TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring UK-based rail booking technology provider SilverRail.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Transfixed by the matrix of travel and technology, the SilverRail leadership team comprises top travel ecommerce experts whose history goes back to the founding days of online travel.

• Aaron Gowell, company founder and CEO – Prior to founding SilverRail in 2009, Aaron built one of the largest travel technology and distribution companies in the US: National Leisure Group (NLG), a $1 billion ecommerce leader in vacations and cruise. NLG pioneered several early online travel technologies including the cruise industry’s first online booking platform and one of the first dynamic packaging systems. Previously, Aaron honed his survival skills in US Army’s 82nd Airborne and at global management consultancy Bain & Company. Aaron was also a founding member of General Catalyst Partners, a leading venture capital firm in Boston where he was most recently an entrepreneur-in-residence.
• Will Phillipson, company founder and EVP product strategy - With a decade-plus of travel technology and product development experience, Will helped build NLG’s dynamic packaging technology/product. Nearly anyone using web-based travel products today has seen Will’s genius. In fact, NLG’s revolutionary dynamic packaging solution powers 20 brands – like Orbitz.com – and integrates global distribution for more than 2,000 suppliers. Among many successful companies, Will had also taken the reins as the VP product strategy and technical lead at ITA Software.
• Jeremy Acklam, general manager, Quno.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

$9 million in series-A capital from a group of top-tier investment firms including Sutter Hill Ventures, Grandbanks Capital, PAR Capital, Brook Ventures. The syndicate was pulled together by Aaron Gowell.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Developed by a team of highly experienced travel ecommerce experts obsessed with improving online travel planning, SilverRail Technologies has built the first global rail platform.

A global explosion in high-speed rail, awareness of the environmental impact of travel, hassles associated with air travel, and industry deregulation have coalesced into a perfect storm, making passenger rail the travel industry’s most dynamic and fastest-growing sector.

We consolidate passenger rail products from across the globe into an integrated single-source platform that removes the complexity of selling rail anywhere in the world.

Describe the business, core products and services?

For railways:

SilverRail works with railways as a technology partner and provides access to any travel seller through a single connection. Harnessing the SilverRail Integrated Technology Platform, railways do not have to invest their own time and money to implement, manage or support multiple customer connections.

Meanwhile, Railways benefit from access to new markets and distribution technologies – while maintaining complete control of their product.

Distribution channels include:

• Travel management companies
• Online and traditional travel agencies
• Tour operators
• Travel technology companies

For travel sellers:

SilverRail makes selling Rail easy! By aggregating numerous rail suppliers into a single, flexible platform, SilverRail Technologies provides travel sellers a complete rail solution that fits their business needs.

The complexity and intricacies of each carrier system – different APIs, different business rules, and different business models – are abstracted and normalized into a single common interface, offering complete product access in a familiar – similar to air ticketing – business process.

Travel sellers may choose to access the rail product via either of two technologies offered by SilverRail:

• Web service – Air-like interface, standardized queries and responses and end-to-end functionality across global rail content.
• White label – Customized websites and widgets available for immediate website plug-in, leveraging the SilverRail Web Service.

In both cases, travel sellers may use direct commercial relationships with the railway suppliers or capitalize on blanket agreements for content forged by SilverRail. At all times, the supplier and distributor are transparent, powered by SilverRail technology.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We have several, but in most cases we are under NDA not to disclose the partnership, given that we supply a core product/capability.

• B2B: Can’t say – under NDA. Five large travel distributors signed or live (three signed, live this fall, two already live)
• B2C: Our own consumer direct rail retail brand, Quno (primarily UK).

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes. We had one client in beta.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Business model is most closely described as a GDS. We consolidate rail content via direct connections to suppliers, we aggregate and homogenise the data into a unified format/structure, and we distribute the aggregated content via a single API (or white label GUI).

The revenue model varies. The suppliers pay either a technology fee per transaction or a % commission. Distributors then pay for access to the content and pay per query or per booking.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Our product platform, which is the first rail platform in the space. Connections are easy to do. Building world-class products is very difficult, which makes the business defensible.

Weaknesses:

• Time and adoption. Rail is new to many/most distributors and we expect adoption to take time.

Opportunities:

• OTAs. No OTA has ever integrated rail into air search or hotel packaging. SRT’s API enables both.

Threats:

• GDSs. They’re smart and have deep pockets and should have done this themselves.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Can’t name names – it’ll burn bridges. What I can say is that I didn’t listen because the macro-dynamic trends were singing to me: huge, growing market, incredible innovation leaps (200mph high speed trains), the largest investment – ever – in travel (high speed rail infrastructure), plus deregulation.

It’s the perfect investment storm!  Besides, no one’s ever tried to do this and being a pioneer is an adventure.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Profitability by end of Q1 2011.  Then my shoulders will unbunch.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring Australia-based backpacker deals site Brokepacker.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Over a backpacking career spanning close to seven years Kevin Lippy had been directly responsible for… not much really, and was more than content with simply being well-traveled. That was until one day when his promising backpacking days came crashing down in one foul swoop when he ran out of money and had no other choice but to go home!

He had officially become a “brokepacker”. Kevin simply knew that he had to do more to help save other backpackers from suffering the same fate as he did.

So he founded Brokepacker, a website purely dedicated to offering the greatest discounts and deals on backpacker accommodation, travel and transport.

A short time later, fellow Brokepacker Dean Ginsberg who has experience in digital marketing, business development, strategy and design, returned home in dire need of a job to repay his backpacking debts.

As Brokepackers, Kevin and Dean both truly understand how much backpackers value discounts, because every single dollar saved is a dollar that can contribute to another experience, another adventure and ultimately another day.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We are self-financed. We just tell people that our staple diet of noodles and tomato sauce is part of our strategy to delve into the mindset and psyche of our backpacker target audience.

What problem are you trying to solve?

For backpackers we live by our company motto: Saving You From Home.

For operators:

Having to contend with seasonal demand and volatile fluctuations in backpacker numbers, the majority of operators in the backpacking industry have some unused capacity (distressed stock) during most months of the year.

Brokepacker allows these operators to offload a limited amount of their unutilized inventory at a discounted rate.

Another issue is that the backpacking industry is made up of thousands of small independent operators, the majority of which do not have the brand awareness or marketing budgets to promote themselves on any other points besides price.

Brokepacker serves as more than just a booking engine for these operators as it essentially provides an affordable marketing solution where they can inexpensively differentiate the products and services they offer.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Brokepacker utilises its own purpose built pricing model (Innovation Patent Application 201000090) to distribute the discounts it offers, which are bundled together into ‘deal sets’ and are available on a first come, first served basis.

The discounts are distributed so that:

• No discounts on Brokepacker are less than 25% off – we believe anything less is not a big enough call to action, especially as we generally sell low ticket items.
• All discounts within a deal set are distributed unevenly to allow for some significant teaser discounts which offer as much as 70% off.

Part of our value proposition is that once all the individual discounts within a deal set are sold out, the product/ service can then be purchased at the market rate.

This can either be booked directly through brokepacker.com or by linking a user to the operators own booking engine where they can offer more detailed information and receive bookings commission free.

Restricting the amount of discounts offered per listing, allows us to offer the most competitive discounts. It also allows us to incentivise those who get in early as opposed to rewarding those who book late (which is the opposite of what a lot of lastminute-style discounting sites do).

The system is built so that operators can autonomously manage their own deal set listings in line with the amount of distressed capacity they have at any given point in time.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Price conscious, potential “brokepackers” age 18-30 wanting to prolong their travels in Australia. In this way the Brokepacker concept is market driven as it appeals to the overwhelming majority of backpackers who are typically and unashamedly frugal as they seek to get the most bang for their (limited) buck.

Did you have customers validate your idea?

Its pretty intuitive that besides sex and beer, discounts are the most sought after commodity by backpackers. So was it entirely necessary for me to move into a backpacker hostel a couple of months prior to our launch to validate this notion? Absolutely!

Sure, at first even I thought I was uneccesary, but in hindsight it was probably the greatest business decision I have made to date. So much so that I haven’t exactly moved out yet.

Living in and amongst real backpackers on ground level has provided me with a level of insight and understanding about my target market that far outweighs anything I could have possibly achieved from sitting in an office behind a desktop.

It’s also pretty handy for sales leads and spreading the word of mouth about the project, which is great considering it will take some time to get substantial online traction. At times it does prove to be difficult environment to run a business (so I do go home occasionally).

The most interesting thing I have learned so far is that a significant portion of backpackers are equally appreciative when it comes to “value-adding” as they are with discounting.

In this way we are continually seeking to adapt our strategy to not only offer distressed stock at reduced prices but also to offer value-adding products.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Brokepacker’s primary source of revenue is commissions earned from deal sets sold. Being that it is free to list on Brokepacker, our model is based on the premise that we only make money once the businesses that list with us make money.

We also promote listings that do not do not utilise our pricing model. These may include operators who want to advertise their own special deals or certain types of operators who simply do not fit our pricing model, an example being backpacker bars.

We also run marketing and social media based campaigns through brokepacker.com on behalf of operators on an ad-hoc basis.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Brokepacker is first to market as a website purely focused on deals and discounts in the Australian backpacking industry. Our custom built pricing model and unique system design was built with simplicity and automation in mind. Brokepacker’s marketing strategies are more targeted to a younger, more social and web-savvy 18‐30 year old independent backpacker audience. Being on ground level amongst backpackers provides us with a unique edge to directly reach our audience

Weaknesses:

• We are a small team with minimal start up capital. We truly see this as more of a challenge then a weakness as we have to be extremely scrupulous with every single dollar of our marketing spend. We simply cannot afford to be reckless at this stage and need to be creative in our promotional strategy. The good news is that we wholeheartedly believe that it is now easier than ever to reach our audience without requiring a prohibitively massive capital base.

Opportunities:

• At present there is no website in the industry that acts a one-stop-shop for a backpacker’s every need including accommodation, activities, tours and transport. The hostel segment is covered (i.e. Hostelworld, Hostelbookers) but in terms of booking tours, travel packages and car rentals as well, you still need to navigate through numerous individual websites. Brokepacker bridges this gap, by allowing all segments of the backpacking industry to list.

Threats:

• Discounting in the backpacker accommodation sector is a widely debated topic in our industry, and there are a faction of operators who believe that any type of discounting is bad news because it drives down yields and consequently hampers product development and inward investment. We need to disassociate from being irrational discounters and let the market know that we provide a solution for operators to sell there excess capacity as opposed to their entire capacity at a discounted rate.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Nobody has ever categorically stated that Brokepacker would not be successful; however if someone ever did then the last thing we would do is not listen to them.

We would want to understand exactly why they held this belief and on what specific grounds do they think that the idea is going to fail?

We would then thoroughly assess their point of view and if there is any merit whatsoever in their argument we’d do whatever was necessary to mitigate those reasons. We are never too proud to learn, fairly flexible and constantly adapting our strategy.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

If in 12 months from now we could walk into any backpacker internet terminal along the east coast of Australia and have a good chance of seeing someone on Brokepacker we will be over the moon.

No doubt this will certainly be a challenge considering how transient our target market is – after all the average backpacker comes to Australia for under two months.

Achieving that amount of market recognition and brand awareness will require the continual engagement of new backpackers through word of mouth referrals.

Another success metric will be defined by the amount of operators we have listed on Brokepacker, as we will only increase this in line with demand.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring Netherlands-based travel ticket exchange service Re-Ticket.com.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

I am Gregor van der Made, 27 years old from Amsterdam, the Netherlands and the owner/founder of Re-ticket.com.

I graduated in economics and as a student I’ve been working in my spare time for several airlines at Amsterdam Airport.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

My own savings money and an informal investor.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Offering a platform for travellers to sell their already bought travel tickets. And for bargain hunters offering the possibility to buy those second hand tickets.

People do not t know that they can change the name on a ticket, that why you can check on our website if your airline allows name-changes. For train/bus/ferry tickets there is no need to check, because those tickets are most of the time not personalised.

And even if it’s not possible to sell your ticket, we can help with getting a refund for the airport taxes.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Re-ticket.com is an online marketplace for travel tickets where people can sell and buy their second hand tickets. Tour operators and travel agents for example, can also sell their overstock on our website.

With the refund service, we are able to get a refund in 70% of all requests with an average amount of Euro 70 per ticket.

And our request service helps travellers who are looking for a trip, but can’t find any. So they can leave a request so other people/travel agents can reply with a specific offer.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Travellers in general, but on the re-ticket side it’s mainly the backpacker who is offering and buying tickets.

For our refund service we see a lot of business man using our service, because they have tickets left due to an agenda change or something like that. And, to our own surprise, we are working for several travel insurance companies to get refunds for them (or their clients) if they have a claim for cancelled flight tickets.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

No, although we did a lot of market research which showed that there is a demand for this.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Advertising with banners/advertorials/e-mail marketing. Our marketplace is free to use for individuals, but for business accounts we charge a Euro 1 fee per ticket to be published at our website.

This is because business accounts are able to upload several tickets in one time so they don’t need to insert all data over and over again if they have 10 seats left on the same LTN-AGP flight for example.

We charge a Euro 15 fee per claim for the tax refund for individuals and for B2B partners we ask a ‘no cure, no pay’ fee in the form of a percentage depending on the volume of the claims.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• A specific international multi-language marketplace for travel tickets to help travellers to get rid of their ticket and to get (at least) some money back. We offer a refund service which no other marketplace is offering.

Weaknesses:

• It’s not easy to convince travel agents and tour operators to publish their overstock on our website. So far, they prefer a “not sold seat” over a “50% sold seat”. And overstock from travel agents generates more offers on our website instead of ticket offers from individuals.

Opportunities:

• Same as weakness; when travel agents and tour operators start to work with it, it will offer opportunities to travel agents as well as travellers.

Threats:

• There is always a possibility that large ticket websites like Expedia or Cheaptickets.com also will offer this second hand ticket service.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Almost everybody who is working for conventional legacy airliners and the travel agents on the corner of the street.

I didn’t listen to them because the employees of the large airliners aren’t used to look broader than their own airline. And the travel agents at the corner of the street don’t believe in internet at all, and therefore also not in Re-ticket.com

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Having 100.000 visitors per month would be good for a start, having a positive cash flow, and ideally 25% of the tickets offered published by travel agents / touroperators.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring UK-based trip planning service Kukunu.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Kukunu is a London-based start up taking a new approach to travel planning.

It was founded by Gerald Goldstein, Ph.D. in physics and Itamar Lesuisse, ex-Amazon, in September 2009 at Seedcamp.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We started the company out of our living room, bootstrapped and counting on our wives to pay the rent. After few months we had a first preview of the platform ready for testing by some beta users.

We recently raised a seed round with a fantastic group of investors: Jaina Capital (Marc Simoncini), Kima Ventures (Xavier Niel) and Seedcamp.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Travel planning. While we can find a large amount of content, reviews and booking engines across the web, travellers still miss a service to consolidate their planning experience, with online travel we lost the convenience of a travel agent.

Some numbers to highlight the issue: 50% of travellers still consider planning a major pain point before leaving for vacation and online users spend an average of 29 days on more than 20 different websites between the first search and booking.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Whether it’s two weeks in Spain or ten days in California, Kukunu helps you build your itinerary across cities before planning all aspects of your trip, such as hotels, restaurants, sights or activities.

Because you might not travel alone, Kukunu is a collaborative experience, allowing co-travellers to work together to plan fantastic trips.

Your friends on Kukunu, Twitter or Facebook can also contribute by sharing their ideas and suggestions.

To bring you the best experience, Kukunu has teamed up with trusted travel providers so that you can directly access more than 100,000 hotels and 200,000 activities, restaurants and sights.

We have already teamed up with travel players such as Booking.com, Expedia, Opentable, Isango and Viator. With much more in the pipeline.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

If you love travel and believe that travel is better when you plan it yourself, then Kukunu is for you.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

The idea behind Kukunu started from our own travel experiences, often planning trips on a piece of paper or a calendar.

It’s when Itamar’s wife planned a trip on a Google spreadsheet that everything became clear, content and booking had been solved but the planning process was still broken.

Since then we have talked and tested our products with hundreds of travellers covering a wide range of travel styles and budget.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Commission on hotel and activity bookings is our main revenue channel.

Our focus on great user experience prevents us from using display adds on the site, and our strategy is to serve users as best as we can, constantly increasing the selection of travel products.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Our approach to travel planning is quite unique and there is a real opportunity here to solve a massive issue. Our biggest bet is our focus on building a great experience first, focusing on content at a later stage.

We have no doubt our strong technology and product management DNA will lead to a fantastic product.

We’ll be facing the same challenge as most travel start ups: getting visibility in a crowded space.

Our weakness is probably the fact that we believe a great product will always find is way to users, we’ll leave it to our users to prove us right or wrong.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

When you share your product vision with many industry insiders and investors, as we have, you’ll always find some believers and non-believers. We believe in our vision and we’ll keep moving forward, iterate the product and let our users be the the final judge.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Users completing their trip planning and booking on Kukunu.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring UK-based hotel business intelligence system iNNtelligenz.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

We are an inspired team of online travel experts and technology gurus focused on one thing – developing the most advanced suite of competitive intelligence apps for the travel/hospitality industry.

• Anton Kuznetsov (founder), concept, networks, servers and data harvesting – MSc Engineering, senior technical positions at RTComm, SvyazInvest, Rostelecom.
• Roman Peskin (founder), concept and design – MSc Biotechnology Engineering, hotel general manager, revenue manager, hospitality IT consultant.
• Bob Rogers (founder), industry advisor and angel investor – Cornell MMH, director at Expedia, senior manager at Nokia.
• Oleg Zaidiner (founder), back end and databases – Technion BSc Computer Science, senior technical positions at Symantec, Nokia-Siemens.
• Ruslan Sinitskiy (founder), front end and data harvesting – MSc Electronics Engineering, R&D engineer at the Ukrainian Space Agency.
• Robert Willis (CFO), angel Investor – Pittsburgh (Katz) MBA, CCA, auditor.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We are entirely self-funded. A combination of a very efficient back-end, a true online model that allows the user to easily do many things themselves, and some very talented people who have dedicated their time and passion, has made this possible.

What problem are you trying to solve?

The internet has radically changed how hotel rooms are sold. But it has also created massive chaos and information overload.

While tools such as Kayak help the consumer fight this chaos, hotels are left with basic rate shopping tools, and remain largely in the dark.

Describe the business, core products and services?

iNNtelligenz, the first product from iQueLab, is a competitive intelligence webapp for hotels that is both technologically and business-wise a game-changer.

By combining Kayak-like web crawling technology, the insights of Google analytics, and pulling it all together in an Apple-esque zenned-out user experience, we equip the blind hotelier with a powerful yet easy to use market x-ray device.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Our primary customer with the first version of iNNtelligenz are hotels, whether chain or independent, small or large, luxury or economy.

Any hotel situated in a market with more than 30 hotels will gain significant value from iNNtelligenz.

We are working on versions of iNNtelligenz that are optimized for chains, OTAs, property owners and analysts/researchers.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We spent over four months working with a regional hotel group on refining the app before commercial launch, as well as consulting numerous industry experts for their feedback.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Our approach is to make a B2B experience more B2C. This means, easy and instant access to the tool, a two-week free trial, and the ability to add hotels and adjust competitive sets on the fly.

We want this tool to be accessible to every hotel in a significant market, so we have subscription model with a pricing structure that makes it affordable for smaller, budget properties, as well.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Our efficiency – we are able to offer an incredibly powerful app with very low operating costs.
• The team – a brilliant combination of technology expertise and real-life hotel revenue management knowledge.

Weaknesses:

• Our marketing resources: we are primarily focused on making the best competitive intelligence tool out there. This restricts our ability to spend money and resources on getting our name known. Our recently announced partnership with EZYield should go a long way towards addressing this.

Opportunities:

• More insights – there is a goldmine of information available on the web. The trick is to present it in a clear way and show patterns. There are way more valuable insights available from the data we collect.
• Greater Integration – obviously market level information is invaluable in helping to determine the correct price for a hotel on any given day. This data can be easily added to revenue management software to give a ‘reality check’ on pricing recommendations.

Threats:

• Blocking by OTAs – although our approach aims to minimize site disturbance when harvesting data, OTAs may decide to make it more difficult to access their pricing information. Given that the OTAs are using the same basic technology to benchmark each other, this is unlikely.
• Spreading ourselves too thin – we are a small team, and although there are many additional opportunities out there, we need to maintain a high level of discipline to ensure that we don’t take on more than we can handle.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

A colleague of our CFO was convinced that the service would not take off because the target market (hotels) was too narrow, and there was not sufficient demand for insights into market dynamics.

We did not listen because the person in question worked in the area of web design, and had no hotel revenue management knowledge. Our own experience and the feedback from hotels in our beta program suggested that a clear picture of market trends for the hotel industry was long overdue.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Every hotel in a medium-sized market (those with 30-plus properties as competitors) knows of iNNtelligenz, and a significant proportion of those have signed up for the free trial.

From there the rest is easy!

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring India-based trip planning web service Yoplr.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Yoplr is backed by two promoters, Deepankar Biswas, and Raja TN. Deepankar Biswas is an industry expert in technology and product management with over 15 years of experience. Deepankar also has been a co-inventor in six patents and sole inventor in one patent filed in the US.

One of his papers on multi-modal Presence and Availabilty was selected for presentation in the ICIN Conference in France in 2003.

Deepankar brings along rich experience in blending technology with business, and being an avid traveller, contributes to Yoplr both in terms of technology and in terms of product strategy and direction.

Raja TN is a seasoned industry expert with over 14 years of experience in customer operations and technology. Raja has been a co-inventor in one patent filed in the US.

Raja has rich experience of working across customers, partnerships, and brings a lot of value in terms of operations to Yoplr. Raja handles the partnerships and operations and drives the content strategy for Yoplr.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We bootstrapped ourselves, and used the FFF channel (family, friends and fools) and a few consulting assignments to run the business until now.

What problem are you trying to solve?

We are trying to solve the problem of multi-modal travel planning. This is also known as making door-to-door tours, which cover all the components of a holiday or a travel.

This includes flights, trains, buses, hotels, transit, and sightseeing options. Our solution empowers users to make multi-modal tours in a flash using strong technology at the backend. This is a highly scalable solution which can cover any travel vertical and holiday experience.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Our revenue model relies on direct to consumer fulfilment, and lead generation for affiliates. Since the service went live only a month back, we are yet to bring these up on the site.

Yoplr works on a core software algorithm, which churns out multi-modal tour itineraries not only for transportation, but across hotels, transit and sightseeing options as well.

Since we are starting with religious tourism as a niche, we also work on the modalities of the worship timings etc of the main diety or the lord the user is visiting.

This completes the holiday and the tour need of the user in full. Moreover, it also allows the user to customize and change his options on the fly and arrive at a refined plan. Technology-wise it is a LAMP stack solution.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Our key customers at launch were the consumers (demand side) using the service. Going forward, our customers would be essentially on the supply and aggregation side.

Demand side customers: Geographically – anyone in the world wanting to visit or make a tour for one of the destinations we can help with.

Supply side Customers: Currently working on India-based suppliers

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We showcased in Echelon 2010, Singapore, in June this year, and had a lot of investor attention.

We have not had the opportunity to showcase it to investors officially so far. However, we are looking for investment to scale up this solution and make it realize its potential, and hence looking for potential and like minded investors, who understand this space.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Our revenue model relies on direct to consumer fulfilment, and lead generation for affiliates. Currently since the service got live a month back, we are yet to bring these up on the site.

In the customer fulfilment cycle, we connect the consumers directly to the suppliers and not to any intermediary. We do not sell travel.

Our lead generation model for affiliates also has an API/Widget model, by which the tour operators and travel agents would get a very interesting solution from our end, thereby making us profitable in a short span.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• The software, its algorithm, and content.

Weaknesses:

• Lack of an industry expert in the team.

Opportunities:

• Domestic and international destination tour planning – ‘From any city in the world to any tourist attraction in the world’.
• Other verticals like adventure, exotic etc.

Threats:

• Mindset.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Along this journey, a few people told us: “It’s tough, it will not work. Nobody’s doing it, so why are you? Why hasn’t somebody done it before?”

I strongly believe this is revolutionary, brings about a paradigm shift in the way tours are planned, gives more leeway and control to the ever bargain-hungry consumer and gives more freedom to the suppliers.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

For the consumer – if you want to make your tour/plan your travel there’s nothing more customizable, fulfiling and trustworthy as Yoplr.

For the travel supplier – we get a better lead-to-conversion ratio. The traffic that they bring is serious, genuine and trustworthy.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring Romania-based travel company Hotel Peeps.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Zitec.com is a Romanian software development company, focused mainly on providing outsourcing services. Our customers are mostly foreign (from US, Canada, Denmark, UK), but we also have important local customers.

International customers list includes: Mercedes Benz,  J W Marriott, Amadeus International, Proventys, Polar Rose, Broadway.tv, PetManufacturers.com, Fitness Forward etc.

We are mostly dealing with LAMP applications, but we are also very experienced with cloud computing platforms (Amazon) and other languages, platforms and database systems.

Current Zitec team has around 35 full-timers: Zend-certified engineers, Zend framework engineers, ISQTB software testers, experienced project managers and graphic designers.

In 2009 we have invested $250,000 in Media Ventures, a US company that owns VideoPublishing.com. This year we have launched two Zitec-owned projects: Hotel Peeps and Sharoid.com.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Zitec has financed itself mainly by providing software development services for the past seven years.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Hotelpeeps.com is trying to address a common problem: finding best accomodation options when travelling.

We realised that when travelling to a new destination we tend to ask our friends if they’ve been there and if they have any recommendations. So we turned to Facebook and built our application around this social network.

Instead of reading thorough but anonymous (possibly fake) reviews on well known travel websites, people are usually looking for their friends experience because a friend’s recommendation counts more.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Hotel Peeps is currently connected to seven booking engines (GTA, Travco, Hotelbeds, Tourico, Miki, Jacob and Restel) which provide us with the hotel database and booking mechanism required.

First of all, Hotel Peeps allows hotel browsing by location and friends recommendations, but also provides more social-oriented features: travel experience compatibility and travel wish compatibility.

These features will help friends organize their future trips better. Once a hotel is selected, prices and booking are easily available.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

At the moment we only target Facebook users and we have focused on Romanian public (around 1.3 milion Facebook accounts so far) in order to validate our idea and execution.

We managed to get over 5,000 Facebook users after the first month. A recent phase started in May to push our Wishlist feature, accompanied by a new promo campaign.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We are actually looking for investors at the moment and will be participating very soon at some specialised events. We wanted first to build as much as possible, launch, then iterate based on user feedback and the things we learn.

We have a lot of upcoming features so we are looking for a partner to help us grow.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

First of all we need to attract as many users as possible and take it worldwide, not only focus on Romanian users. We are very happy with the results of our Facebook campaigns and we think this can scale to achieve a solid core of power users to get the ball rolling.

The revenue model will be a mixed one:

• We will receive a commision fee for every hotel or airplane booking that originates from Hotelpeeps (affiliate style).
• We will promote specific hotels or travel packages to our users.

Since we do not have ever hotel in the world in our database, we were already being contacted by multiple hotels, interested in our project and willing to pay for regular ads. So going for a pay-for listing for not included hotels could also be an option.

If everything goes well, we could build a website outside Facebook (indeed, you never know what their app strategy will be in the future) and integrate with other social networks.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Very good planning and execution skills, understanding of social media, very good knowledge of tourism industry, solid partners.

Weaknesses:

• Limited experience with worldwide level online startups, especially marketing at this level. We’re totally dependent on Facebook at the moment and their shifty approach towards applications (methods Facebook applications are able to promote themselves have seriously been affected lately).

Opportunities:

• Current social-oriented travel experience applications have proven they can be succesfull, but we believe we can execute faster & better.

Threats:

• Not being able to retain the incoming users, fail to keep them coming back to the application, and therefore not achieving the critical mass needed to take off with an efficient marketing investment.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Some people were skeptical that a booking order will ever originate from Facebook, as (they stated) FB is only seen as a place where “you grow your crops”, a playground, nothing more.

While that is true for lots of people, we look at the FB users that are making best use of the social network to communicate with close friends and share their life experiences with them.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We would consider we are succesful if we manage to get at least 50,000 users from Romania alone & earn enough commisions to cover development and marketing costs of this first stage OR if we will find an investor that believes in our idea and will help us take it to the next level.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring Switzerland-based travel gaming company Wazzamba.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

The founder and CEO is Rocco Pellegrinelli, a succesful serial technology enterpreneur.

He managed to grow his previous start-up (Brainpower) into a leading global financial software player, going public in 2000 at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and then in 2006 being sold to the Bloomberg Group.

The other members of the management team are professionals of the gaming industry.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

The company has been funded with seed capital by the founder and then in two rounds by a group of high profile angels, with a strong background in finance, travel and marketing .

What problem are you trying to solve?

We want to allow thosands of people to be able to travel more. We want to make an impact in the real life of people by making possible for them to win the trip of their dreams.

The way to do this is to compete in a skill-based competition made of casual games and to complete quests in our travel-themed virtual world.

The best players win fully paid travel packages every week. This is part of the new generation of on-line social and casual games where people receive a tangible reward in the real world on top of having fun.

We want to offer more value for the time and the money that on-line game players spend today.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Wazzamba is a unique online social game that combines virtual exploration with skill-based casual games offering users the opportunity to win real world travel prizes.

It is designed to appeal to casual gamers as well as non-gamers who are interested in travel.

Players can create and personalise their avatar, visit virtual cities, meet friends, engage in quests and other challenges, play trivia and earn points for the winning score.

They can also earn Wazzamba miles that can be spent for buying virtual goods and power-ups. Once a week the best scores win one of the many prizes available. The essence is play, win, travel.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

The target demographics of Wazzamba are online casual gamers in the 22 to 55 age range. This is consistent with the population of actual users, who are 70% female.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We ran a number of user group tests to validate and to fine tune the proposition and the user experience.

The concept has been received enthusiastically by our early users. The gameplay continues to evolve as we add content and fine-tune functionality following our users feedback.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Wazzamba offers free membership as well as premium subscription. Premium members have access to more and higher value prizes so fees are part of the model.

The second component is microtransactions via the sale of decorative as well as functional virtual goods.

A third stream of revenues  will be travel focused advertisement, advertgaming and e-commerce.

Players of wazzamba share a strong interest for travelling so our community is very appealing to travel operators.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We have a truly innovative concept of combining games and travels, bringing more value for the time and money that people spend playing social games online.

Weaknesses:

• We are still light in the travel expertise area. We will have to expand the team managing the purchase of travel packages. We have to better communicate the travels options, content and details. We have to leverage more the whole travel theme.

Opportunities:

• To become the brand of reference to consumers about going on holiday for free. The proposition “you travel, we pay” is a disruptive idea with fast and global scalability.

Threats:

• Our users win on the basis of a competition based on skill-games. Changes to regulations of skill games in key countries may limit our ability to offer prizes and therefore to grow. There are no indications of dramatic changes in this field, but this is a risk. Competition from travel operators might be another threat. However we believe that the market is so big that can accommodate more players.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Frankly we never met anyone opposing the idea .We rather met people quite enthusiastic abot “travels meet games”.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

The key metric is growing the active users community to reach break-even. At the same time we will be looking at retention and monetisation metrics.

We have set reasonable goals for the next 12 months, but we also believe that we can substantially exceed them, if we can create strategic alliances with key travel operators, which is one of our goals.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring US and Europe-based Vayant.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Vayant is an industrial distribution platform for real-time flight search and pricing, with the ability to finalize bookings in the availability-delivery system of our clients’ choice. Our technology is cost effective and built on a set of powerful, proprietary algorithms that enable dynamic routing and pricing.

We reduce distribution costs by providing extremely focused, personalized search results that are significantly more likely to be converted into bookings – thus delivering higher ROI through the simultaneous reduction of Look-to-book (LTB) ratios, shortened pathway to booking and, over time, development of greater loyalty among our clients’ customers.

Our highly modular design lends itself to strategic partnerships with industry incumbents and is fully controllable by our clients. We serve airlines and alliances, online travel distributors and marketers and diversified airline technology/infrastructure providers.

• Atanas Christov (CEO) is a graduate of Harvard Business School and his industry-related focus includes over 7 years of passenger pricing and distribution, fleet planning and strategic alliances for leading global airlines for McKinsey Consulting NYC. In his recent career he led AIG’s restructuring and divestiture efforts for the Commercial Aircraft Leasing division (ILFC) in the wake of the 2009 market crash. ILFC represents the world’s largest commercial jet aircraft fleet, serving over half of the world’s commercial airlines.
• Eric Dumas (CCO) has spent a decade managing successful startups in Europe, Japan, and the US, with the bulk of his professional career straddling engineering and software development. He was previously Vice President and Country Manager at Tumbleweed (successful IPO and traded on Nasdaq) and PostPath.
• Boyan “Bobby” Manev (Biz Dev) possesses over ten years of first hand experience in the online travel industry. He has worked closely with travel agencies, consolidators, and airlines throughout the European market including TUI and Alitalia, and in close partnership with both Worldspan and Galileo.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

New Europe Venture Equity LP (NEVEQ).

What problem are you trying to solve?

There is a better way to search for and price itineraries, and Vayant has found it.

Our technology provides results that are more directly relevant to the end consumer. Higher propensity of our client’s customers to book a solution from Vayant’s first set of results demonstrates our technology’s ability to significantly reduce inefficiencies related to delivery of large but substantially unused volumes of data prevailing in the industry today.

Describe the business, core products and services?

We look at data differently.

Vayant Search: We started from scratch, using “tabula rasa” algorithms to arrive at the most optimal solutions for any query, within a multitude of customizable parameters – and all within a single search.

Virtual Alliances: Modified split search rules within Vayant searches allows clients to consistently identify opportunities that are otherwise lost within traditional airline travel searches. This tool generates untapped itineraries within an expanded virtual network, allowing our clients to better serve their markets, and reach new ones.

Intelligent Cache: Vayant’s intelligent cache acts as the primary touch point for search queries and ensures that only focused queries are submitted to the client’s mainframe for a substantial reduction of IT/host ops costs.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We will be launching with a well known meta-search engine.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Absolutely, with a well known meta-search engine and mid-size European airline at the head of the pack.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We make money when our clients make money.

We’ve purposefully designed a revenue model that demonstrates our willingness to collaborate by aligning ourselves with our clients’ growth. Pricing is developed individually for each client and relies on licensing revenues generally based on number of revenue transactions enabled for our clients.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Being the right technology for today’s industry – highly customizable design, seamless integration capabilities, complete source data, split ticketing, extremely focused search results

Weaknesses:

• We’re newcomers to the scene, but we came to the party at the right time.

Opportunities:

• Any player looking for a smarter way to search and price.

Threats:

• Moving up the vision scale faster than we move across the ability scale.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

There’s a lot of public opinion and published thoughts out there that say this space is just too complex and too convoluted to navigate. These are opinions were read and hear about every day, so in a way you can say there is a general mindset out there that is telling us we’re not going to make it in this industry.

We decided to listen to a greater message. Look at companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Zappos, Virgin – these are companies that totally went in the face of that kind of thinking. We want to be part of the fundamental changes we see all around us.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Anyone can get customers. In 12 months we want a select group of extremely satisfied clients who go on to become advocates of Vayant technology.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring Australia and Europe-based TourRadar.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Shawn and Travis Pittman (brothers) co-founded the online travel site Bugbitten.com back in 2003. TourRadar was spun-out of Bugbitten in June 2010.

• Shawn, 38, is based in Sydney, Australia. His background is in finance industry, who was employed as an Investment Analyst from 2001 to 2006 for LMS Capital, a boutique Venture Capital company (circa £200m) based in London with investments in the UK, Europe and USA. His role saw him travel frequently to New York, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Moscow and Edinburgh to meet with the Funds to discuss and analyse their portfolio of investments.
• Travis, 31, is based in Europe. He is an engineer with a varied background of public and private sector experience in both Australia and Europe.  Travis’s last position in London was as the Project Controls Manager for Atkins Rail who was responsible for the Comms installation of the £30b London Underground Station Refurbishment programme.

Since 2004 the team behind Bugbitten has been researching and developing the tour search technology which now is at the heart of TourRadar.com.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Both bugbitten and TourRadar have been bootstrapped by the Founders.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Our goal is to make every tour in the world discoverable by bringing the key players in the Tour Industry closer together. The only way that can be done is by creating a single platform that provides integrated solutions for each segment, which respects their individual business models.

We’ve seen in past few years websites come and go who have focused on developing solutions for the tour industry that always revolve around the booking engine/commission model.

Bookings are obviously the end result operators want… however it’s an old model which isn’t suitable to creating an online solution that benefits ALL the key players in the tour industry (plus many operators have invested heavily in their own booking technologies and don’t like being dictated to by these sites).

Describe the business, core products and services?

TourRadar provides individual solutions for the four key players in the tour industry.

• Tour Operators can add their individual tour listings into one platform (TourRadar.com) and then choose (via a click of a button with our Self-Service model) which Publishers in our advertising network they would like to ‘turn-on’ their tours with and pay for direct leads to their website on a simple Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis.
• Publishers can add a free ‘Tour Search’ plugin to their website as an additional feature for their site visitors and generate ancillary revenue on a PPC basis from this (as our experience has shown that CPA-based Affiliate programs are worth very little to Publishers).
• Travel Agents can create a private login to TourRadar where they are able to easily search for tours suiting their customer’s criteria (instead of aimlessly flicking through brochures or just getting high level results from the major search engines, without being able to filter by Price, Trip Length, etc).  Agents even have the ability to select their preferred suppliers and search only from their tours if they want to.
• DMOs (Destination Marketing Organisations), like Publishers can add a free ‘Tour Search’ plugin to their website.  We do not charge DMOs or their members (who’s tours that are included in the DMO’s plugin) for any clicks generated from the plugin.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Tour Operators and Publishers. The more Tour Operators who add their tours to the TourRadar platform, the more choice a visitor to Publisher’s websites will have when looking for a tour to their next travel destination. The more Publishers we get on board, the more choice the operators will have on the audiences they can reach to market their tours around the world.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes. We have been working with some of the world’s best and largest operators (Contiki, Intrepid, Topdeck, etc) for years as we developed our tour search technology (listening to feedback along the way).

We’ve also partnered with some of the best traditional Print Publishers (TNT Magazine, Student Traveler Magazine) who have given us invaluable incite into the needs/wants of Publishers who operate both offline and online.

Other publishers we’ve been working with include large-scale travel communities like tripwolf.com and Tourism Organisations like TTNQ in Australia. All this experience and feedback has been used to create TourRadar.

Like everything – we know our solution is not yet the perfect solution for everyone… however by listening to the feedback from all the players who use our technology, we’re pretty confident we’ll get there soon enough!

We are now at the point where we are starting to look for investors, as we are no longer a technology start-up seeking seed capital to build the platform; we are now looking to raise capital to recruit a sales team, marketing/PR team and expand our development team.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

TourRadar employs a PPC model for charging/paying operators/publishers. For agents, after a free 30 day trial, they pay on a Software-as-a-Service monthly subscription basis costing them less than a cup of coffee per week per user account.

TourRadar is a complete self-service model and is hosted in the cloud, so our running/operational costs are much lower in comparison to others.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We have long-standing, paying operators who are seeing success from our platform.  We have publishers who are generating ancillary revenue from their website traffic.

Weaknesses:

• Not having the funding to expand at the rate we need to, to stay ahead of our competitors.

Opportunities:

• With the aggregation of nearly all travel products (flights, hotels, car hire) – Tours still remain one of the only sectors where there still is no clear market leader. TourRadar has a fantastic opportunity to be this market leader.

Threats:

• Google’s foray into the online travel sector (recent acquisitions of ITA Software and Ruba) is still an unknown factor, as to what they are actually planning to do with these technologies.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Like every startup – we’ve had our fair share of criticism and people thinking we were crazy to be doing what we’re doing.

Because we started out developing Bugbitten in 2003 which was a community where travellers could share their blogs, photos in an online travel journal, it has been quite difficult to get to where we are today – launching what has been our ultimate goal all along, a platform that brings together all players of the tour Industry, where it’s a win-win for everyone.

We knew we had developed the technology to serve an entire industry, however Bugbitten was always viewed as a publisher site aimed only at the 18-35 year old market, hence the need to create TourRadar.

The feedback from friends, operators and publishers since the launch of TourRadar has certainly validated our reasons for going to the effort of developing an entire new brand and platform.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

• For tour operators to recognise TourRadar as one of the must-have channels in their online marketing strategy.
• For publishers of websites (both small and large) to add our free plugin to their site to start generating more ancillary revenue from their visitors.
• For travel agents to think “How did I ever find a suitable tour for my customers before TourRadar?”
• For DMOs to install our free plugin to help promote their member’s tours without the hassle of building (expensive) stand-alone solutions.

TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.