In April of this year, we reported on Oyster.com, a commerce meets editorial travel site much like Jetsetter and the lesser known, but locally rich Jauntsetter. Oyster is full of curated information to provide inspiration for wanderlust travelers, along with planning help that will put the traditional travel agent out of business.

The Travel Channel invested $7.5 million into Oyster.com and promotes Oyster on television and online in exchange for revenue share on trips booked on the site. And like many brands are trying to do online, the station is positioning itself as a lifestyle brand. The deal provides The Travel Channel with a new revenue stream in addition to advertising and cable subscription fees.

We caught up with the travel experts at Oyster just before the holidays to ask them where they thought we should go for New Year’s Eve. Now, we’re tapping their expertise to uncover the most tech savvy cities across the United States and the most hooked up hotels to stay in. If you’re planning to travel or would like to travel to one of these cities soon, check out the list below.

Mountain View

Though Mountain View has a quaint downtown area and an outdoorsy vibe, don’t be fooled — it is one of the most tech-savvy cities in the world. In 1956, the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory moved to Mountain View — contributing to the area’s “Silicon Valley” name (the laboratory was the first company in the area to produce silicon) — and ever since, Mountain View has been home to innovative, high-tech companies. Home to Intel, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Evernote and Hewlett-Packard, Mountain View is the first city in the US to be covered by free Wi-Fi in all areas of the city. So don’t forget to bring your laptop! And, the city’s largest museum is, not surprisingly, the Computer History Museum.

Where to Stay: Domain Hotel, a Joie de Vivre Hotel

Less than a 10-minute drive from Mountain View, the Avatar Hotel in Sunnyvale caters to high-tech geeks visiting Silicon Valley on business (the hotel even provides a free shuttle on weekdays to companies within 10 miles). The hotel may be a converted motel, but the property has been significantly spruced up – colorful rooms (you have your choice of “awakening” or “tranquility”-inspired décor) feature iPod docks, flat-screen TVs, and free Wi-Fi, and the stylish Bytes bar is a popular spot for happy hour. Unfortunately this hotel can’t completely escape its structure, with some rooms that only have windows overlooking the lobby and others that are subject to street noise, but overall, it’s a good value.

New York City

While there’s quite a lot of debate as to which city is more “tech savvy”, until Mayor Bloomberg gives us city-wide free WiFi, NYC is coming in 2nd. But New York City’s tech scene is thriving. “Silicon Alley”, pioneered by successful 90s’ start-ups, is now home to hundreds of tech-focused entrepreneurs with notable startups such as Gilt, Foursquare, Oyster (of course!), which are fast becoming household names, and driving tons of capital to the city that never sleeps. Bloomberg also encourages the entrance of startups to the city, hoping to draw in more tech companies to counter-balance the plethora of media and finance companies.

Where to Stay: Mondrian Soho

Opened in February 2011, this stylish 270-room hotel is located right on the southern border of chic SoHo. It has small, beautiful rooms with white-and-blue decor, high-tech amenities — like large flat-screen TVs and iPads — and floor-to-ceiling windows, many with jaw-dropping views. The trendy Imperial No. 9 restaurant, by Chef Sam Talbot, serves sustainable seafood, and has a lovely garden room with cool glass decor and a greenhouse-inspired feel. The fitness center, though small and in the basement, has state-of-the-art machines with personal screens and headphones.

Washington, D.C.

D.C.’s most recent score on the technology scene was LivingSocial’s choice to make the capital home to its headquarters. But Washington has been a tech-savvy city for decades and has always been a top contender in tech employment ratings. Not surprisingly, many of these jobs are provided by the government – which could be disconcerting as the government has tightened spending – but more and more jobs arise as the city rides the social media wave. The counties in the D.C. area have the highest percentage of college-educated residents in the country, and more and more post-grads flock to the city every year. So despite ups and downs, Washington, D.C. will be a tech-savvy city for many more decades to come (and it doesn’t hurt that its location is home to numerous top research institutions and airports, and more importantly, grants it great political significance).

Where to Stay: The Jefferson, Washington DC

After a massive renovation in 2009, this boutique reopened, and regained its place among DC’s elite hotels. It’s not as famous as the Hay-Adams, but its blend of technology (TVs are embedded in bathroom mirrors; all rooms are equipped with electronic housekeeping buttons, free Wi-Fi, iPod docks, flat-screen TVs, and DVD players ) and colonial charms (intimate library, working dumbwaiter) are second to none. All that’s missing is T.J. himself…(although he is commemorated by a bust in the lobby).

Seattle

When you walk by a Starbucks in Seattle (and you’ll walk by many), you’ll probably see dozens of people hunched over their laptops, connecting to the free Wi-Fi. Not only has the city consistently been ranked by Forbes as one of the most wired cities in the US, but Forbes also ranked Seattle #1 for the city with the highest – and best sustained – tech growth over the last decade. Bill Gates started the influx of tech companies in 1986, when he moved Microsoft to Redmond, right outside of the city. But Nintendo has been headquartered there even longer, and now there are over 700 tech companies in this rainy town. Facebook has just announced that their offices in the city will be doubling, creating even more tech jobs for the Seattle area.

Where to Stay: Hotel 1000

This upscale hotel is located smack-dab in the heart of Downtown Seattle, within walking distance of businesses and major attractions like the Pike Place Market and the waterfront. It has gorgeous amenities that make it stand apart from most other hotels in the area, including a virtual golf system, a full-service spa with a wonderful (and expensive) menu of personalized treatments, and an acclaimed, locally-popular restaurant on-site. The glass-enclosed bathrooms with tubs that fill from the ceiling and separate walk-in showers are arguably the highlight of the high-tech and modern (though somewhat dark) rooms. Overall, it’s certainly luxurious, but the feel is that of a glossed-up Westin or Kimpton — it lacks the nuances of a truly high-end brand, such as Rosewood.

Austin

Nicknamed “Silicon Hills,” Austin’s “hills” are dotted by tons of high-tech companies; Dell, Google, Facebook — just to name a few. And Austin takes pride in the fact that it’s the cool younger sibling in the tech-savvy city family: not only is it a great city for video game creators (as home to EA, which is in the process of expansion), but it has also been ranked as the #1 market for bloggers and blog readers by Scarborough Research. Like D.C., in recent years its number of post-grads has skyrocketed and it is well-known among the young, tech-savvy crowd as the home of South by Southwest. Though also a hugely popular music festival, SXSW is heavily involved in the startup tech world in its work through the “Interactive Startup Village.” At this showcase (which more than 20,000 people attended in 2011), startups, inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors meet and mingle, discussing innovative advances in technology and – at times – creating new tech companies.

Where to Stay: Barton Creek Resort & Spa

The 312-room Barton Creek Resort is sprawled across lovely grounds centered within three golf courses in the hills west of downtown Austin. You’ll find plenty to do on-site, including golf, tennis, a spa, indoor and outdoor pools, a large fitness center, great shopping, and even family-friendly scavenger hunts — but Austin’s downtown attractions are just a 30-minute drive away. Rooms are spacious and thoughtfully decorated with at-home touches, and each one comes complete with fabulous views of the surrounding areas, as well as large flat-screen TVs equipped with satellite cable channels and a gaming system — though unfortunately there’s a daily fee for Wi-Fi.

Do you live in a tech-savvy city? Let us know why your city should be on this list in the comments below!

Finding things to do in your own city isn’t always easy. Finding things to do on the cheap is next to impossible. Sure, if you Google something like “Free things to do in San Francisco”, you’ll probably find a bunch of a spam pages and perhaps a somewhat helpful blog post from 2009. You have to do all of the research to find out whether the prices listed or activities they wrote about are still available or not. It’s quite a pain.

RAVN sets out to make finding these activities an easy process, and a social one at that. The service that I found to be most similar to RAVN is Trazzler, but there are way more things to do listed in RAVN’s database, which makes it an attractive alternative.

Not only can you find free things to do in your area, you can get deals directly from event organizers and local tours, and even earn points to use towards these.

Right now, the service is only available in Chicago, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, SF Bay Area, and Washington DC. Cities like Boston, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia are on the way, the site promises.

Free, free, free!

The RAVN site itself is free of course, and as soon as you sign up with your Facebook account you’re shown a whole list of things in your area to mark off as being done or as things you want to do. This gives the service an idea of what types of activities to recommend to you, and even gives you points while doing it. As you tell the service each thing you’ve done and rate the activity, you’ll get points towards paid activities listed on the site.

RAVN does a brilliant job getting you into the spirit of what they’re trying to do, which is to get you excited about activities happening in your neck of the woods. By giving you points towards discounts on paid activities, that’s icing on the cake.

Once you’ve gotten tired of cycling through activities, you can skip ahead and find things that interest you, based on price, location, and availability. That’s a huge feature advantage for RAVN, because with our busy schedules, finding things to do isn’t always the problem, it’s finding the time that you can do them that is.

Activities on RAVN are categorized from things like “Date Ideas” to “Family Friendly”, so you’re more than likely going to find at least one new activity that fits your lifestyle. If you’d rather use an open search box for an activity, RAVN offers that option as well.

Get social

The social aspect of RAVN also makes for a fascinating experience. The service pushes up things that your friends on Facebook who use the service also want to do or have done. Who knew that Liz Gannes was interested in learning how to handle hot glass? Ouch.

RAVN’s search experience is pretty impressive, and makes finding the perfect experience rather simple. Based on availability and price, you can granurlarly find the best activity for you. I was able to find quite a few free San Francisco tours that I knew nothing about before trying the site.

The service is currently in private beta, but if you use the code TNW, you can jump the line. It’s a great way for local businesses to get on the local radar as a new hot spot. Something like a free tour of a chocolate factory could make for memories that you never thought you’d have before.

➤ RAVN

If you religiously check-in using foursquare whenever you travel, the app TripsQ will pull all of that information together to tell you just how much you’ve actually traveled.

The data that foursquare collects is why I use it so much. I know that whenever I check-in at a venue, the information is recorded along with all of the other places I’ve visited since using the service. While the data that foursquare collects on where you went is fantastic, the question of “how far have you gone” has always caught my interest.

I could figure out how far I’ve traveled manually, digging up every flight confirmation I’ve ever been sent via email, but that would take forever. Since I use foursquare daily, I’ll rely on its data to tell me, thanks to an assist from TripsQ.

I’m sorry…How many miles?!?!?!

I was honestly surprised by how many miles I’ve traveled. After logging into TripsQ with your foursquare account, the data is crunched quickly, and you’re shown how far you’ve traveled according to your timeline of check-ins, and how many days you’ve traveled.

Here are my stats:

There you have it, since I’ve checked in at every airport I’ve flown from and to, my data gives TripsQ the perfect information to tell me how much I’ve traveled since I started using foursquare.

115,476 miles and 670 days spent traveling since I started foursquare sounds about right. It tires me out just thinking about it. Once you’ve let TripsQ calculate your stats, you can share them on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ to show off just how far you’ve gone.

The other handy visualization that TripsQ provides is a map showing all of your “trips” according to foursquare. These are dropped on top of a Google Map and listed on the right hand side so you can see where a bulk of your miles have come from. For example, mine came from trips to London, France, and India.

Wading through information likes this makes using services like foursquare time well spent. There’s nothing worse than using a service for months or even years, but not getting a solid idea of how you’ve used the service or how it’s impacting your life.

Clearly, foursquare is a big part of my digital life, and having access to its information makes visualizations like TripQ fun and makes me want to continue to use the number one check-in app for years to come.

➤ TripsQ

When you’re visiting a city for the first time, you have a lot of options to help you find cool places to go. You can ask your friends and locals, or just surf around on the net looking for attractions.

One city Mayor has decided to utilize foursquare in hopes of becoming your Tampa tour guide.

Relying on the lists feature that foursquare provides, Mayor Bob Buckhorn and his office have generated expansive lists of things to do, see, and follow in Tampa, including city parks, attractions, dining and shopping, government buildings and public safety.

I’m in Tampa, now what

Politicians are using social media more and more these days, from President of the United States, Barack Obama, to Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker.

Tampa Mayor Buckhorn has taken social sharing to a new level though, becoming our virtual tour guide for the city of Tampa.

On top of hand-picking places to go while you visit his fair city in the state of Florida, the Mayor has left tips at specific venues, suggesting you try different things at restaurants for example. This turns touring around Tampa into a bit of a scavenger hunt. Nobody knows a city better than its Mayor, right?

Do you think more Mayors will get involved with social media, and specifically using foursquare in this way? I found it to be a perfect introduction to a city that I’ve never been too.

➤ Mayor Bob Buckhorn on foursquare

When you have questions about specific cities you’re traveling to, who better to ask than the people who are actually there?

A lot of apps and services like Nomad for iPad and Trazzler let you ask for travel recommendations, but Uptake helps you ask the people who probably know best.

Uptake is set up to have a web community of people passionate about their local bars, hotels, and restaurants, but the key is that they let you ask questions of your Facebook friends who are local in the city you’re interested in.

Ask a question, get an answer

When you ask questions in an open community, you’re not guaranteed to get an answer. If you’re looking at reviews on Yelp, you don’t really know who are behind them. Your friends are usually the people you trust the most with picking a great bar or pub to eat at, so Uptake takes the extra step of drilling down to the friends who are relevant to your question.

For example, if you want to know which karaoke bars are the best in New York City, connect to Uptake with your Facebook account and simply enter your question and choose a city.

After you click submit, your Facebook friends in that city are shown. You can choose to ask all of them the question in a wall post, or just some of them. The question is also available to other Uptake community members to answer, so that you get a good collection of suggestions.

After you’ve chosen which Facebook friends to ask, a post is placed directly on their wall. It’s actually very well done, and if you don’t ask too many questions in a row, you won’t annoy your friends with the post. They can click on the provided link and provide you with an answer to your question.

It’s really handy, and surely beats creating a list of people using Facebook and blindly messaging them with questions.

How to make local better

Local destinations still need technology, as sites like Yelp have become a stomping ground for trolls sounding off about bad experiences. Social is the key to a good recommendation, but not many services have nailed the experience yet. When I see a recommendation from a name or avatar that I recognize, it instantly has more value to me.

Uptake is in beta right now and promises a few features that aren’t available yet. Things like “Plan your trip” and “Themes and Activities” fit into that category. I’m really interested in seeing the themes feature, because I know that my friends have different tastes and like different aspects of the city that they live in. For example, one of my friends might be a huge museum and history buff, while the other might really be into architecture.

Having just launched publicly today, the community aspect isn’t there yet, but being able to group your friends by location and ask them a question quickly is really something I could see myself using a lot. Other cool travel apps to check out are Gogobot, Trippy, and Fidatto.

➤ Uptake

Q&A services are bubbling up everywhere these days, with Quora a strong leader. Unlike Quora however, the Ask a Nomad iPad app focuses on questions about travel and geographical locations.

The company behind Ask a Nomad, WorldNomads.com, focuses on travel insurance and safety. The service created this iPad app to get people excited about traveling, and also help people find peer information about locations they’re interested in visiting. The app is gorgeous, and extremely simple to use – probably the prettiest travel Q&A app we’ve seen.

The Ask a Nomad service also has a web app if you’d rather ask and answer questions there, but you’d really be missing out on a great iPad experience.

Here is a video from WorldNomads.com about its iPad app:

The Questions

Once you sign-up for Ask a Nomad, you can choose a location and then tap the “Ask a Question” button in the bottom left. There are no extra steps here, it’s quick. Once people start answering your questions, you get push notifications to alert you. Technically, you could get help in real-time making your travel decisions from a community of like-minded travelers. It’s not all about global travel though, you can ask questions about local cities close to where you live.

You’ll notice that the app has a similar design to Twitter’s iPad app, as the tiles overlap, giving an experience where you easily swipe through questions and answers.

The Answers

If you’re someone who has travelled a lot, you may find the Ask a Nomad app to be a really fun and time-consuming pastime. The app has a recently released feature called “I Know” that lets you add cities and countries that you’ve been too, and then prompts you with questions others have asked about them.

This is a really smart way to get people engaged in conversation about a location, rather than making someone dig through a lot of content on their own. Finding people to ask questions isn’t nearly as hard as finding people to answer them, so Ask a Nomad was built brilliantly in that way.

Overall, the Ask a Nomad app is a great way to get quick answers to burning questions you might have about that big upcoming trip, or that trip you hope to eventually get round to doing.

The one thing that’s missing here is a full social connection between users. You can set up a profile, but there is no way to message other users for more information about them or their questions or answers. To me, this is a letdown because I could see myself getting immersed in the experience for hours, but not without being able to connect to people directly.

The travel deal space is busy, but companies are differentiating themselves by its online and app experiences. Trazzler actually doesn’t want you to travel far, and would rather you stay within driving distance. The company says its approach:

Fosters investment in local economies and encouraging more frequent, shorter trips.

Trazzler was created out of the original Twitter office by Adam Rugel, a former Odeo employee with Biz Stone. Biz Stone is still involved as a co-founder and board member, and the company has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from big players such as SV Angel, Twitter and Square’s Jack Dorsey, Path’s Dave Morin, and AOL Co-Founder Steve Case.

Finding places to go

You can sign-up for Trazzler by using your Facebook account on the web or with its iOS app. Once you’re logged in, the service shows you a series of pictures and asks you to choose the one that interests you the most. It suggests you don’t take a lot of time, and choose from your first gut instinct. What the service is doing is getting an idea of what types of things you’re interested in. For example, do you like to go out and dance at night, or would you rather have a glass of wine at a nice restaurant.

After you’ve gone through the photos, Trazzler tells you what type of person you are, and what the company has learned about you. If you don’t find it to be accurate, you can go through the photo quiz again.

If you’re satisfied with what Trazzler thinks about your tastes, you are then given recommendations of places to go based on your location. Since Trazzler is focusing on places within “driving distance”, these are places you can go right away, and not something you have to plan way in advance or even save up a lot of money for. The location aspect makes Trazzler really interesting, especially since the iOS app is beautifully designed and lets you do everything that the website does. If you’re in your car already, you can let Trazzler give you a recommendation on what to do right now.

Sharing with friends

Trazzler has a social aspect as well, letting you share places, and mark places as somewhere you’ve already been. This will let your friends know that a certain location is something worth checking out. You can save places to check out later as well, so if you’re not within driving distance at the time, maybe you can plan the trip for another day.

Travel with friends

Trazzler has an interesting feature that compares you to your friends based on your tastes, and the photo quiz that you took when you signed up. Here, I’m told that Biz and I would be compatible travelers and we’d more than likely end up lounging around. This feature is fun, and really incentivizes you to get your friends to sign up for Trazzler too.

Deals

The last piece of Trazzler that makes it work checking out is the daily deals aspect. Unlike a service such as Groupon, Trazzler is giving you a daily deal for a place near your location that matches something you might like to do. It makes the deal harder to pass up, thus potentially more lucrative for Trazzler, and companies partnering with them.

Overall, Trazzler is a great recommendation service if you’re looking for things to do. The key is that the company wants to keep you within driving distance, because you don’t have to plan long-term, and can do things right away. I’d like to see the content and the userbase grow, because without the fun aspect of seeing where my friends have been and what their tastes are, the service feels a bit bare now. The company has an editorial team to keep locations fresh, which could help the potential staleness out.

Planning a trip is difficult, there’s a lot of homework to do on places, especially if you’ve never been. There are a ton of books and of course you have Google to search for all of the cool places to go.

However, wouldn’t it be nice if your friends could plan your trip for you based on their experiences?

That’s what Trippy is for. The company has a site and an iOS app that lets you set a location of where you’d like to travel to. You can share that with your social graph and let people jump in and suggest places for you to go.

Trippy points out that getting advice from strangers isn’t fool proof, especially on the internet, so why not leave it up to your Facebook friends?

The company was a finalist in the TechCrunch disrupt 2011 Startup Battlefield. launched as a finalist in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 Startup Battlefield. The company CEO and Founder, J.R. Johnson, has had 2 startups acquired by Expedia in 2008.

Start a new trippy trip

Even if you don’t have set dates on when you’d like to go to a certain location, it’s nice to dream about it, right? Trippy lets you set up as many trips as you like to share with friends. Setting up is easy, just choose a location, the reason for the travel, and pre-fill in some description on why you’re getting away if you like.

Adding the reason for travel is a nice touch, because not all of your friends have gone to these places for the same reason. Some have gone for business, for school, or for a romantic getaway. Choosing why you’re going is key, so don’t skip it.

Once you’ve set up your dream trips, you can share them to Facebook, Twitter, or just with a link through email. This link drops people on a landing page where they can sign up for Trippy and then start recommending places for you to check out. They’re given a search box for the location only, so it’s easy to start adding places for your potential itinerary.

Help your friends plan their trip

Once you’ve set your dream trips up and shared, hopefully you have some of your friends on Trippy doing the same. This makes things fun, but I fear that if none of your friends sign up, you won’t come back to the site to add more trips. Since you can post to Facebook and Twitter though, there’s a good shot that your friends will at least try the service out.

It does take a lot of work to even think about a vacation, let alone plan one, so we think Trippy might be onto something here.

In case you’re not sold yet, here’s a video from the company explaining Trippy:

The company also has an iOS app, but quite honestly I wasn’t able to figure out how to use it. I would search on locations and it would bring back results close to me in San Francisco. The user experience isn’t great on iOS app, but the website is clean and straight forward, so it might be best to stick with that.

FourSquare hackathon prize winner My Next Trip, created by developer Benjamin Netter, uses FourSquare’s API to help you plan your next big city trip. FourSquare has announced its ‘Global Hackathon’ winners on its blog.

All you have to do is log into the site using your FourSquare credentials and authorize the app. You’re then given a simple search box to type in the city you’re planning on heading to.

Then the magic happens with all of the data FourSquare has collected from our check-in’s, tips, pictures, and to-do lists. The app circles around the notion of spending a weekend (2 days) in a city, and maps out a potential itinerary for you.

This is when things get really cool. Based on where and when your friends checked in, you are given a daily itinerary for each day by My Next Trip. You can see who went there and what tips they left. Even smarter, based on places you’ve gone, it tells you new places to go based on what your friends have done on FourSquare.

This really is the perfect example of what developers can do with an open API for a popular service like FourSquare, which stores tons and tons of data.

Of course My Next Trip is a simple app right now, but it would be even more useful if I could export the itinerary into another format. If it was possible to export, say a Google document by way of email, I would then be able to print it out.

Making their way to PayPal’s Innovate 09 Conference in San Francisco this week is an innovative UK based start-up called Expensure that helps friends, flatmates and travel companions track, manage and resolve their shared bills and expenses.

Expensure aims to make your life easier by using a unique algorithm to work out who owes who what in just a few seconds, saving you from the pain of working it all out manually. By comparing who you own money to, who owes you money, and what money these other people owe to each other, Expensure can calculate the easiest way to resolving your financial conundrum as fast as possible.

The tool should come in particularly useful for students and home sharers who are frequently looking for ways to resolve in house disputes over your typical household costs like rent, broadband, gas, food etc.

Expensure also offers a collaborative Shopping List making it quick and easy for flatmates and travelmates to check off who owes money for what.

According to an interview with IndieStartups, co-founder Andrew came up with the idea while “sitting around one day trying to work out who owed who money after about three months of bills and expenses had been accumulated. We had each paid for loads of shared stuff, and owed money for many different bills. In the middle of trying to work it all out for the tenth time we thought, why don’t we just make an app that does it all for you?”

While not the first company to target this niche, see BillMonk and Scred, the company is making headway having managed to secure a place to demo at Paypal’s SF event this week, in a bid to play a part in Paypal’s ambitions to feature a ‘payment resolution’ mechanism in it’s payment platform.

If only Expensure had only been around in my student days…me and housemate Jason would still be friends today.