• November 4th, 2010

    UpTake Networks Buys Social Hotel Recommendation Engine RealTravel.com

    UpTake Networks announced today that it acquired RealTravel.com, a social hotel recommendation site. With the purchase, terms of which were not disclosed, UpTake aims to “accelerate their investment in the online travel research experience and drive more free, qualified leads back to travel sites”.

    UpTake already operates UpTake.com, a semantic search engine designed to help travelers research and decide where to go, stay and what to do. → Read More

    September 17th, 2008

    UpTake Raises $10 Million In Series B Funding

    UpTake, a travel search engine that specializes in helping users find travel ideas by taking a semantic approach to indexing destination descriptions and user comments across the Web, announced today that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding. → Read More

    May 14th, 2008

    Travel Search Site UpTake (Formerly Kango) Launches In Public Beta

    If you are looking for ideas for a family vacation, a pet-friendly hotel, or the perfect place for a romantic weekend, try travel search engine UpTake. It is geared only for travel and looks for keywords in destination descriptions and user comments across the Web that help it place results into different travel buckets. It can understand about one million different travel-related keywords and phrases. Even “girl getaway.” After coming out of stealth last fall (here’s my initial review) and changing its name from Kango to UpTake, today it is emerging out of private beta, so anyone can check it out. (The reason it changed its name was because it sold the URL to Hearst’s classifieds site Kaango, which wants it eventually as a redirect. The change avoids any future confusion, but I thought Kango was the better name). Also, instead of just covering California and Hawaii, UpTake is offering national coverage for 400,000 hotels, which CEO Yen Lee claims is more than Expedia, TripAdvisor, or Yahoo Travel (where he used to be the general manager). UpTake crawls all of those sites and thousands of niche travel sites as well. Lee is also quickly moving to national coverage for destinations and activities. Google already loves UpTake’s results. To see its semantic SEO magic at work, try searching for “pet friendly hotels gilroy” or “family hotels” and the name of any city in California. A result with a Kango URL will likely pop up near the top. CrunchBase Information UpTake Kayak Mobissimo Kaango Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More

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