Travel and expense management company Concur, which earlier this year acquired TripIt and GlobalExchange, has invested $5 million in Yapta, a provider of airfare and hotel rate tracking services. The investment brings the total of capital raised by Yapta to $13.8 million. → Read More
Aside from Dopplr’s quiet disappearance after its acquisition by Nokia and Tripit’s exit to Concer, web-based travel planning is still, arguably, one of the holy grails of the web. flextrip, a new startup operating out of Europe and the US and founded by long time entrepreneurs Leith Stevens, Alex Kremer and Andrew Glover, aims to facilitate travel planning by offering real-time offers for tours and activities – a branch of the travel industry that is still somewhat neglected despite its estimated global market size of $89 billion.
Flextrip is a stand alone service that lets you plan your travels by pulling in your Dopplr or Tripit travel details, analyzing that data and serving real-time offers from local operators. Tour operators working with flextrip on the other hand receive SMS notifications whenever a potential travel customer plans a tour in some city or region. They in turn can then make targeted offers to the traveller . → Read More
Concur, a publicly-listed provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions, this morning announced it has agreed to acquire TripIt, which helps travelers easily organize and share travel plans.
Concur is initially paying approximately $82 million in upfront cash, stock and unvested restricted stock units – additional consideration over time could bring the total value to $120 million. More details on the financials are below. → Read More
TripIt, the site that creates customized travel itineraries from travel confirmation emails, is upgrading its premium version today to be even more useful. Now TripIt Pro will track any pro member’s flight itinerary so they are notified of a price drop that could trigger a potential airline refund.
TripIt Pro members will now be alerted by email and text message when they may be eligible for an airline credit or voucher. Any eligible flight within TripIt Pro is automatically monitored for post-purchase price drops. Consumers simply contact the airline via phone to obtain their credit, armed with the information TripIt Pro provides in its alerts. → Read More
Just when you thoughtTripIt couldn’t get any easier to use, the startup has defied the impossible. The nifty site that creates customized travel itineraries from travel confirmation emails, is launching an auto-import feature for Gmail and Google Apps that will automatically read and import your travel emails to create and update itineraries on TripIt.
The feature essentially replaces needing to forward confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com. If you have a TripIt account you can register your Gmail or Google Apps account for the auto-import feature, allowing TripIt to automatically import your travel confirmation emails to create itineraries. The feature works across TripIt’s web platform and the startup’s apps for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry phones. → Read More
We’re big fans of TripIt, a nifty site that creates customized travel itineraries from travel confirmation emails. Today, the service is becoming even more useful by integrating Yapta.com, an airfare and hotel tracking service, into its platform.
Yapta lets you track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines, allowing users to select flights to track, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase it, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies. Travelers can now forward their flight confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and can choose to have Yapta start tracking their flights for airline refunds or credits. TripIt members can then link their account to Yapta in order to be alerted when they are eligible for a refund or credit based on an airline’s “guaranteed airfare” policy. → Read More
Dopplr has launched an iPhone app they are billing as a “social atlas”. Curiously, and possibly wisely, you don’t even need an account at Dopplr to use the app, meaning it will get exposed to a lot more potential users. However, a let down from the get-go is that you can’t add upcoming trips from within the app right now, which is kinda the point with Dopplr, as it’s users will attest – although the feature is planned, they say. Till then if you want to add trips on mobile people can use the site, twitter, SMS or email in the usual manner, of course.
The app appears first on the iPhone, but apps for Nokia, Blackberry and Google Android platforms are also in the pipeline. The app is available from the iTunes store here. There is plenty of content inside the app pulled from Dopplr’s own content as well as your social network. The question mark with Dopplr is how it will continue to fair against Tripit, which is tearing along at a fast pace and recently launched premium flight monitoring and alerts. → Read More
TripIt is one of those great services that actually manages to make life easier — just submit your travel confirmation Emails, and the site generates a comprehensive itinerary. It’s made Michael’s list of products he can’t live without for two years running, and is quickly gaining fans among frequent travelers. That’s all well and good, but until now the service hasn’t really had much of a revenue model beyond advertising. Today, that changes: the company is launching TripIt Pro, a collection of premium features that is sure to appeal to a wide range of road warriors.
The first major feature offered by TripIt Pro is enhanced flight monitoring. TripIt will keep tabs on any delays, cancellations, and gate changes for every flight in your itinerary, and send you an SMS message to alert you as soon as there’s a change (you can also choose to receive reminders for check-in 24 hours before your flight). TripIt co-founder Scott Hintz ackowledges that some airlines offer similar notification services, but says that you have to set these up for every carrier you fly on. With TripIt, you only have to sign up once for it to work across all airlines. → Read More
At Launch Silicon Valley this past week, I saw a demo of Gliider, a Firefox plug-in and tool that allows you to drag and drop travel information you collect from around the web. The video explains the concept behind Gliider, which is still in private beta, fairly well. While the travel 2.0 space is nearly saturated with a plethora of competitive products, Gliider’s tool is incredibly useful and its focus is narrow (Gliider only wants to help users with planning), which could make it standout in the crowd.
After you download the plug-in, you can pop-out the Gliider trip planner box from your browser when you need it. Within the planner box, you can create a trip, specify where you are traveling to (Gliider’s search box offers auto suggestions), and when you plan to go. Gliider will automatically create folders for each type of information, including flights, hotels, shopping, transport and food. You can also create customized folders.
When you come across useful travel info, like hotel, restaurant, or flight listings, you can highlight the text and images and simply drag and drop the info into the box. Once the item is in the organizer, you can make insert comments to each item. It replaces bookmarking for travel and automatically organizes links, sites, and listings for you. Once you’ve finished the planning process of a trip, Gliider will email you all your details in a PDF file. The startup will also be rolling out a iPhone app that will let you view your planned trips. → Read More
Appropros Mobile has released a Pro version of its popular FlightTrack iPhone application that can automatically pull in your flight itineraries through TripIt’s recently released API.
The original FlightTrack application, which costs $4.99 and is currently ranked third among the iPhone App Store’s top paid travel applications, asks for you to enter an airline, a flight number, and a date. It then displays a travel map with route and weather information, and it tells you whether the flight’s gate has changed or if there’s been a delay.
The new Pro version essentially saves you from having to remember flight numbers by giving you a list of the itineraries you have already emailed to TripIt. You can still look up flights manually (perhaps when you want to retrieve the status of a flight for a friend or family member), but you’ll always have your own travel information ready for quick access. → Read More
TripIt, the helpful travel site that lets you generate an itinerary by simply forwarding the service your Email confirmations from hotels and airlines, has opened up an API for outside developers. The API will give third party applications access to TripIt’s itinerary sysytem, which now accepts data from 350 travel sites. Developers can find all the details for joining the program here.
A number of applications have already used the API to implement new features. Expensd, an online service that helps business travelers manage their expenses, will use TripIt to automatically import your transit and hotel expenses. Popular iPhone application FlightTrack will use TripIt to automatically look up your flights to see if they’re on time. And Where I’ve Been, a social network application that plots your travels on a map for your friends to see, will use the API to automatically look up your destinations. Other potential uses for the API include an ‘Add To TripIt’ button that would allow travel sites to transmit your booking data to TripIt so you won’t have to forward your confirmation Email. → Read More
Airline group Air France-KLM, formed after the merger of Société Air France and the Royal Dutch Airlines and currently the largest airline company in the world in terms of operating revenues, has recently launched a social network for travelers called Bluenity to connect its +75 million customers when traveling (presumably so that they can meet up with strangers).
An airline moving into social networking is interesting, so we decided to take a look and see how it compares to internet startups who are looking to monetize social platforms catered to travelers. Unfortunately, in this case, it turns out to be not much more than a marketing exercise. → Read More
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.
This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.
The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.
I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer. → Read More
TripIt, the online travel assistant that debuted at Techcrunch40 and is one of the sites Michael can’t live without, has received $5.1M in Series B funding. The main contributions for this round come from Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and European Founders Fund. This addition brings the site’s total funding to $6.1M. TripIt’s main goal is to simplify travel. Users need only forward email confirmations from airlines, hotels, and other travel services, and TripIt generates a simplified comprehensive list of travel plans. TripIt recently launched a mobile version of the site, and also features Closeness Matches, which notify users when they are in the same region as a friend. O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which contributed to this round, was also responsible for TripIt’s $1M Series A funding round. CrunchBase Information TripIt Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
TripIt, the service that creates master travel itineraries out of your confirmation emails, has become even more traveler-friendly with a new mobile site. Users can access the site at m.tripit.com with their handheld devices. We’ve been told it works best with Blackberrys, iPhones, and Treos (the shot on the right is obviously how it looks on an iPhone). The new site will support TripIt’s Closeness Matches, a feature that informs travelers when they’ll be in the same areas as their friends. It’s a feature that may very well have been inspired by Dopplr, another hot startup in the travel space. Michael recently named TripIt as one of the Web 2.0 companies he couldn’t live without. CrunchBase Information TripIt Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Travel organization service Tripit, a TechCrunch 40 finalist that was recently named by Michael as one of the companies he couldn’t live with out, is getting more social with new location-based social ”Closeness” alerts. “Who’s Close To Me?” automatically notifies users if their travel plans overlap with fellow travelers while on the road, and “Who’s Coming to my City?” automatically identifies colleagues who will be visiting the users hometown when they’re not traveling. Tripit claims that the new features “offer a unique social network for travelers and their community of contacts.” The ability to connect with other travelers is a nice addition to what is already a good service. CEO of Tripit Gregg Brockway said that the service provides a better way for Frequent travelers to keep up to date when they “don’t have the extra time to keep track of their travel as well as the travel schedules of their friends, family and associates.” CrunchBase Information TripIt Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here. This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (WordPress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, WordPress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without: → Read More
Online travel organization startup (and TechCrunch 40 finalist) TripIt will today release some new features that aim to further simplify booking travel online. TripIt is a travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans. Travelers manage their travel itinerary with TripIt by forwarding their purchase confirmation emails to the service. TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. You can print or access your itinerary from anywhere including online, in print and on web-enabled mobile devices. TripIt now syncs itineraries with any personal calendar that supports iCal, including Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, Plaxo, and others. What this means is that TripIt users no longer need to manually update their calenders with trip information; TripIt now does it all, adding details such as flights, hotels, rental cars, restaurant reservations to supported apps. Other new features going live today include support for temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit and other international features, with international date support coming soon. TripIt also now supports travel confirmation emails from Aer Lingus, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, Tiger Airways, Virgin Blue and Avis Europe, as well as rail providers Amtrak, Eurostar, GNER, UK Trainline and VIA Rail. See our previous review on how TripIt works here. CrunchBase Information TripIt Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Today’ Web 2.0 Summit ended with a Launch Pad session where six startups each got six minutes to pitch their companies to the crowd and a panel of venture capitalists. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of each with my initial impressions (For a more thorough take on these startups from a real venture capitalist, read Christine Herron’s post): CleverSet—Best of Show went to CleverSet, a Seattle-based company that takes a sophisticated statistical approach to product recommendations and personalization. This is not exactly an unknown company. It’s technology already powers 85 sites, including Sephora’s, Wine Enthusiast, and part of Overstock (I also wrote about them last summer in Business 2.0). CleverSet is applying some advanced math to improving recommendations, and claims to increase revenues for Websites that implement its technology by 18 to 30 percent, on average. If that’s true, they deserve to win. But then I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve his movie recommendations, and he expressed some skepticism about how useful any statistical approach can be. Hastings has found that even within just the category of movies, knowing what horror films someone likes tells you nothing about what dramas they might like. So making statistical correlations across products would be even more difficult. TripIt—A company that presented at TechCrunch40, TripIt builds a personalized itinerary starting from your airline confirmation. A useful travel organizer. See Mike’s previous post. G.ho.st—All of our data and applications are moving online, why not the operating system? G.ho.st is a Web operating system of sorts that ties together all the data and applications you may be using across different Websites with one password and URL. Conceptually, I’m with them. But getting people to change their behavior and abandon everything on their desktops except for their browser is going to be tough. (G.ho.st was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit) SpiceWorks—Ad-supported enterprise software. Already 160,000 IT professionals use SpiceWorks to help manage their computer networks. SpiceWorks then serves up news feeds and product deals targeted at the specific devices on the networks they manage. It’s a consumer approach to enterprise software. This will work—until the ad bubble pops. ClickForensics—The CEO claims that the click fraud rate is nearly 16 percent (and over 25 percent on distributed advertising networks like AdSense or Yahoo Publishers Network). ClickForensics offers a neutral service to both advertisers and publishers that → Read More
Tripit, one of the companies that launched at TechCrunch40 is an extremely useful application for frequent travelers. It’s dead simple to use and it keeps you organized – all you have to do is forward confirmation emails to them when you purchase airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, etc. Tripit pulls the relevant information out of the emails and builds an organized itinerary for you. You can send emails in any order, for multiple trips, whatever. It just figures everything out and organizes it. The best part is you don’t even need to register to start using it. Just take an email and forward it to plans@tripit.com. Within seconds you’ll get a confirmation email back and you go from there. If it doesn’t recognize the email format from the seventy travel companies they currently support (orbitz, united airlines, marriott, etc.), you can add the information in directly on the website. Today at the Web 2.0 Summit CEO Greg Brockway is launching a new feature that makes the service even more useful, particularly on a mobile device (what you have with you when you travel). You email a basic command to the service and it responds with relevant information. “Get Flight Today” will return today’s flight information, for example. Or just “Get Trip” to get full details of your most current trip. Or just email “Help” to get a list of possible commands and modifiers. San Francisco-based TripIt has raised $1 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. → Read More
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