TripSay blog

We attended our first Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on April 22-25 this year. The conference had some 10.000 visitors and a lot of exhibitors and sessions. In that sense it was a bit different from some of the European conferences such as LIFT, Plugg and The Next Web that we’ve been to this year that host only a few hundred visitors. The Web 2.0 conference in SF also had more large companies (Nokia, Amazon web services, Adobe, Google etc.) exhibiting their offering, whereas the previously mentioned conferences (ok, maybe LIFT excluded) were almost 100% startups.

Conferences are great for meeting people and this was no exception. We met a lot of people from the blogging scene like Robert Scoble, Mashable’s Kristen Nicole (great party guys :), Venture Beat, GigaOM and of course the Next Web guys, who seem to be everywhere wearing their white suits.

There were a whole bunch of Finnish startups at the expo: Floobs, Xihalife and MoiPal to name a few we hooked up with. On Monday night before the conference, there was even a Finnish night at a restaurant called Foreign Cinema (they show foreign movies) with some media, some locals and some ex-Europeans now working in San Francisco. Jyri from Jaiku/Google was even nice enough to show us around Googleplex. As a sidenote and a bit of an advert for our Finnish friends, we used Scred to record our expenses throughout the trip, an incredibly useful mobile app.

We also got to meet people from some San Francisco based travel startups, like Elliot from travel review meta search site UpTake and Gregg and Scott, the founders of trip itinerary organizer TripIt (pic on the left), that has done quite well.

All in all, the trip was a success, San Francisco was mostly sunny and the Wi-Fi didn’t totally suck. We’ll be back next year! Meanwhile, be sure to check back on our blog and see how we are doing on our twitter feed.

We were reviewed on TechCrunch yesterday and have received a fair amount of invite requests since. Awesome! We’re just finishing a new Join-feature on our site, after that we will start handing out the invites to the lucky 200, so be patient.

I met with Erick from TechCrunch as he was moderating the Next Web conference in Amsterdam and got the opportunity to demo our site in between all the hassle. He asked some good questions and had some good comments and obviously knew the scene pretty well. It’s always a pleasure to demo to someone who knows about your business. Very cool that he did a post on us! He starts with the title “TripSay Lets You Discover The World With A Little Help From Your Friends”, which we think is quite well suited. See the TechCrunch post for more (tech-savvy) comments and discussion. We’ll be at the Web 2.0 Expo in SF next week. If you’re going there and want to meet, drop me a line at leo@[youknow].

We have just finished a major overhaul on our site. The basic features are still there, but the layout and usability has improved a lot. Now everything should be much easier than before. And cooler… and more fun! We are very excited about our new site and we hope you feel the same way too. Your feedback has been most valuable for us for reorganizing the site! Thank you!

At the same time we changed our name to TripSay, which should be easier to remember and can be associated with travel instantly. To our large surprise also the domain name was available. From now on you can access the site at www.tripsay.com. Old usernames and passwords will work just as before with www.vailoma.com.

We have several cool ideas what to do next, so please keep checking the site and keep that feedback coming to help us develop a better service!

We have created a new application we call the Destination Module. The purpose of that embeddable application is to share our content with our travel agency partners so that they’d get interesting destination content from the web and travelers onto their site without any work. You can check it out on our site or the first implementation we’ve done with Kaleva Travel, one of Finland’s largest travel agencies. Check out the application at e.g. their San Francisco page. The page is in Finnish only and you need to scroll down a bit on the page to find it.

This is a great way for any travel agent, travel content site or whom ever for that matter to add a wealth of destination information on their website. Everything is updated dynamically from our servers so that our partners don’t need to worry about adding content. You only need to include a short javascript to your page and that’s it. Give it a try and spread the word!

And yes, we’re also planning to add an API for partners that wish to create more tailored applications from our data. That will be released later when we have the time to work more on it.

Check out our thoughts on the problems in online travel and search at Europeanstartups.com!

We’ve been silent for some time. A lot has happened since the last post which was four months ago. In start up time that’s an eternity. Lately we’ve been burning midnight oil as we wanted to be ready with new features for the largest travel expo in the Nordics, which started today. A short update is appropriate though.

We launched a new app we call the Vailoma widget in the above mentioned travel expo. It allows travel agencies to include parts of our service and data into their website very easily. This gives our partners the benefit of offering rich destination content without investing to site development or community building - everything comes from our service. More on this after the expo is over and we can point you to the actual application on our partner’s site.

We also secured our seed financing late in 2007. Excellent stories of this here and here. As a result we have also moved to new premises. We are now based in the old premises of Jaiku, the microblog that got bought by Google last fall. We’re not taking pressures but we of course try our best to measure up to the expectations!

We like to think that our service has developed significantly since the last post and we do think that it is nearing to be good enough for a launch. Now we also have the money to do the launch properly.

We are constantly improving the Vailoma service according to the feedback we receive. The latest build has a new feature we especially like. It’s a new cool version of the “Visited places” widget on the Vailoma Home page. The widget basically draws your visited places on a map. But with this version you can create a kind of a personal heat map of the globe tracking your travel taste! Not a very revolutionary idea as such, but we really like the looks of the widget now. It’s fun to surf people’s pages and quickly see which parts of the world they’ve been to and what they liked about it. You’re going to learn new things about your friends: “Hmm… she has had her best trips in the ex-eastern bloc.. I thought our romantic trip to Mauritius was supposed to be the best ever.”

Actually, when we decided to revise the widget our goal was just to make the widget clearer and easier to navigate using the map zooming and the best and the worst lists. But as a side effect we got the heat mapping. Now this is the way development should go: you get more than you set out for…

Tim (of The BOOT) has written an interesting and long entry regarding user generated vs. editorial content in travel. User generated content (UGC) consists of facts, reviews, journals and blogs written and further edited by millions of people. Think Wikipedia and Wikitravel for example. On the other hand editorial content refers to travel guides and travel agents’ sites written by an “expert”. Tim notes that the key is to find a balance between UGC and editorial content: UGC provides unbiased up-to-date reviews of destinations. But without an editor the content is difficult to sort and navigate.

UGC has been the centerpiece of the so called Travel 2.0 debate. Many (e.g. UKNetMonitor and m-Travel) have referred to reports by Nielsen//NetRating and EyeforTravel earlier this year. The reports basically state that travellers value UGC above editorial content and that UGC has an influence on their travel plans. Right. Of course you’ll value your friend’s opinion on a destination she has visited over some travel agent’s brochure with slick photos. What’s more interesting is the big percentage of travelers looking for UGC and that active travelers are much more UGC-aware than rookies…

Back to the balance issue. The problem is clear: for example in Tripadvisor there are so many entries on some popular hotels that there always are positive and negative reviews of the same place. And it’s impossible to know which reviews are relevant to me if I don’t know anything but a username of the reviewer. A solution is needed, but we don’t think a biased editor is the best solution. Instead, the reviews should be sorted by the authors’ profile: if a traveler has similar preferences with me, then I’ll value her review more than someone’s with an opposite travel profile. There have been interesting approaches for building a travel profile based on user demographics (age, gender, budget) but we think that’s not extensive enough: don’t think a review from someone on his first foreign trip is that relevant for me even though he is of the same age….
Therefore we are extending the travel profile to things like: where have you been; how you rated the destination; what are your interests (”profile tags”); what kind of trips have you made; etc. With these kind of profiles we can sort user generated content in much more interesting ways: “Show me reviews from people who are interested in hiking and outdoors and who have loved the Alps and Slovakian Tatra mountains but who didn’t like the crowded Uluru trail or the concrete jungle in New York.”

So off you go to refine your travel profile by rating your favorite destinations in vailoma.com and next time you’re planning a trip you’ll know who you gonna call…

- Vailoma team

Newsflash - Vailoma user interface developed to a new level of comfort! … After a lot of fixing and polishing and reading feedback from test users we figured that our user interface would benefit from a drastic change. Our guideline has been to provide the user with only the most relevant picks according to her profile, thus removing all clutter from the screen. This means that the screen layout can be made very clean and simple.

However, we have learned that people actually want to see more content on the screen while they’re exploring around the map building their trips. Too much “cleanliness” makes the user interface look too spartan and doesn’t help new users in finding information that they don’t know exists. To answer the call we developed a feature called OnePick. OnePick brings e.g. travel destination descriptions and photos, reviews from fellow travelers, and users’ ratings to the main explore screen. All these are still, of course, filtered according to the user’s profile and preferences to avoid irrelevant info.

So far we’ve got positive feedback regarding the change. In the coming versions the main issue is to find the best balance between clean user interface and “cluttering” the screen with interesting stuff. Too much either way is bad…

P.S. Thanks to our testers for valuable comments!

Travel is an interesting and fun business to be in. But there’s this additional benefit that makes building a travel service even funnier: it’s almost mandatory for us to test our service and do some leisure traveling on the side. How else to get first-hand feedback regarding the features and data?!

At the time being, we have guys testing the Alpine hiking trails for sport-oriented profiles. It’ll be interesting to hear whether our filtering engine was able to pick the right places for them and what kind of fine-tuning do we need to do…

Next week we’ll send people to Rome to test out the city vacation planner. After that it’s time to see how our feature set fits with road tripping (test site will be around Trieste / Northern Italy)… And in August maybe some party-profile “business” tripping in Spain…

- The Vailoma team