TripSay, a Finnish social travel service that gives its users destination recommendations based on other users’ travels whose profile matches theirs, launches for the public tonight at 12am (Standard GMT+2; Summer GMT+3). Already earlier on they got TechCrunched among other news.

The service has clear and intuitive design and all the features that you’d expect from a such service, thus everything seems to be in place as long as the idea in itself will work. The make-or-brake question is whether TripSay can attract travelers beyond the web savvy kind that sign up to anything and everything new just to try it out and the travel industry professionals looking to fill their own guides.

In the larger sceme of things the success of TripSay like travel services depend on individuals’ desire to share their travel insights. Not purely locations where travelled, but real insights. In other words, whether such social travel services will take-off comes down to travelers’ ability to see more value in the service than they do in the Lonely Planet brigade after the initial Wow. It’s a debate worth having: Whether people in general want to share the real gems home and away, and whether the frequent travelers want to channel the entire Ryanair or EasyJet fleet to that little cozy street cafe that has the best cinnamon rolls in the planet where they like to visit every time they fly via Budabest. In the short term perhaps for while, but long term is tricky.

The service might be good at recommending you destinations (which is nice in itself), but I personally want to know what to do and where to go when I get there. The point is this:  Photos (think Flickr) might increase in value when shared with a close circle of friends the more they comment on them, but a small cafe or a restaurant let alone a secret powdery slope in Chamonix or Whistler hardly will in the same manner; you need the critical mass to benefit from the TripSay’s service since not all your friends have travelled where you’re going and when opened up to the larger public the venues only move from authentic and cozy to touristy and over crowded. Can TripSay draw a balance between not too much and just enough?

If TripSay can pull the trick and get people to come back to share their insights, I will never use Lonely Planet with it’s dedicated editors again. As an enthusiastic traveler myself I am eager to the see the kinds of locations it recommends to me and how the service manages to attract people to do exactly that.

Dopplr, a service that lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues, released a new version codenamed “Copenhagen” some time ago. There has also been other updates we’ve been writing about along the way. With this post I wanted to recap some of the developments and go a bit more into detail on how the new features are working for the users.

Among other improvements I can now publish my Dopplr profile page on the Internet for the public to see and for the search engines to find. This is a needed addition as it was frustrating to ask people to create their own profile if they only wanted to follow my whereabouts (yes, there was the widget, but only with one default disclosure option). Dopplr also plays along with what is a desired and much overdue positive trend among many social networks, namely giving users the ability to control how much information they want to disclose to the public. This is done via modules which the user can which on and off as she wishes.

After a little tinkering I was able to find my public profile, but there’s still no way to do a search of public profiles on Dopplr’s home page. This would be great addition especially since Google’s Search bots hadn’t found my profile yet, making it practically nonexistent.

Another very useful feature that Tripit already has and which Dopplr has now also added, is the possibility to input your trips to the service via email and SMS. Dopplr didn’t stop there but let’s the users also use Twitter to input one’s itinerary. This was a positive surprise. It took me a few back and forth confirmations to make it work, but not too much to make it an inconvenience. After I follow Dopplr on Twitter I am able to input a new trip just by doodling my destination and the dates into Twitter and post the Tweet to add it to my Trips at Dopplr.

A user can also choose to use Twitter to post her itinerary ’silently’ to Dopplr in which case it does not even show in her Tweets. I did this, but due to the usage limits that Twitter has imposed it takes a long while for the posting to go through. Once a trip is confirmed a user can also forward relevant emails such as hotel reservations to the service where they will be automatically attached to her trip.

Email, SMS and Twitter upload is a welcome addition that let’s Dopplr to strike back as Tripit already added what was Dopplr’s killer feature, namely the serendipity feature which allows me to see all my friends who use Dopplr and are in the city at the same time that I’m visiting there.

I found this quote (from Dopplr blog) fascinating on how Dopplr works out the the dates and other info from the doodlings we send them:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

I’ve always liked Dopplr for its simplicity, but there has still been the feeling that its a one trick pony with its fascinating serendipity function. With the Copenhagen release this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore and I could see myself move all my travel planning to Dopplr, if I only could access my full itinerary from my mobile with the same ease I can Twitter it up there. Something that Tripit makes possible even though not via Twitter but via SMS.

One can speculate if the new version is codenamed Copenhagen because Tyler Brûlé just recently nominated Copenhagen ‘the most livable city in the world’ in the latest issue of what is supposedly every city hopper’s bible, Monocle. Regardless, I think Dopplr has made itself much more useful for all of us with its latest version.

Scred, a Finnish community-oriented cost balancing tool, which initially focused on balancing debts and shared expenses among a group of friends announced that they are looking into new possibilities to leverage their back-end infrastructure.

Scred has partnered with Alternative Party which will be held in Helsinki in the coming October. Scred built an inexpensive bespoke ticketing service for the party with which you can reserve, buy and print the tickets straight from the web. Tickets are also machine verifiable which is more than many other service providers offer.

Kristoffer Lawson from Scred told us that the new service is currently not available for 3rd parties, but that they they will see how the first deployment will go and add some features before deciding whether it’s the right path to take. According to Kristoffer tickets can be currently bought via PayPal and ‘couple of banking services’, but the credit card option is on its way.

The party in itself is the second largest ‘demoscene-party’ in Finland after Assembly. Alternative Party aims to mix demos, music and art. Unlike Assembly, Alternative Party’s focus is more on artistic shows and activities and there is practically no gaming.

There is starting to be a lot of activity in the e-commerce infrastructure space coming from Finland. Scred seems to be gradually heading that direction and Fruugo is looking into becoming the “trusted 3rd party of ecommerce”. Based on Fruugo’s still mysterious website we will find out what they will actually offer in more detail later in 2008 when they’re planning to launch. This is something that might also be of interest to Scred since after knowing what Fruugo is aiming for Scred can better adjust their product offering to the market.

MySites, a Finnish startup based in Tampere that provides a single location to save, manage and share content online, has finally launched after delaying their launch for a little over a month to iron out the last bugs.

Even before their formal launch MySites had been active in the sponsoring front having already sponsored ArcticStartup Events, student union parties and gaming events. For the launch MySites did not slow down a bit and went on to sponsor Mashable’s US Summer Tour 2008.

On average MySites has been more active in sponsoring events and websites than we have accustomed to see from a Nordic startup that has just launched . Despite their attempts to get a lot of awareness for the service they have still quite a ways to go with improving the service itself.

The user experience is confusing at best. MySites user interface is not nearly as intuitive as it would need to be and since their service intends to combine many different functions under one roof this should be even a greater concern as the level of complexity tends to creep up anyway compared to one-purpose-only services.

Similarly, the layout could be a lot more unified from the get-go. There’s at least three kinds of different animation on the front page, not to talk about the rather foggy video clip from what should be inspiring user interviews. Maybe this is intentional, but for me it only makes the service harder to figure out.





It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out how to navigate around the site including the times the service froze and I had to reopen the page to continue. Nevertheless if the user interface would be easier to navigate I could see myself using MySites to share movies with my friends which can’t be emailed around due to their sheer size. The 10GB that I get for free by signing up could also be used to share and store other large files among a group of friends or colleagues. Thus for the moment I could see the service moving towards a cloud of stuff that I could share with a group of people. If it only wouldn’t be so hard to use.

Eat.fi, a Finnish website that let’s its users rate restaurants and bars and show which ones are open at a given time, is about to get a serious face lift. The folks at Eat.fi emphasize that the new site is in Beta and unlike Google’s Betas this Beta is really just to test out the functionality, thus all the reviews should still be written to the old site or they will disappear when the new site goes live.

The new site is build on Google maps and the new mashup has really improved the user experience. The site is easier to use and more intuitive from the get go. The functionality has also improved significantly. The website has a new bar on the right hand side of the screen which is quite handy showing the top rated restaurants which are open at a given moment. The ‘top rated’ bar of course changes based on your query, thus filtering out for example all the other venues except ‘Asian food’ if that’s what you’re after.

The smart folks at Eat.fi figured out they could use Jaiku’s active user base to get feedback for their Beta (here). This is an ingenious and many times very effective way to get feedback for your web service due to the vocal yet colorful user base at Jaiku, thus giving you passionate opinions across the board from professional designers and user experience geeks to your average Joe.

The new Beta site and activity at Eat.fi leaves me wondering if or rather when they are taking the concept abroad. It turns out that the same Jaiku thread partly answers that one as well:

• Wow @Spongefile, this is a great service. When might we have this in Los Angeles???

• @JebBrilliant Got a database of LA restaurants? :)

• @Spongefile It’s funny you ask… Can we IM on Skype

[...]

• Looks really interesting. Like to see this worldwide. A category of food/reastaurant that is really important to many is Vegetarian (though I’m a raging carnivore myself)

• @WaveyDavey001 We’re heading there… :)