Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 14th January 2009
3 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Tripsay, the Finnish start-up who provides passionate travelers with recommendations, has added over 25 years of travel experience to its staff by welcoming former Travelocity Vice President Alfonso Castellano to the board.
Castellano worked at LastMinunte.com for nine years, serving the company as the Managing Director of Southern Europe, head of Latin American expansion and Global Hotel contracting and procurement. Following Travelocity’s billion-dollar acquisition of LastMinute.com, Castellano was appointed Travelocity’s Senior Vice President of consumer business in Europe.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Castellano also works as a Managing Director at InnovaTravel and MindProject. InnvaTravel supports travel start-ups from definition and strategy to funding and operations. MindProject helps travel companies to get their marketing right.
What makes TripSay unique?
Tripsay received a positive response from the tech scene when it launched in August. When I met co-founder Leo Koivulehto at a Finnish meet-up in San Francisco in May 2008, he explained me how Tripsay will differentiate itself from the dozens of other travel services.
TripSay founders Juha Huttunen and Leo Koivulehto. (CC) Elliott Ng, UpTake Travel Search.
Koivulehto said: “Our service is unique as the information you see is personalized according to your interests and profile. The more time you spend on the site and more places you rate, the more it learns from you. A college graduate and grandpa Jones will see differently biased content and recommendations. Which means you don’t have to spend time going through things that are of no interest to you. We help to find what you are really looking for.”
Now that the service has found an user base, it’s time to monetize. That’s probably why the Finnish travel service attracted a man who exactly knows how to make some money out of a travel site.
Written on 22nd August 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Cnet reports that Nokia has announced a deal with travel guide empire Lonely Planet to sell mobile versions of their books to Nokia Maps 2.0 users. Traveling Nokia users will be able to download information for than 100 cities – and that’s just the first shipment.
This perfectly fits into Nokia’s plans to become a service company. To honor this strategy, the Finnish company earlier acquired Navteq ($8.1 billion) and geo localization social network Plazes (undisclosed)
What struck me about the partnership, is the price for each download. Nokia users will have to pay €7.99 to download the maps and background info to their mobile. I’m pretty sure people would be willing to pay this if there were no free alternatives. Isn’t it about time for some travel sites to offer some?
Of course there are services like Tripsay (review here) and Wikitude, which are accessible via mobile phone. Wikitude even works like a location based service, offering you Wikipedia pages based on your GPS position. But the problem is, mobile Internet in other countries than your own is way too expensive.
As long as international data plans aren’t mainstream, mobile travel guides are not so interesting when traveling abroad. What we really need, is a service that offers travel guides of great quality which can be installed as apps. Maybe they are around already, but not really salient. But as soon these guides become more popular, Nokia and Lonely Planet will only reach the hardcore fans and those afraid of new ideas. The rest will be savvy enough to look it up for free. So Tripsay, Wikitude, and competitors.., wake up!
Written on 25th June 2008
4 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
TripSay, the recently unveiled social travel networking service, has added a ‘groups’ feature at the request of its beta users.
TripSay nicely caters to its community with a slew of social features, and the Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube integration works seamlessly. With the introduction of groups, users can now form mini communities within TripSay around any topic (e.g. Golf, Iron Maiden World Tour 2008, Hiking, etc.) and choose to do so publicly or privately between friends. According to the company, this also removes part of the irritation with anonymous reviews and recommendations, since it allows you to share your opinion with people you know and trust.
TripSay, which operates out of Finland, says it intends to move from invite-only to public beta this Summer. The business model will evidently consist of highly-targeted travel-related ads and affiliate fees to travel booking sites. TripSay faces competition from an emerging group of social travel sites, such as Driftr, HereOrThere, YowTrip, Rummble and others.
Would you like to be part of the thousands of beta users who are exploring TripSay today? The first 100 readers who send an e-mail to info [at] tripsay [dot] com with “nextweb” in the subject line get an invite.
(TripSay founders Leo Koivulehto and Juha Huttunen, photo credit Elliottng @Flickr)
Written on 1st May 2008
9 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Update: Leo wants you to test TripSay. The first 100 readers to send an e-mail to info [at] tripsay [dot] com with “nextweb” in the subject will get a beta invite.
As I’ve promised on Sunday, it’s all about the Finnish start-ups on the Next Web this week. They thank that to a successful invasion at Web 2.0 Expo. Today I cover TripSay, a social travel service. I’ve met these guys at the Next Web Conference as well as last week. They got Techcrunched after the Next Web, now it’s time for me to ask them some questions.
Let’s start where TC’s Erick Schonfeld ended his post. He said social travel sites like Driftr, HereOrThere, YowTrip, and TripSay will face the challenge of creating a knowledgeable community. To attract a crowd like this, a travel service will need a little something extra. So I asked founder Leo Koivulehto how they will differentiate from their competitors.
Jyri Engeström (Jaiku), yours truly & Leo Koivulehto
Koivulehto: “Our service is unique as the information you see is personalized according to your interests and profile. The more time you spend on the site and more places you rate, the more it learns from you. A college graduate and grandpa Jones will see differently biased content and recommendations. Which means you don’t have to spend time going through things that are of no interest to you. We help to find what you are really looking for.”
TripSay also partnered up with some large Finnish travel agencies. TripSay provides them with their content, in return they receive a chunk of the travel agencies’ traffic. Nice move, but Koivulehto will have to make sure that TripSay also teams up with agencies from other countries. Otherwise, TripSay will offers its visitors just a Finnish view on the world of tourism.
Before launching their start-up, Koivulehto and his team used to be active travelers. Now they just stroll conferences: “We would never take a package trip, but want to plan the trip ourselves. For that we needed to crawl the web for information, ask all our friends where they had been and how did they like it . This was really time consuming and there was simply too much stuff on the web to find anything sensible and relevant to our interests.”
“We wanted to create a service where you can easily access travel information that has been crawled from the web, aggregated, organized and made easily searchable. We also wanted to have ratings and tips from your friends integrated, so you could see where your friends have been and easily spot the places that have been liked the best and get the insider tips and ideas for your next trip. Our databank now consists of info from over 260000 destinations, places and sights.”
What I like about TripSay, is the integration of Flickr and YouTube content. Koivulehto said they’re also working on Facebook integration and will pay attention to the wishes of their users. I think that the key to extra traffic lays there. Integrating content from other services – maybe Dopplr as well? – makes TripSay more interesting, nobody wants an isolated social platform anymore.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
