TripSay adds groups to its service, continueing on the strong community path. With groups, users of the service can more easily see what their peers in the same group are doing. Users can also add certain places to different groups.

Juha Huttunen, the CEO, commented groups in the following manner; “We added groups because they are a crucial element for finding people that share the same travel passions. With groups it is now again easier to find tips related to your interest. You can now easily find the places and tips recommended by e.g. fellow surfers or party animals. You can also create your own group with just friends too.”

With regards to their moving out of private beta, Juha Huttunen did not reveal all that much. The list of todo-items isn’t apparently all that long - I’m guessing they are in the final stages of fine tuning code and sorting out the communications things with regard to getting everything in-sync. The launch date is still unsure, but we’re guessing that its set for August.

The competitor to TNS Metrix here in Finland, Oindex.fi, will be launching their first set of data later on tonight. They went into open beta last week. Jüri pointed us to a similar service in the comments of our previous post currently working in Estonia called metrix.ee, which relies on Google Analytics data and is also free to the users.

Tripsay has gotten TechCrunched. There’s a lot of good and encouraging commentary in the follow up to the blog post. Erick Schonfeld has done a good job explaining the service that is currently in private beta.

Congrats to Leo and co!

MahShelf Ltd, founded February 2008 in Espoo Finland is wanting to become the “youtube of books” - a place where you can read and share books online.

The three students, managed by Odin Chen, began working on the concept in the end of 2007. They are pushing out a public beta in April, according to their blog.

MahShelf is in a very interesting area with their service, but they do have heavy competition from Scribd and similar services.

Reporting from LeWeb3 in Paris, Dopplr has announced today that they are open for public by dropping the beta.

More on their blog.