Zetrip, a new startup offering to help users find “travel inspiration” based on the activity of their Facebook friends, just raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Inspiration Ventures.
Co-founder and CEO Edouard Tabet said he came up with the idea last year, when he was planning a trip to the Galapagos and wanted to see which of his Facebook friends had also been there.
“This information was really hard to dig from Facebook so I decided to extract it and mine it via their API,” he told me via email. “To my surprise, I discovered I have a couple friends who went to the Galapagos and posted amazing photos of their trips. I realized there was a gold mine of travel artifacts buried in Facebook and thought it would be super useful and fun to discover new places for my next vacation.”
This approach can encourage people to travel to new places, Tabet said, because they often look to their friends for travel advice.
You can get a sense for the kind of information that Zetrip provides in the demo video below. There’s one section called Photos, which shows all of your friends’ travel-related Facebook photos, organized by country. There’s another section called Map, where you can see a map of all the locations visited by people in your network, and then when you click on each location, you’ll see the specific friends who have been there. And there’s also a travel scrapbook, highlighting your own photos.
Perhaps the most original feature in Zetrip is the infographic-creator, which summarizes a lot of the travel details about people in your social network, such as the most popular destinations and the most active globetrotters. You can see Tabet’s profile here. (It takes about 24 hours to build a profile, so mine is still in the works.)
Travel inspiration for your next vacation. Most travel sites help with planning, shopping and booking, however people find travel inspiration haphazardly by asking friends, co-workers or family but without real access to the breath and depth of travel experiences in their networks. ZeTrip extracts, aggregates and mines semi-structured social data to help users answer the question every other site asks them - “Where do you want to go?”
Inspiration focuses on technology based companies that need proof of concept capital. In addition to funding, Inspiration offers an entrepreneur to entrepreneur approach that provides operational guidance for young companies.
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