Travature Blog

Upgraded Comparison Engine Adds Hotels and Car Rentals

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:33:00 +0000

Some of you may have noticed that our front page has changed dramatically. We have pushed our core trip planning comparison search engine to the front of the stage on the main page, and dramatically improved the engine that runs it all. We have also removed some of the neat things you are used to (travel guides, community and restaurant and hotel reviews) but don't worry, they will be back in full force very soon. You'll also notice a completely unique new community driven travel deal voting system, but I'll leave describing that for tomorrow's post.

So first, lets talk about our shopping comparison engine. We spent a lot of time watching what travelers like you were doing on Travature, and we found one of the very first things new Travature users do is search for flights. So we listened to your feedback, and spent a lot of time working on making our flight search engine top notch. By searching hundreds of websites that offer airfares, we can give you unbiased (yep trust the algorithm) feedback on who the cheapest website is to book your specific flight (remember we don't book your ticket we just help you find the best place to book the ticket). We also though now can tell you a lot more, about the details of that flight including sophisticated filters based on stops, flight times, airlines, and even nearby airports. We also can take in advanced options now such as economy versus 1st class and whether you are traveling with children. All this ads up to a smoother experience, so you can find the website that is offering you the travel plans perfect for you.

Along with the upgraded flight search engine, we have also added the two major pieces that were missing for comparison travel shopping: hotel search and car rental search. Now on Travature you can use our same great search engine that compares hundreds of websites for the best airfare, and now apply that to finding the best rates for hotels and car rentals as well. What also is great is that we integrate it all so by default we search flights, hotels, and car rentals together , so you can get an idea of what the total trip will cost if you book it all online.

Find over a half million restaurant reviews and more hotels

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:57:00 +0000

Today we greatly increased the number of restaurant reviews we aggregate from all over the world. We added a GIANT amount of new reviews from travelers all over the web, and the total amount has now surpased 500,000 reviews, on nearly 250,000 restaurants. Thats a lot of opinions!

For good measure we also increased our hotel count to over 35,000 and will be making major additions on that front in the near future as well.

With all these new reviews we decided to make a major change in our sorting algorithm, and now show you the most popular restuarants/hotels as the default sort order. We figure, if your traveling somewhere and can only go to a few restaurants while you are in town, you probably first want to check out the places that most people talk about.

So enjoy all that amazing traveler generated content, and don't hesitate to be the one that adds the 500,001st review.

Aloha and ATA Go Bankrupt

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:35:00 +0000

As many of you have heard both Aloha and ATA airlines have gone out of business this week filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Both Aloha and ATA were close working partners with us and we offer our condolences to all the employees and customers adversely effected by the bankruptcy.

If you had purchased a ticket on one of these airlines we recommend contacting United and Hawaiian airlines Aloha assistance pages (linked above) as they have setup a standby program to try and help accommodate those who have lost their reservations. We hope all is well and your Hawaiian travels will continue as planned.

Mashable reviews Travature

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:45:00 +0000

Those oh so cuddly folks over at Mashable, did a review on us. With 5million pageviews and 750,000 readers a month, having them give us a shout out was really great. As an added bonus our site didn't die, which one always has to worry about when huge number of people come check you out all at once. Overall we were really happy that Kristen seemed to "get" Travature.

Check out the review at: http://mashable.com/2008/04/02/travature/

oh and if you are ever so kind, you could digg the article too!

LA Networking, Tech Scene Growing in Southern California

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:12:00 +0000

So it was a real busy week meeting Angels, VCs, and lots of other tech startups. The week was packed with DigitalLA on Wednesday, Dealmaker LA on Thursday, Community Next Twiistup party on Friday, Community Next Conference on Saturday, and closing out with MashMeet LA 2.0 Saturday night. How the heck are startups supposed to be doing any work, with so much schmoozing going on? I guess it just means more burning the midnight oil to make up for it. Anyways the events were actually really good, and its nice to see the tech startup scene (even if we are on the outskirts down here in San Diego) starting to become more cohesive. Building relationships with investors and other startups right now is a big focus, and last week was very productive in that regard. Anyways, looks like the networking events, in LA/SD, are dying down in the next couple of weeks, so its time for us to plug head strong back into the coding dungeon.

MySpace Travel Application Released!

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:19:00 +0000

We have been hard at work over here trying to get our Myspace Applications ready by the time the Myspace was ready for them. Well today that time has come and while we have 3 applications ready to roll only one of them made it through. That being said it is probably good fortune what we had one application make it as many developers have not gotten a single application approved.

Basically our application is a map where you can type in the countries you have been to and you get to show everyone who visits your myspace page where you have been (its more detailed, but that is a simplified version of our application). I hope you add the application to your Myspace page, you will find it available here.

Here is a sample of what it looks like (and yes this is my travel map)!

Travatures New Socially Focused Main Travel Landing Page

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:34:00 +0000

So what the heck have we been up to in Travature development land? Well a lot actually, widgets, gadgets, Myspace, and Opensocial are all getting some attention, and we'll have more to talk about on that front very shortly. But the big announcement today (if you haven't already noticed), is the new main page.

One of the things we've been striving to do is better show all the cool stuff that you can do in the Travature community. Meta search for flights across hundreds of airlines and travel providers, find and review millions of restaurants and hotels, access and edit thousands of wiki formatted travel guides, upload pictures from your travel adventures, and engage other travelers directly through social profiles and our travelers forums. All of this stuff has been available for a couple of months now, but how it integrated together into one tightly packaged travel platform has been a bit vague. You had to go to other pages, and as a result what we thought would be a simple and clean Google style main page turned out to be confusing for a lot of people.

Todays new main page, should help show people how easy it is to use all of our travel resources. By being able to access our flight search engine, the travel guides, and all the user generated reviews together in one place, it eliminates the need for separate sections for people to get lost in. We also have added the entire right column that shows user feeds of the most recent activity, plus the best user uploaded travel photo for the week, as well as the top most engaged social users. All of which should help make our the social portion of our travel community more transparent.

Anyways, we hope you like the changes and as always feel free to contact us with any suggestions!

Red Hot Site of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:57:00 +0000

RedOrbit has declared us their red hot site of the day so special thanks to them. If you would like to check out their review you can see it here!

Other than that we have been plugging away on what is no less than an overhaul of the main page to make the use of our many travel tools easier for our users. Expect to see the major changes in the coming weeks.

Travature publicity on eHub

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 19:32:00 +0000

Ok I realize I have been lagging on the blogs here, but last week eHub ran a little story on us which you can check out here!

Post a comment or just look around the site which is a great site dedicated to all sorts of new web technologies.

Travature mini interview travel startup

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:03:00 +0000

Chris and Derek, recently got interviewed by TechZulu about Travature. They were a little caught off guard, I think, while they were finishing up their lunch, but regardless, they managed to inform the TechZulu readers about a little Travature goodness:

Lunch 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 01:44:00 +0000

Most of us here at Travature attended San Diego's Lunch 2.0 today (for the first time), we found the whole event very inspiring. It was a great way for us to relax for a couple of minutes and see whats happening in the San Diego Tech community. We obviously are not as well connected as places like Silicon Valley where everyone knows one another and we need more events like lunch 2.0.

Special thanks to Digital-Telepathy, Laura (of Digital-Telepathy), and Andrew (of Mixergy?) for putting the event together. Hopefully we will see everyone at MeetMashLA this Thursday, and I strongly advise all the techies out there to attend the next Lunch 2.0 in their area.

Have a great weekend, Go Chargers, and of course...Stay Classy!

Did you hear Travature on the Radio?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:57:00 +0000

Thats right our rising voice of San Diego, Chris Hendricks, just got on the radio as the 94.9 DJ for the second time in as many months. Hey played the Clash, Modest Mouse, Lucero, Gas Light Anthem, and Rise Against during his hour from 3pm - 4pm, displaying his uber knowledge of music geekdom, plus of course plugging Travature! He was a big hit, with the 94.9 DJs, and I think they want him as a new DJ. But no guys, you can't have him, he's much too busy being super entrepreneur and law student. But we all love it every time you invite him in, because we get to hear great music, and all of San Diego gets to hear about the goodness of Travature.

Search Flights by Activity or Destination Type

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 01:38:00 +0000

One of the things we talk about a lot, is the advantage Travature can offer, because of our vision of integrating 'all things travel'. Since this is a new concept, its sometimes hard for people to visualize what we mean, but today we've rolled out a new feature that really exemplifies the power of merging travel tools.

Today, we've added the ability to search for flights based on a keyword tag, as opposed to just a destination city/airport. We are the first ones to do this in the field of airfare meta-searching and we are excited to share it with you. The main concept here is, although you probably always know where you are leaving from, you may not always specifically care where you are going to as much as what you want to do at your destination (wherever that may be).

A perfect example would be saying you lived in Los Angeles and knew you wanted to go on a golf trip but didn't care exactly where...you just wanted to check your options. Well instead of checking every flight from cities you might want to go, Travature allows you to enter into the destination field ("Going To?") your activity of choice. In this case that would be the word "golfing." Our flight search engine would then check the flights from your departure point to everywhere we have a travel guide labeled "golfing."

This feature works for just about anything imaginable, our keyword tags are generated by Travature users in our travel guide section. Right now there are well over 50 tags and the most popular include; "beaches", "surfing", "golfing", and "spring break."

For more information about our new keyword tag feature check out our press release! Also there are many new features about to be released on Travature this week so stay tuned.

Nomintate Travature as the Best Bootstrapped Start-up for the Crunchies Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:33:00 +0000

We just found out that the nominations submisions for the Crunchies ends TODAY. It's one of the biggest startup competitions around, so it'd be great to get in. For some reason we thought the sumbissions were later, which is really unfortunate, because we are releasing major NEW stuff at the end of this week and we were hoping to wait until then, before we tried to get Tech Crunch's attention, but oh well..

So please vote for us HERE
nominate us under the "best bootstrapped category" and put in the name "Travature"

Thanks!!!

Little update with big things to come

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:08:00 +0000

I know its been a couple of weeks since one of us posted, but don't think we've gone AWOL. Yes the travel for turkey day was good (mini vacations are always nice to keep us focused on what this is all about Travel, Travel, Travel), but we've been incognito not because of vacation but because we are burning the midnight oil on a big release.

You see in a lot of ways, what we have publicly available is only a "test" release of sorts. It begins to tease at some of the great things you can do with a user focused travel platform, but it doesn't go so far as to really exemplify our vision of what a total integrated "one stop shop" for travel information looks like (or how its so much better than a "normal" travel site). Clearly when you go explore a new destination there's a lot of things to check out. We've begun by integrating our airfare comparison shopping engine with wiki style travel guides and community built restaurant reviews, but this really just scratches the surface.

In just a couple weeks (basically mid December) we will be releasing some major new stuff that will finally get us to "stage 1". Something beyond our current test release, taking us to a place that we think will finally do some justice to the game changing travel platform we envision. Stay tuned, it will be an exciting ride.

Can I get restaurants for my city?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:24:00 +0000

Well the answer to that question is of course yes! We have been getting quite a few requests from people all over (literally Jakarta to Toronto) for Travature to add data to restaurant reviews. As it stands now we have well over 100,000 restaurants in the database, and we are adding more daily. However if you have a city that you want restaurants added for just tell us and we will do our best to accommodate everyone. Thank you for the interest and remember you can use our Facebook application Restaurant Wars when reviewing restaurants!

restaurants@travature.com

Travature Users Abroad

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:52:00 +0000

Of course there are many Travature users abroad, but I write this blog to just give you a heads up on a Travature user's blog which may be of some interest. It comes from one of our avid users that regularly contributes to the Central America guides (remember guides are all open and editable or wiki-style).

She has been living in in Mexico and Central America for sometime now and has a blog of her own which offers a very personal, professional, and artistic account of living abroad in Mexico and Central America. So check it out at Conversations On All Continents and get a little more acquainted with your fellow Travature user.

On an analogous note to getting closer with fellow Travature users, we are very close to unleashing our social network, so be excited and stay tuned!

More Reviews on Travature!

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:01:00 +0000

It seems people are starting to notice some of the stuff going on around the office here and we couldn't be happier. Earlier in the week we had a startup review site you can check it out here! And if you haven't already vote for us on that site (vote by clicking on the "+" sign below where it says "Killers" in the blue box...upper left of your screen)

Second up our Facebook application "Restaurant Wars," has just been reviewed on a Facebook application review site and you can check out that review here!

Travature review on Killer Startup

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:50:00 +0000

I'm not really sure how they stumbled onto Travature, but an online news site of sorts that reviews web 2.0 ish startup companies reviewed Travature yesterday. We got basically a favorable review, so it's nice to see even at this early stage that people think our vision of free integrated travel information is headed in the right direction. What also was nice is that the things they found Travature lacking (stronger social community features) are exactly what we are working on right now. So stay tuned for some big changes in the coming month or two related to that.
Also in the spirit of crowdsourcing, ala digg, besides the review that killerstartup gave us, they also allow people to "vote" for us. We'd love to be in the Top 10 startups list, so if you guys could go to: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/travature--Resources-For-Planning-Your-Adventure/ and click on the bluish button on the top left that says "killer", we would most appreciate it!

Press Release for Restaurant Wars!

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:14:00 +0000

Our first Facebook application went live yesterday and just this morning we released our first press release about the Facebook application. We look forward to any feedback you can give us about the application, just shoot us an email; talktous@travature.com

Check out the Press Release Here!

Travature's Facebook Application Restaurant Wars goes live!

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:26:00 +0000

Our first Facebook application went live today. The application, "Restaurant Wars," enables Facebook users to review restaurants and challenge their friends taste in food at the same time.

In the process of creating Restaurant Wars we have really spruced up the Restaurant Review tool in Travature by adding well over 100,000 restaurants for our users to review. So hopefully this will calm some of the Travature users who have been requesting us to add their favorite restaurant to our system.

Add Restaurant Wars to your Facebook account here!

A week with Travature, Fires, and thrown together mashups

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:52:00 +0000

Well it certainly has been a crazy week. We were planning on coming in this week to announce a new thing we've been working on. Of course the San Diego wildfire happened instead, and thus all work related stuff got (pardon the pun) put on the back burner.

Instead, all of us spent Monday, at home on lockdown, trying to stay off the roads for emergency personnel, while at the same time monitoring the status of our homes, our friends homes, etc.

Tuesday though is when things got interesting in Travature land, because 1) I was feeling a bit cooped up, unable to go the office. 2) I was checking a million sites to see if I need to evacuate from my own home. 3) I wanted to help out in the crisis. Which, all factors combined pushed me to build the Travature San Diego Fire Mashup.

The truth was in my eyes initially the mashup was hobbled together, and relied on other data, so it wasn't all that impressive. But because the info was coming in so fast from the great sources of KPBS, LATimes, Signonsandiego, NateTwitter, Flickr, and Youtube, the advantage of having it all in one place became amazingly effective. Late that night we posted on some blogs about the creation, and by the next day we were seeing traffic 10 times our normal levels.
People were commenting that it was "the best way to find out what was going on out there". Which obviously made us really happy to help in some small way.

Of course, the worry immediately became, can we handle the load if the traffic continues to explode? Considering I was still stuck on lockdown at my house, if the servers crashed we would have been royally screwed. More than a business being down, the criticality of a service interruptions when people are relying on you for disaster updates, is a whole different level. I can only imagine, the collective gutrench that those in the local news industry must have felt when many of their websites went down, during the initial firestorm on sunday night.

Luckily, we scaled away, and we were able to handle the influx without any hiccups. Even now, 5.5 days later, we are still receiving strong traffic from people checking the fire mashup - but its certainly on the decline. This is obviously a good thing as it means things are winding down. In fact, for the Travature team, today has been the first day any of us have been able to return the office (we even got a smigeon of actual travel work done).

That being said all is not clear. Mainstream media is reporting less and less, but fires continue to burn with ever present danger. Overall though, the shift in mood has become an air of cautious optimism that the worst is now over.

On the tech front though, one of the things that has begun to surface, is how effective new media has been in providing information during this major disaster. Both, as someone who was trying to consume the information and also as someone who was trying to help disseminate it, I can attest to the fact that the often hyped web 2.0 has shown its strengths. From Twittering, to Blogging, to Mapping, - new tools put in the hands of both traditional media and the average joe, has proven effective.

Of course it also brings about new questions, of how do you standardize the information aggregation, so the people, know where to go, and can get access to everything deemed "relevant". This is obviously the hard part, but clearly the future is streamlined, standardized mashups. I know people like Nate Ritter, and others are beginning to think about how to do this on a more general level. And I think its a great challenge to take on, how to determine whats good info, bad info, and relevant info in the time of crisis, while accepting standardized and unstandardized data from traditional media and joe shchmo in the thick of things. No easy problem, but certainly the foundation for something great if it can be solved well. As for us, our concern was clearly trying to help in the middle of our crisis. And I think, in our geeky way, we did, and for that I'm proud.

San Diego Wild Fire Mashup (Rice Canyon Fire, Witch Fire, Harris Fire)

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:56:00 +0000

As an update to our previous blog about the San Diego Fire, since the office is closed, most of us are now at home glued to the news, wondering if we are are going to get evacuated.

Considering the news (and weather is changing rapidly) we found ourselves constantly looking at multiple source on the Internet to get updated about the status of the fire.

So we decided to help ourselves (and hopefully some others as well) by quickly throwing together a mashup of sorts of data that we were checking.

What we've put together is: a Flickr photo stream of the 100 most recent photos of the fire, two of the local blog news feeds that continue to be the most updated (KPBS and Signonsandiego/San Diego Union Tribune) and also the very useful Google Map of the Fire damage + the evacuation centers + the mandatory and suggested evacuation areas in the county (also made by KPBS).

We hope some other people find what we threw together useful, the situation in San Diego county is certainly dire, with nearly a half million people displaced. Any little bit we can help, we will - take care San Diego.

View the Fire Mashup at: travature.com/fire

P.S. This was thrown together super quickly so please don't blame us too much on the lack of polish, or if it ends up crashing from so much use...

San Diego Fires

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:19:00 +0000

The fires around San Diego continue to burn which has forced the closure of the Travature office until at least this Wednesday. While some of our team is have been evacuated everyone is healthy and safe. I want to thank everyone who has contacted us for the kind words of care. Our team will continue to work through the fires remotely.

On a more personal note we would like to express our condolences for all those who have suffered loss at the hands of the fire.

Take good care and stay safe San Diego.

Travel Deal of the Day - OUT. Super Search Tag Cloud - IN.

noreply@blogger.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:21:00 +0000

A bunch of people have noticed that our main page no longer offers a travel deal of the day. Why did we remove it, when our snarky travel writers were famous far and wide? Well, it turns out, much to our surprise, that the travel deal of the day was confusing people. You see Travature whole mantra is to be the most unbiased travel information source for things like trip planning and travel research. We thought, having our editors hand search travel deals everyday to show people the best one would be a useful thing to see. However a bunch of people thought it was just one big ad. It was definitely not (heck, we usually made fun of the deal), but rather than have people come to our main page and immediately think we are trying to sell them something (which is the exact opposite of what Travature is trying to do), we decided to remove it all together.

In it's place we've put a a tag cloud up of some of the most popular search items in our travel super search. Hopefully it does a better job showing new visitors how cool integrating things like flights and travel guides, and restaurants, etc can be.

For those who miss the travel deal of the day, don't worry, we miss it too. However fear not, we have plans to revive the concept of unbiased travel deals, but in a different way. It will be cooler, more community driven, locally specific, and not on our main page to confuse people. Thats a big undertaking so we will unfold more about that as development occurs in the coming months.