Tripl Socializes Travel
Summer is the best time to travel and social interactions with different people is a great part of that experience. But how do you get hold of cool folks with similar interests to party with in Tel Aviv or take a biking tour around New York City? These are the questions Tripl, a Swedish start-up, is trying to answer. Their solution is yet undisclosed but one thing is clear: they are building a platform that would connect travellers with each other, locals and friends of friends. Tripl has recently closed $300,000 funding round, finalized their team of six and will launch their product to the public within a matter of weeks. We talked with David Los, a co-founder, to find out what the start-up has been doing behind the scenes.
Offline City Sightseeing With Guidepal
Guidepal is a Swedish startup that offers city guide apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, and Blackberry devices. The guides are free to download and use, and contain information about sights and attractions, places to go, shopping etc. typical things you might expect from city guides.
The guides are produced by Guidepal's local city experts and writers around the world. There is currently an app for 27 different cities. Guidepal aims to differentiate from the traditional travel guides by supporting a number of digital platforms, and trying to offer wider and more relevant content than other services.
Zonga Aims To Make Travel Internet Access Cheap And Easy With Mobile Wi-Fi
Zonga is a new Finnish startup committed to make the Internet experience easier, better, and cheaper for all the globetrotters around the world by providing a mobile Wi-Fi rental service. The company was founded by Internet enthusiasts feeling the frustration of getting and staying online while traveling. While mobile services and Wi-Fi hotspots are getting more and more common, every business traveler knows what pain it is to try to get connected while on the go. Many mobile phones can create a Wi-Fi hotspot over 3G, but while traveling abroad mobile data roaming is usually outrageously expensive and thus not feasible. And Wi-Fi never seem to be conveniently located nor priced.
Ecompter: What Gets Measured, Gets Done
Ecompter is a start-up which offers a new service to the hospitality industry in these times of climate change. While every major airline has a carbon footprint calculator on their website, for hotels and the hospitality industry such measures are currently still of little concern. Ecompter is setting out to change this, and aims to help hotels measure their exact carbon footprint.
TripSay Strengthens Board
Tripsay, the Finnish social travel site offering personalized travel tips (coverage), has welcomed Alfonso Castellano as their new board member.
Castellano has made a 25+ year career in the travel industry, being Managing Director of Southern Europe for nine years at LastMinute.com, and the head of Latin American expansion and global hotel contracting and procurement. Castellano had the role of SVP Consumer business at Travelocity following its billion-dollar acquisition of LastMinute.com. This year he has statedly two travel technology/innovation related companies to launch, InnovaTravel, a seed company to support travel innovation and travel start-ups, and MindProject, providing consultancy and training in innovation, technology, marketing and distribution for travel companies.
TripSays's service was launched a few months ago, and Castellano helps to bring in long experience and insight in building successful online travel businesses and compelling features for users and partners. Castellano's comment indicates also that his InnovaTravel will have a stake in TripSay: "Tripsay.com will be one of the jewels of the InnovaTravel portfolio.”
See full press release.
BuzzPal Revealing Its Product
The mysterious Sweden/US based startup BuzzPal has revealed us what they are all about. As the founder, Chris Comella, says in the video, BuzzPal is an advanced version of CouchSurfing with a business model and growth strategy and it seems they are going head to head with a US based startup AirBed&Breakfast.
BuzzPal aims to facilitate people to find affordable accommodation on their travels from locals living in the given destination by enabling the locals to post their offer online with a price tag, be it an available couch, bed or even a flat for a few nights. In effect BuzzPal is an online marketplace for peer-to-peer traveling.
Chris didn't want to say exactly how they aim to monetize the service just yet. Whether they use the same model as AirBed&Breakfast which charges a 5-12% service fee from the guest during the checkout process or use for example an advertising based business model to go with the transactional one.
Even though AirBed&Breakfast is already up and running (unlike BuzzPal) BuzzPal has still a good shot at the market. AirBed&Breakfast had less than $20,000 in seed capital from friends and family when it started and has only just started gathering users: For example, when I checked they only had two places posted in Finland, five places in Denmark, four places in Sweden, none in Norway, Iceland or any of the Baltic countries. Out of these, the places on offer in say Denmark were all more expensive than for example Hotel Cabin City which is a decent choice right downtown Copenhagen.
