The funniest meeting was with Michael Burnham from Tripmedia. Although we didn’t know each other previously he spotted my badge and came to talk as he’d heard of our company before. We ended up chatting for quite a while and at some point ended up talking about how old we are as we don’t really get twitter. The funniest part was that he guessed that I’m much younger than I actually am and once I told him the truth he said that it must be my Dolph Lundgren like looks that made him guess wrong. I found that hilarious as some of the guys in the office have mentioned the same thing. It must be the blond hair…

I like the TDS concept where there’s an expo hall, some free presentations and the paid seminar. As I spent my time in the expo hall I saw that many interesting companies had a stand on the expo floor. This year, a promiment number of companies were offering mobile solutions for travel companies. Let’s see if mobile finally starts getting some traction as the consultants keep telling us in these seminars. Quite a lot of companies were offering web2.0 features to third parties (pretty much as we do with the widgets and the api). Good to see that there are others, who believe in the same model as we do! All in all it was nice to see that despite of the economy there still are companies coming up with new ideas and technologies.

The TDS is a good event and definitely worth going to. There were even some free drinks at the end of the show’s first day making it even better. You can’t go wrong with free drinks. Thanks for the guys at CarTrawler for serving me the drinks whenever I ran out!

We also had a get-together with a small bunch of travel startups on one of the evenings. It was good to meet others trying to do something new in travel with scarce resources. The whole thing was organised by the nice guys at Tourdust. I hope that we’ll have more such meetings in the future! It’s great to share experiences with other entrepreneurs in the same business. Looking forward to our future meetings!

The most interesting session was about user experience where both Google and Frommer’s had done a lot of interesting research. The Frommer’s study pointed out that the weakest link online today are recommendations both on the destination itself and the activities/things to do in the destinations before choosing where to go. According to Frommer’s that’s what consumers want but feel are not getting from travel agents or the web today. This is great news for us as recommendations are exactly what we are doing – trying to help our members to get new ideas and tips on the places they find or might find interesting answering the questions “Should I go there? If so what are the most interesting places for me to see?”.

There a lot of coverage from the event on the Travolution site. See especially the Frommer’s study. Interesting stuff.

I participated the panel discussion regarding innovations in online travel. The session focused on HomeAway that has been hugely successful in a relatively short period of time. The discussion was over too soon and I would have loved to hear more about how they made it and what we other startups can learn from their experiences. There’s only so much time in a conference like this, unfortunately.

Thanks for the Travolution guys for inviting me over! I look forward to the next time.

It was a good night out. And it got even better when TripSay was awarded three honorable mentions! The categories were The Best Infodesign; The Best Startup; and The Best B2C Service. We went on stage three times to receive our award and each time with a totally improvised “Thank you” speech. Our thanks go to all TripSay members for your valuable feedback!

The Grand One jury stated that TripSay “is daringly heading to the international markets”, “has strong design skills”, “is a great Finnish mash-up service, that has got great attention internationally”, etc. Great!

Much of TripSay’s UI design is made by Valve Internet Agency. Big thanks to our friends at Valve!

More photos from the gala by MTV3 here.

Is travel in Europe a recession-proof industry?

Some said it was like previous years and some felt that there were a bit less visitors. I’m not sure which way it actually was but to me it at least looked pretty much like last year. It was good to see that the recession hadn’t hit ITB that hard.

It was impossible, as usual, to find a hotel room in Berlin with both decent quality and price, so I ended up traveling the startup way and living in a well located but otherwise terrible hotel. It was a big upgrade compared to last year though as then also the hotel location was terrible – the taxi driver taking me there was afraid for my safety when he dropped me off. The Casino restaurant at the expo grounds still offered bad food with even worse service but bratwurst was as good as ever. It’s good to know that some things never change, makes you feel safe when going to ITB. 

I had some very interesting meetings during the expo. Hopefully some of those end up as interesting partnerships later! I also spent a very interesting day at the PhoCusWright seminar. There were many very interesting topics covered like socially generated travel guides, semantic web and mobile applications to name a few, all of which naturally interest us at TripSay very much. The seminar content was good although I was missing the discussion on relevance of information – rather than having too much UGC or other content I’d like to see the relevant content for me. I don’t care if there’s a million reviews, photos or other content on a city, sight, activity, hotel or whatever. I just want the ones that I should care about based on what I like. Even the semantic web discussion was more about scanning the online discussions for your brand image rather than using semantic technology to actually help the consumer to find relevant information which to us is of course the more interesting application. Also even though mobile was talked about a lot still it was mostly about iPhone/Blackberry and business travelers. They are the heavy users, yes, but they don’t represent any true volume. We still haven’t seen any major breakthroughs in consumer mobile applications for travel and it might still be a long way to go before that happens. A lot needs to happen in terms of devices, roaming and other things before consumers will adopt mobile apps  in any significant amount.

All in all it was great to see that people were still thinking about the future and innovative solutions. ITB is a must expo for anyone interested in seeing the latest and greatest developments in the industry.

It is always fun to get acknowledged. We are happy to see that TripSay was featured on New York Times. In the paper’s travel section reporter Hilary Howard writes about two new web tools that help in trip planning. She suggests two user-friendly travel sites: TripSay and Fly.com The article goes on:

Tripsay.com, a free social travel network, lets users share their likes and dislikes on destinations and link up with other travelers according to mutual interests. Members are asked to describe their vacation preferences, mention previous trips, and list dream destinations. A recommendation engine will then match them with travelers who have similar tastes and preferences.

Read the full article here.

This media interest further strengthens the trend we wrote about in a previous post. The time is getting right for the next generation of online travel services!

We got nominated in three categories:

• The Best Infodesign. A category for websites that are designed with a special focus on user experience, intuitive user interface, and clear and logical layout.
• The Best Startup. For Finland-based Internet startups. The category is managed in co-operation with ArcticStartup, a blog writing about internet and mobile startups in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
• The Best B2C Service. A category for consumer sites, applies for e.g. web media, brand and company sites, and online shops.

Grand One is an annual contest for the Finnish digital media companies. The jury has selected the finalists among a number of websites and services. The main rule is that “most of the design and implementation work must be done in Finland”. This applies well to TripSay, as our roots are in Helsinki, Finland. That’s where the magic happens.

The list contained the best bang for the buck destinations around the world. We constructed the list based on a huge number of ratings by those TripSay users, whose travel profile is geared towards budget travel. Now, as the queries kept flowing in, we gave in and created another list. Using a similar approach, we put together a top list of budget destinations in the USA. Some interesting findings there, please take a look at the figure below.

The size of the circle represents the popularity of a destination. A big circle means that the destination has got very good ratings for Tripsayers. The color represents the “heat”: the darker red, the more Tripsayers have visited the destination.

What do you think about the cities on the list? Feel free to log in to your account on TripSay.com and contribute your ratings. We’d appreciate your travel tips!

The conference itself unfortunately suffered from some serious hiccups. The wifi or the wired connection did not work for most part of the conference. This is not new, since wifi seldom works at a web conference (exception to the rule: Slush Helsinki), but the wired connection usually works. When the Internet connection for Slush was built, we were able to do it with zero budget thanks to sponsors at Nebula and Cisco and some hours put in by our selves and it just worked.

There’s plenty of bashing the conference on other blogs, so I will stop it here and say a few good words.  Even after all this, I think LeWeb 2008 was the greatest conference I’ve been to so far. The venue (LeCentQuatre) was great. It had everyone more or less in the same area with the main stage being the center of everyones attention. Networking and bumping into people was easier, since people were not divided into a hundred small rooms scattered around the area. The wifi being down also gave the opportunity to concentrate on networking . There were many friends there and I met a lot of cool new people as well. In the end, people make the conference.

The end party could have been arranged better though, music was way too loud to even try to conversate, it was too small and crowded and it took forever to get service at the bar. I’m not surprised most of the people left before midnight.

The startup competition had some very cool companies, including our friends at Zipipop and the winning face recognition service Viewdle. All in all it seemed like there are several promising startups coming from Europe.

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.