We’ve been crawling the web for new places, hotels, activities, and attractions for while now, but until today they haven’t been available on openplaces.org. The hard part is merging duplicates: knowing when two or more similar listings (for a hotel, for instance) refer to the same place. Today we finally succeeded at ironing out the last known bugs in our system and have added more than 350,000 new places to the site. Over the next few months, we’ll be adding tons more.
We’re also working on gathering more useful content about each place: reviews, articles, blog posts and links. Stay tuned.
You could say that we have been quiet since we first posted this page. That would be a polite way of putting it. This is not so much the result of a clever stealth strategy as it is a consequence of the ridiculous quantity of work we created for ourselves. As it turns out, mixing Information Retrieval with Grid Computing is kinda hard. Who knew?
We are slowly clawing our way toward launching openplaces.org. So, starting today, I will be posting regular updates. Let’s get things started properly: here is a first screencast of our search techonology.
Here is a first screencast that showcases our travel search technology. It focuses on the land parts of a trip: activities, hotels, etc. We are hard at work adding flights and other transportation to the engine, along with detailed pricing. More on this soon.
If you happen to like British Reggae, make sure your sound is on…
Every start-up trying to launch a disruptive technology is going to try to convince you that their billion dollar industry is completely broken and that they have found the only way to fix it. In order to prove this, the savvy entrepreneur will usually quote a single obscure and dubiously-sourced statistic taken completely out of its original context. This is a time-honoured tradition that dates back to the early days of the internet, when Valley companies would raise one hundred million dollars to “fix the problems of pet food distribution”.
I see no reason to break with tradition, so imagine my joy when Mark Skapinker sent me a link to Online Media Daily’s article about how online travel is… wait for it… completely broken!
“eMarketer is pegging online travel sales to top $105 billion this year in the U.S., up 12% from 2007. But while the dollar amount is increasing, fewer Americans are actually booking their trips online.”
“In 2007, only 55% of travelers booked their trips online, down from 63% the previous year.”
“According to eMarketer senior analyst Jeffrey Grau, it’s because travelers are fed up with the buggy, antiquated booking and planning systems of online travel agencies (OTAs)”
Abstract: The traveliness guesser is a Web page classifier paired with a subjectivity analyzer that ranks information according to its credibility and its relevance to the travel domain, either in essence or by mean of entities commonly useful to a traveler.
This week we finally closed our A Series: 2M$ with Brightspark Ventures. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows us: we had already done a seed round with them in 2007.
For me this marks the end of my travels out to Venture Sand Hill Road in the Valley and Magic Mountain in Waltham. For reasons I don’t fully understand, Venture Capitalists seem to instinctively seek out the highest elevation of an area (a mountain, a hill or a hollow tree stump) and huddle together in small groups. A friend of mine says they do this to keep warm, but somehow I think there is more to it…
After brushing off all the inevitable rejection that comes with begging for money, I think we did ok. We got three offers: two from the US and one from Canada. Ultimately, we turned all of them down and did an internal round. Yes, you read that right, we turned everyone down and did an internal. After doing the exact opposite at my previous gig, I have learned that in the early days of a startup, anything that distracts you from building a great product is bad. I’ve decided to apply this principle to our funding strategy: pick your funding partners carefully, take as little money as you can, spend it wisely and think long and hard before adding someone new to the table. Albeit a big, all-powerful, well-reputed firm.
A semantic search engine for travel. An effort to aggregate, classify and structure all of the travel information on the web, to build a genuine and accurate representation of the world we travel.
A collaboration to fill in the blanks, where everything is freely licensed under Creative Commons.
A level playing field. A place where quality and relevance determine ranking, unimpeded by commissions and other commercial dealings.
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