VentureBeat

With so many online travel sites crowding the market, you’d think we were nearing a Web 2.0 travel bubble. But according to travel information search engine UpTake, which is launching May 14, there’s still an untapped niche in the market: a travel-opinions supersite.

The market is extremely fragmented with thousands of micro-sites for individual hotels, beaches, airlines and leisure activities. UpTake’s goal is to gather opinions from all of those sites together and become the most comprehensive research tool used by travelers.

“The booking sites are good when you know that you’re going to Maui on May 17 and want to stay in a Hilton Hotel. But if you don’t even know whether to go to Maui or Kauai, it’s not that easy,” said CEO Yen Lee, who was General Manager of Yahoo Travel before he left to start UpTake in late 2006.

The site features a personalized filter that, unlike traditional search engines, lets you customize your search according to profiles such as “kid friendly”, “beach”, “romantic” or “adventurous”. These keywords are matched againt a database of more than 20 million traveler opinions from more than 1,000 review sites across the web, including WAYN, TripSay, IgoUgo and, potentially, another newcomer by the name of Tripwolf (more on them later). The ratings collection now spans about half a million places to go, things to do and places to stay. The database will expand rapidly, according to Lee. Searches will be matched with search word ads displayed along with non-commercial search results.

A traveler with unclear travel plans visits, on average, 22 sites before booking a flight or hotel, according to a recent study by Google and Comscore. UpTake wants to turn these 22 jumps into one smooth stop. “We’re like Google, but we’ll only do travel”, said Lee. But he added that unlike Google , UpTake’s database is prepared to ask travellers the big questions: why they’re travelling and who they’re travelling with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Online travel sites are an increasingly crowded space, so much so that it can be difficult to differentiate between them. NileGuide is attempting to offer something different, a full-service travel site that exists online. The site will help you plan a trip from start to finish. The mission is to own the trip itinerary business.

NileGuide saw the first wave of travel sites as useful simply for booking. The second wave, was good for limited user-generated content. Now comes the time for a third wave.

NileGuide will offer a site that has experts in multiple locations around the world who can give you information that is accurate and relevant. The company has 75-80 experts from all around the world, about half are in the United States, and half in the rest of the world.

“NileGuide is like having your own travel agent, tour guide, and concierge wrapped into one,” NileGuide co-founder and chief executive, Josh Steinitz says.

The site uses a hybrid model for offering recommendations for users. Ninety percent is done by software calculations; the other 10 percent is pulled in from the site’s own editorial content and the local experts. This insures that results will be served up quickly.

On top of the experts, NileGuide will pull in information from sources such as CitySearch, Expedia, OpenTable, and TripAdvisor. From here, users can build a comprehensive, personalized travel guide, “with the serendipity that makes travel special”, Steinitz tells us.

Other players in the online travel space include Kayak and the larger sites Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Hotwire.

The San Francisco-based NileGuide was founded in 2006. Its initial angel investors included Draper Richards and KPG Ventures.

Here’s the latest action:

Mobile enthusiast gives up on “mobile web” – Russell Beattie, a Silicon Valley developer and mobile enthusiast who spent two years working at Yahoo Mobile before launching a start-up called Mowser, has given up on the mobile sector. He writes: “The general answer is that I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to.” Mowser focused on adapting content for mobile phones. Beattie said the expected traffic never came. His story is a cold shower for industry players hoping advances by the iPhone and the Android will inject life into the sector.

Credit crunch hits cleantech after all — Despite some crowing from the clean-technology crowd that the credit crunch hadn’t hit it, it did eat into one a that sector clean-technology companies: private equity investment. Earth2Tech has a good wrapup of the numbers and commentary.

Silicon Valley’s giants are fine, but maybe not for long — The big tech companies of Silicon Valley, on the other hand, are humming along as if the current (probable) recession weren’t even taking place, says the San Jose Mercury News in its annual SV150 issue. The reason: Their international business divisions are going strong. However, the New York Times reports that housing markets worldwide are following the US market’s tailspin, so credit and spending abroad could suffer as well, challenging even multinational companies.

Feed your tank, starve a poor person — Biofuels have pushed back the fight against poverty by seven years and may continue to hurt poor people, according to a quote from World Bank president Robert Zoellick in the Guardian. The tapping of biofuels for alternative energy has faced a growing negative reaction, because it is sending food prices soaring around the world. Biofuels are made from food crops like corn and sugar, and so are taking away from the food stock. The effect, at least for the moment, will probably be limited to more cautious government subsidization policies.

Farecast rumored sold for over $75M — Online travel search site Farecast may have been sold for over $75 million, according to John Cook of the Seattle PI. He’s not sure who the buyer is, but speculates that Expedia would be a likely match since two major competitors, SideStep and Kayak, merged last year. Farecast has done well with its feature that lets you predict whether fares are going up or down in the near future, helping you decide when to buy.

Radio One buys Community Connect for $38M — Media giant Radio One has laid down $38 million for Community Connect, which operates niche sites based on ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. The company had taken funding from Dominion Ventures, ConnectCapital, Comcast Interactive Capital and Jump Ventures, according to peHUB.

YouTube dominates video, while Google roars in search — YouTube boasted 73.18 percent of all U.S. visits among a group of 68 online video websites in March, according to Hitwise. MySpaceTV received the second highest percentage of visits, with 9.21 percent followed by Google Video with 4.06 percent. YouTube dominates video more than Google dominates search. But then search makes much more money. Google got 67.3 percent market share for search, and that’s a high, while Yahoo and Microsoft hit new lows.

Gawker media cuts Wonkette and others loose — Gawker owner Nick Denton tells Silicon Alley Insider that as the economy stumbles, he’s ditching three “underperforming” Gawker sites: Wonkette, Gridskipper and Idolator, which will all continue under new ownership. That leaves the company to focus on its 12 “core titles,” like Silicon Valley’s beloved gossip blog Valleywag.

Google App Engine and Amazon web services, together at last — When Google launched its Engine App a week ago, allowing developers to build and deploy web applications on Google infrastructure, the move was widely seen as a move against Amazon’s web services. But just because they’re competing products doesn’t mean they can’t work together, as Portland entrepreneur Chris Anderson has shown by creating AppDrop, which allows you to build apps with Google’s software development kit and deploy in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. There have been complaints that Google Engine App locks in your applications, but AppDrop shows that isn’t quite true.

LiveUniverse reportedly acquires home page service Pageflakes — LiveUniverse, the online entertainment network run by former MySpace executive Brad Greenspan, has acquired the Ajax home page service Pageflakes, according to TechCrunch’s unidentified sources. Just a few hours earlier, GigaOM reported that Pageflakes was “desperately” seeking a buyer. Last February, a number of sites said that LiveUniverse purchased video site Revver, so the network appears to be in an acquisitive mood.

Intel bullish on mobile Internet handhelds: The world’s biggest chip maker said more than 25 companies have signed up to use its low-power Atom microprocessors in upcoming “mobile Internet devices” (MIDs). The new category of wireless broadband-enabled devices will combine the features of Internet-enabled computers and navigation units in a handheld, with the first devices appearing in late May and early June in China, South Korea, and Japan. The chips consume anywhere from 0.65 watt to 2 watts. That means they could be serious challenges to low-power processors from Arm Holdings, which has a virtual lock on processors for mobile devices and cell phones, making the so-called MIDs Intel’s Trojan Horse for an assault on the mobile device chip market.

The latest iPhone rumors: AT&T’s CEO dropped a hint once again that Apple will launch a 3G version of its iPhone on AT&T’s network within months. His second mention, it was enough to set off an argument among analysts about whether the signs of an imminent 3G iPhone introduction are iPhone shortages at Apple stores. Apple, meanwhile, passed Wal-Mart as the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S.

Google acquisition rumors multiplied in the past 24 hours as word spread that it was going to buy travel site Expedia. Susquehanna Financial Group’s market intelligence team started the rumor. The consensus currently seems to be that it’s bogus, but we’re not completely ready to rule it out. Travel is a major vertical that Google hasn’t moved into yet, and back in 2005, there was some talk about Google starting up a travel site of its own that would tie into Google Maps and Google Earth. Travel e-commerce blogger Alex Bainbridge posted that Google had a high-level executive dedicated to working with Expedia from 2003-2007, and that Google may have developed Expedia’s search marketing program. Separately, TechCrunch reported that Google might buy the Skype phone service from eBay. Word is that eBay has been shopping Skype for months.

Blazing broadband. How fast do you want your Internet access to be? Comcast has begun offering 50 megabits a second to some lucky people in the Midwest. That’s like a dirt road to South Koreans. But here in the U.S., it’s the Autobahn (and it only costs $149.99 a month). Sometimes I wish I lived in Hudson, Wisc.


Best Buy beat expectations but saw a slight dip in its profits. The company earned $737 million in the March fiscal quarter. The electronics retailer’s earnings and its guidance for the fiscal year ahead were ahead of expectations. TV sales are expected to grow. But you can expect everyone will be watching closely to see if consumers get skittish about buying big-ticket items as a recession looms.

Games uber alles. Market researcher NPD Group reported that about 72 percent of Americans played some kind of video game in 2007, up from 64 percent of the population in 2006. Does this mean non-gamer dinosaurs are rapidly dying off? Of these, more than half say they play online games. The PC is the most common platform, with 90 percent of online gamers using it. Half of Xbox 360 game console owners use it to go online.

Get ready to rumble. Sony said that it would launch a new controller for the PlayStation 3 with “rumble” technology built into it. Sony caught flack for not including the force-feedback technology in its latest game console controllers, but the company was still smarting from a settlement where it agreed to pay Immersion in a patent case. The new DualShock 3 controllers have motion-control in them and Sony will stop selling its Sixaxis controllers, which come without the rumble feature, once supplies run out.