TravelMuse is excited to be nominated in Mashable’s second Annual Open Web Awards.
Thank you for nominating us; now that we are a top 10 finalist in the Travel category, please support us with your votes. You can vote for one company in each category per day until midnight on November 30th -- just add your email to the widget on the right and "Vote Now"!
Winners of the first Annual Open Web Awards included Facebook, Digg, Google, Meetup, Twitter, Netvibes, woot!, Last.fm and Mahalo.
The first and final voting rounds will be held from November 19th until December 15th.
Thanks for your support!
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At the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit, Hollywood, Calif. We’re excited to be making a couple of new announcements.
1. Plan-It! Widget for Bloggers
Bloggers can add the Plan-It! widget to individual blog posts, enabling their followers to save and share relevant content within the TravelMuse Planner.
The Plan-It! widget provides a solution to help travelers easily collect and centralize their research—while also increasing visibility for bloggers. Blogs that feature the Plan-It! social bookmarking widget allow visitors to quickly save content from the blog by simply clicking the Plan-It! button on any page. The content is then stored directly into the TravelMuse Planner—a centralized place to collect, organize and share travel research. Within the Planner, individuals can easily create trip plans and share the research they’ve collected with friends, family and fellow travelers—driving more traffic back to the blog postings they’ve saved. Bloggers can visits Plan-It! for Bloggers to find out more and easily add the Plan-It! button.
Sites using Plan-It include: UpTake, Ciao Bambino, Compulsive Traveler and TravelingMamas.
2. Crowd Sourcing
This new feature provides insights into the hottest travel destinations and topics on the Web. As individuals save content into their TravelMuse Planner from TravelMuse.com and from around the Web, lists of most popular destinations and topics are generated and dynamically updated based on trip-planning behavior—view this example destination page for Barcelona to see popular bookmarks. By capturing the actions of crowds, TravelMuse can provide valuable insight reflecting the interests of travelers in real time.
See TravelMuse at the PhoCusWright Conference on stage at 10:16 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 17, or visit us at our table on Monday or Tuesday in the Laurel-Doheny rooms.
For full details click here.
We’re excited to work with the local Junior League Chapter, the Junior League of Oakland-East Bay, Inc. (JLOEB), on their annual fundraiser. The Junior League was founded in 1935 and is an organization of women, who to this day are committed to building better communities and making a difference in the lives of children and families served by the League.
TravelMuse is delighted to have this opportunity, and as we continue to effect change in building our travel planning community, we hope we can help other groups like Junior League. Starting now and running through November 30th, the team here at TravelMuse will donate $1 per each League-generated visitor who signs up and starts planning a trip using the TravelMuse Planner—a centralized place to collect, organize and share travel research. There is no cost to participate and no obligation to book a trip. (The total donation is capped at $1,000.)
Whether League members are looking for destination ideas on where to take their next family vacation, organizing a girls’ getaway, embarking on a romantic trip for two or meeting other League members at the 2009 Association of Junior Leagues International (AJLI) Convention, TravelMuse.com now makes the entire process easy for anyone to plan a trip. TravelMuse.com is also the JLOEB 2008-2009 exclusive travel partner and a silver-level sponsor of the Fifth Annual Artful Living Home Tour, Nov. 7- to 8, 2008, in Alamo and Diablo, Calif.
“Oftentimes, all it takes is a simple action to result in something truly impactful,” saya Tricia Stenger, president, JLOEB. “The League produces tangible benefits for children and their families throughout the Bay Area, and I am ecstatic that our philanthropic efforts through TravelMuse will further expand our combined impact in the community.”
At TravelMuse, effecting change is one of our core values, and we believe companies should not only invest in their employees and partners, but in the community at large. The Junior League is well known for building better communities, and we’re thrilled to work with their members on this program to further inspire others to make a difference.
For full details, read our press release.
Russ Lemelin has been an advisor to TravelMuse for more than six months. As CFO, he brings a wealth of experience in the online travel space to the company. He was one of the earliest employees at SideStep, Inc., where he held the role of CFO and interim CEO. Russ spent six years at SideStep, during which time he oversaw the company’s revenue grow from $0 to $30 million per year. SideStep was acquired by Kayak in December 2007 for approximately $200 million. Prior to SideStep, Russ led corporate development at Komag, Inc.
Russ lives with his wife and three girls in Danville, Calif. He enjoys traveling to Hawaii, spending time with the family and watching classic western movies. Russ is a self-proclaimed, die-hard Oakland Raiders fan and was born and raised in Northern California.
We were pleased to learn that one of our partners, UpTake successfully closed its second round of funding, raising more than $10 million. Congratulations to Yen, Elliott and the rest of the UpTake team!
UpTake has so far focused mainly on hotels and activities and has cleverly indexed more than 20 million online reviews and opinions from travelers across the Web, personalizing results to match user preferences. Compared to TripAdvisor, which claims 15 million online reviews in its company fact sheet, that’s 33 percent more reviews!
UpTake includes content from thousands of trusted Web sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Fodors, goCityKids, Virtual Tourist and Yahoo Travel. I put its site to the test with Puerto Vallarta, a destination I’m visiting in a couple of weeks on my own family vacation, and found some great sites for activities, including canopytours-vallarta.com, which offers zip line tours through the jungle.
I was able to save the research I’d found on UpTake into my Mexico Trip plan on the TravelMuse Planner using the TravelMuse Plan-It! Widget that UpTake has placed on all of its content pages. I simply clicked on the TravelMuse Plan-It Widget at the bottom of the UpTake page, and just like on Del.ic.ous.com, I bookmarked the information. So now, my family and I can refer to that information as we collaboratively plan our trip and can revisit the relevant page on UpTake.
UpTake has done a truly remarkable job to grow traffic to 150,000 unique visitors per month over the past five months, and as research shows, 73 percent of people use the Web to find information for their trips. The SEO investment Uptake has made is paying dividends with Google’s search results, where its content is highly discoverable. If I type “Santa Barbara family hotels” in the Google search box, UpTake shows up as the first result, beating TripAdvisor (which, let’s face it, has been around for a lot longer and has a much larger budget than UpTake).
So what’s next? Having built a solid search offering in Hotels, it sounds like UpTake is heading off to champion new categories such as UpTake Lodging, UpTake Things to Do, UpTake Restaurants and UpTake Beaches. This makes a lot of sense, given how it has excelled in aggregating information so far.
It’s also not surprising that UpTake seems to be investing further in business intelligence and analysis—after all it’s a data driven business! However, on a lighter note, I really do think the key lever for UpTake will be the Facebook Secretary. Elliott, do you not have this covered already with all those Twitter connections ?
UpTake has brought order to the mass of fragmented travel data that exists on the Web today. I’m excited to see what it rolls out next to help people find relevant travel information even more quickly.
Coastal Cleanup Day is this Saturday, Sept 20th. People across the country will volunteer to pick up trash along coastal waterways from 9 a.m.-noon.
Here at TravelMuse, we all love to travel and know you do too. The Beach Vacations tag on our Inspiration Finder is constantly the top selection that our customers click. To that end, we feel it’s our responsibility to help keep our beaches and waterways clean and encourage you to do so too!
Team TravelMuse will be helping on a project to clean up Permanente Creek, at Rock Street Bridge in Mountain View, Calif. Come and join us, or find a project near you.
This will be the 24th Annual California Coastal Cleanup Day, and it’s the premier volunteer event focused on the marine environment in the country. In 2007, more than 60,000 volunteers worked together to collect more than 900,000 pounds of trash and recyclables from our beaches, lakes, and waterways. To find out more visit: www.coastal.ca.gov.
Be part of the solution to marine pollution!
It was a whirlwind two days for TravelMuse at Fall DEMO'08 in San Diego on Sept. 8 and 9!
The experience was amazing and even surpassed the high expectations we had going in. Let’s be clear about this. DEMO is the real deal. I recommend it for any start-up.
TravelMuse got great coverage by the press in attendance, and the show definitely stirred the interest of the investor and partner community as well.
I’d like to thank the TravelMuse team and the families of the team for enduring some very long days and nights over the past few months. You rose to the occasion time and again, and the results speak for themselves! Gracias!
Here are a few pictures from the show. We were honored to be a part of it!
Taking the stage....
Fiona does her best roadie impersonation...
Eric goes vertical on the monitors...
Did you know that 20 percent of travelers report spending more than 10 hours to plan a trip? (source: TIA.org)
Think about the last time you planned a big vacation. How was the planning experience for you, and how long did it take?
Since we started thinking about what we’d like TravelMuse to be, we consistently came back to the amount of pain involved in planning trips and how we wanted to enable people to easily research, plan and book a trip, regardless of how complex the itinerary is.
Today, we’re excited and proud to announce Social Trip Planning within the TravelMuse Planner. Planning is really at the heart of what we do, so we are just thrilled to share it with you. Read full release
With Social Trip Planning you can plan trips with friends and family, and reuse the travel research of people you trust. Let’s face it, who would you rather get advice from—your best friend whom you’ve known all your life, or “crazy4cabo” whose comments you read on advice sites.
Here’s a list of just some of the many new things that this release enables you to now do on TravelMuse.com:
- Create a day-by-day schedule of your planned activities,, restaurants you’re eating at and places you’re staying from our repository of more than 100,000 points of interest and 90,000 hotels spanning hundreds of destinations globally. Or you can add any page you find on the Web.
- Invite people you’re traveling with to collaborate on the plans. Everyone can add research and modify the schedule, and everyone gets notified immediately of changes to the itinerary.
- Network with people whose travel advice you trust. View your friends’ trip plans and repurpose their research.
- Keep apprised of the trips your friends are planning (if they choose to let you see them) and give them the benefit of your experiences.
- Combine research you find on the Web with reference information and travel articles on TravelMuse, and easily drag and drop these items into a scheduler. You can even move entire days around when the need arises!
The net result: You can now plan trips the way you’ve always wanted to, with great content and easy-to-use tools, plus with a little help from your friends.
So stop e-mailing links back and forth and abandon the manila folder—try the new TravelMuse Planner for yourself today!
Finally, we have to extend our deepest thanks to the entire TravelMuse team and their understanding families who pulled out all the stops to make this release possible.
Happy planning!
Kevin and Eric
We’ve been bursting to tell everyone that we’ve been chosen to present our latest technological innovation! On September 7th, Kevin, Eric and I will head down to San Diego to showcase the great work of the TravelMuse team, along with 70 other companies.
In the meantime, we’re fine tuning the six-minute script and working through all the logistics from AV forms to hotel reservations. Thank goodness the DEMO handbook is so well put together! We’re working with DEMO coach Nathan Gold—he’s great and is keeping us on track. Left to our own devices, I know we’d be blowing off meetings with each other.
DEMOfall 08 is the launchpad for emerging technology. During two exciting days of rapid-fire, six-minute presentations, DEMO attendees will be the first to see the most innovative, market-defining products unveiled for the very first time.
With more than 20,000 technologies reviewed and 1,500 companies selected to launch on the DEMO stage over the past 18 years, DEMO has an incredible track record of success.
From the first launch of Palm, Java, TiVo , E*TRADE in the mid/late ‘90s to Salesforce.com, VMware, Six Apart, OddPost, IronPort, GrandCentral and Glam Media in more recent years, DEMO delivers real products ready for market.
The results have been astounding. Past participants such as WebEx, VMware, iRobot, Linden Labs, Six Apart, and Roku have single-handedly defined or redefined their industries. Companies who have launched products at DEMO over the past four years have gone on to raise over $2.5 billion. Plus, more than 40 of these companies have been acquired by tech giants, such as Adobe, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Symantec, Viacom, Yahoo, and more.
We invite you to join us at DEMOfall 08 to see and hear about our incredible breakthrough—before anyone else does. Take advantage of the $600 registration discount and register today for only $2,395 at www.demo.com/DF8PTR.
Stay tuned as we update you on our progress here at TravelMuse and get ready for our six minutes of fame!
Most travelers visit numerous Web sites when planning a trip, but they lack a simple way to organize their findings or share research efficiently. TravelMuse can help solve that problem. Today we released the TravelMuse Plan-It! widget for site publishers. (Click to read the full press release.)
Visitors to sites that feature the Plan-It! social bookmarking widget can simply click the Plan-It! button on any page and save content directly into the TravelMuse Planner—a centralized place to collect, organize and share travel research. Content publishers can download and install Plan-It! by visiting the Plan-It! page on TravelMuse.com.
This widget is perfect for travel content Web sites such as CVBs, DMOs, B&Bs, travel blogs— any quality travel site that wants to empower its readers with the ability to more easily plan trips.
Three TravelMuse partners—which all provide great trip planning content—have already deployed Plan-It!: Uptake.com, CiaoBambino.com and CompulsiveTraveler.tv.
- Uptake aggregates and organizes reviews from thousands of different sites so that you can get a complete picture of a hotel, restaurant or attraction before you arrive. (You can read about how UpTake is using Plan-It! on the UpTake blog.)
- CiaoBambino provides very rich and detailed reviews of high-end family travel destinations and properties.
- CompulsiveTraveler has beautiful, engrossing travel videos organized by activity and destination.
If you’re a traveler, explore these sites and try out the Plan-It! widget. Click on a page featuring the widget, and that content is automatically stored inside of a TravelMuse trip plan.
If you’re a publisher, visit our partner page to learn more. Plan-It! is free to download and use, and gives your site visitors the power to more efficiently plan trips. We hope you find this tool as cool and useful as we do.
http://www.travelmuse.com/about/plan-it.htm
It’s all go, go, go here at TravelMuse, and over the course of July we continued to get the word out about the company through blogs, consumer magazines, press, TV and radio.
As much as she prefers to be behind a camera rather than in front of one, Donna flew out to Miami and was interviewed by Joel Connable on NBC6 news about our Inspiration Finder and planning tools. We were listed as one of their Cool Travel Websites. Watch the video footage here:
The August edition of Mens Journal hit the shelves in mid-July and featured TravelMuse as one of Three New Travel Services—the added advantage is we can legitimately display the cover shot of the very fit Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte in the office! I’m allowed to say that—right? In fact, why don’t I just share it with you…
Kevin did a couple of radio interviews, first with Travel Hub Radio and then KOMO 1000 News Radio in Seattle. He was also interviewed by Verne Kopytoff of the San Francisco Chronicle, where we were featured as a new site offering creative tools for finding and planning vacations.
Vani Rangachar (Los Angeles Times) in the Dallas Morning News said, “Easily its coolest gadget is the user-friendly “Inspiration Finder” … and I also liked Trip Plan, which allows you to collect disparate info in one place by bookmarking and labeling Web sites.”
A big thanks goes out to the blogging community too for their continued interest. Donna and I attended the BlogHer ‘08 Conference in San Francisco earlier this month, and we had a great time reconnecting with Stacy Morrison of Redbook and meeting a number of other women bloggers!
Christina from coolmompicks said, “TravelMuse’s original content and cool trip planning tools make it an interesting place to spend some time; I may never get to a Family Surf Camp but it sure was fun to read about.”
Nicole Feliciano of Momtrends covered TravelMuse and talked to me about tips for planning a vacation when bringing children aged 0-6 and what my vacation plans were.
We’ll have an exciting new company announcement next week … stay tuned!
