorkerDaily, WebGuild, ZedoMax, JourneyEtc, more to come. We’ll post later this week with responses to all the feedback we are getting from the blogosphere!
This morning, we’ll be celebrating the opening of UpTake to the public!
We created UpTake so you can sit in that beach chair above, having a great vacation, confident you made the very best decisions you could with your scarce time and dollars!
What’s new with UpTake?
UpTake [logo], formerly Kango, is a travel search application that helps travelers make better decisions by providing recommendations based on analyzing over 20 million opinions from thousands of websites. More details are on our press release. Here’s what’s new:
- UpTake now covers the entire United States–over 20,000 destinations across the 50 states.
- We’ve got the largest travel database on the Web, with over 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions.
- We’re launching two more themes: “girls-getaways” and “pet-friendly.” [screenshot] Just like our original “romantic” and “family friendly” themes, these ratings [screenshot] are driven by our database of 20 million opinions
- Launched new check rates button to check rates at multiple booking engines. [screenshot]
- Home page is simple and relaxing! [screenshot]
If you’re a blogger, journalist, or just curious, we have lots of other info here, including our logo, releases, our RSS feeds, quotes, company timeline, bios, photos, recommended travel blogs, and my Twitter account!
Some example searches for you to try…
Feel free to just go to the home page and start searching! Or if you want to jump right to a couple examples, look at: San Francisco Hotels, San Francisco Family Hotels, San Francisco Family Things to Do.
…or you can just watch this video (thanks DemoGirl).
We still want your feedback!
Our U.S. hotels search is in “beta” and our U.S. activities is still in “almost beta” as we add more data sources and activity types. So keep the suggestions coming so we can build a truly great travel search site.
On behalf of co-founders Yen Lee and Gene McKenna, I want to thank all of you for your support and help!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
7 Responses
Congratulations gentlemen! I am so proud of you, Yen and Gene and your team. You have truly worked hard and have been so dedicated. I want success and happiness for you both as we are all family and connected, and I depend on you too. God bless you both! love, kt
All the best
kind regards from France
Claude
Congrats on the launch. I’ll be sure to check this out next time I’m traveling.
Yen, I haven’t seen you since Yahoo!, but I’m happy to see you’ve been up to exciting things. Best of luck with the business.
Congratulations on your launch! The site looks awesome, and I can’t wait to be sitting in that beach chair.
The best part is, it gives me a great excuse to plan a vacation sooner than later (That can come under the banner of ‘professional research’ can’t it?)
Congrats on the launch. This does look very exciting and I’ll definitely include it in my next vacation planning.
Just wondering with all of the results, how do you monetize your sites revenue? I know most travel sites have a agreement with a single booking agent.
[...] also got press at ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, SemanticWeb, SearchEngineLand, Les Explorers and the UpTake blog itself. It is only for United States for now. But Winser Zhao of SinoHotelReservation also wrote [...]
Wow, I have been reading Uptake blogs since last couple of months but never realized that it’s such a big company itself. I thought it’s a travel rambling blog. To be honest, I am surprised!