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Thu

Oct 18
2007

Brady Forrest

Brady Forrest

Web2Summit: Launchpad Companies - RealiusTripit, SpiceWorks

The six Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad companies have taken the stage. They are each only here because they received funding from a VC firm. They were selected and critiqued by

  • Chris Albinson and Mike Jung - Panorama/JP Morgan
  • Mark Jacobsen - O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures
  • Michael Skok / Dayna Grayson - North Bridge Venture Partners
  • Jim Lussier - Norwest Venture Partners

Here are the first three:

TripIt is a trip organizer that uses email as one of the main interfaces. Once you've booked your flight online you can email your itinerary to Tripit and it will create a trip based on your destinations. Tripit provides maps, weather data, and other associated data that you and traveling partners might find handy for planning purposes. They make it easy to export your data via microformats and iCal.

Today they are releasing a command-line interface. It allows you to interface with Tripit via email and SMS. You can send in "get hotels" or "get flights".

After the demo the VC panel critiqued Tripit. Chris Albinson did not think that Tripit was anything but a feature. Mark Jacobsen defended it noting that most travelers are using airlines sites and could use Tripit to book the rest of their trip.

Personally, I like and use this service. (Disclosure: Tripit is funded by OATV, O'Reilly's VC arm)

SpiceWorks produces a free tool that automatically inventories everything on a local network. It will also monitor hard drive space and printers. It connects SMB IT professionals via their community site. Their page views are growing.

Why free? IT Pros are used to free web-based services. So why not try an ad-based solution? The ad-based business software is growing. They have 160k IT pros using it in 85 countries. They predict that there will be more

Chris Albinson loves it and feels that they have penetration. Counterpoint: this space is already littered with companies not making money.

I want to see where this market goes.

Realius is a fantasy real estate game that lets you be a real estate tycoon. They claim that there are lots of obsessed real estate agents and home-owners. The weekly games follow the real market (US-only I assume) including the Sunday Open Home. It combines the casual game market with real estate. They launch very shortly starting in Berkeley, CA.

Point: It combines the real estate market, virtual worlds, and casual games. Counterpoint: Casual games ride on hits. This will either make it or not. But the real issue is the size of the market, the prediction is that it will plateau eventually.

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Eric Meyer   [10.18.07 07:06 PM]

I'm a TripIt user myself-- one who's submitted a fair number of suggestions and bug reports, which is always a good indicator of how much I like a service-- but I kind of agree with Chris Albinson: it is basically just a feature. A really great feature, but still. I keep wishing they'll make the social features as simple and useful as Dopplr (another service I've been using) while retaining the powerful creation itinerary feature they've built up.

Or, heck, they could just buy Dopplr and merge the two data sets. It's not like VC funding is hard to come by nowadays, here in the inflationary phase of Bubble 2.0.

Raman Basu   [10.19.07 06:02 AM]

Hello friend,

If there is a platform where we can put our experience, photographs and let people know about it all over the world... it would have been nice for travelers. That not only makes you recognized to a mass people, but be helpful for who really want to visit the places where you did. So, you can provide good-enough guidance to them. And don't forget, tourism is one of the most demanding sector all over the world right now. So, why don't be recognized, be praised? Its a good opportunity for you to become distinguished amongst several crores!

Its very simple to use. All you have to do is to post your experience, here and they will be open for other members and visitors of this site immediately. Also create unlimited albums with your favorite photographs of your tour.

Are you thinking that amicoz is a site to post articles only like many other blog and article sites?
No... its something more than just that. This is actually a travel based social networking site, where you can make friends you like, exchange views, come closer to each other!

Amicoz.com is a mash up of top sites like google, amazon, youtube and flickR to make your profile, articles more and more rich and attractive to others.

The site is only new and on beta. We look forward to receive your valuable feedbacks and suggestions so that we can make it just perfect with maximum usability for you.

So, to wind up,amicoz does not provide you any kind of booking system or trip planning feature. It just a platform to share knowledges amongst people across the world and mash up of top sites like google, amazon, youtube and flickR.

Manuel   [10.19.07 11:07 AM]

Tripit is one of the best startup I saw lately. I plan to use it more regularely in the future.

Yen   [10.19.07 11:47 AM]

I like their business model given the vast majority of the online travel industry’s profitability comes from selling hotels. So, presumably we all send Tripit our flight details and they will sell hotels to us. Sounds clever.

@ Eric Meyer - maybe they are just a feature, but presumably there is nothing wrong with being a feature if they recognize it and raise capital accordingly, so they can exit early…

Tripit addresses the post-booking issues and does an interesting job of it. Way before this phase, if you’re just at the planning stages of a trip, you might want to check out our travel search engine that will help you make decisions about where to go etc. so you know what to book (i.e. then go off to your favorite booking site or price meta-search engine…then off to Tripit after you book). We are pre-beta, but I’d welcome your feedback if you can sign up for private beta, which is coming soon - www.kango.com


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