While analysts and tech-heads pored over the finer details of the S1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, shedding light on some of the company’s financials for the first time, TripAdvisor will no doubt be overjoyed at the inclusion of the Trip Friends system it integrated in June 2010.

Facebook is looking raise around $5 billion from the IPO in the US.

The S1 revealed Facebook’s profit in 2011 was a staggering $1 billion, gleaned through revenues of $3.71 billion, while founder mark Zuckerberg still owns around 30% of the business.

Facebook currently has 845 million users worldwide, with more than half using the network every single day.

What surprised some was the letter from Zuckerberg at the head of the filing, in which he pretty much warned investors that Facebook wants to stick to its so-called ethos:

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

“We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do.”

He continues:

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others.

“We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.”

In terms of the integration used by TripAdvisor, basically a enhanced version of Facebook Connect, Facebook says the service illustrates how third party sites can “design more deeply integrated social experiences built around users and their friends”.

“By tapping into our rich social data, TripAdvisor connects users to their friends and shares relevant content about where their friends have traveled and where they would like to visit in the future.

“While on the TripAdvisor website, friends can discuss their travel plans and recommendations and build out personal profiles of places they have been.”

While initially it did seem to some sceptics to be just another fancy feature that people wouldn’t use, over time it appears to have started having quite a significant impact.

A TripAdvisor official says by December 2011, over 57 million people had “personalised their trip planning experience” on the site using Trip Friends.

Furthermore, these people are twice as more likely to contribute content to TripAdvisor than its other users.

No wonder Facebook likes talking up the Trip Friends integration in probably the most important documents the company has ever produced.

NB: Facebook Like image via Shutterstock.

The Australia-based site launched in December 2010 [TLabs Showcase - TraceMyTrip] with a promise of a platform where users can book trips, store photos, video and journals, and create maps.

Within its first four months, founder Ryan Adams was claiming 1.5 million people had registered to use the service after the company had secured a “small private investment” to fund the startup alongside his own personal capital.

At first glance, TraceMyTrip had a business model – using what it called a geo-located pay-per-click ad platform as well as a plan to launch a subscription fee for some services in the future.

Within its first year Adams was hoping the site would reach six million active users around the globe.

However, something appears to have gone wrong as the site is currently inactive and redirects to an affiliate link-laden holding page – with the URL apparently no longer registered and now available to buy.

Adams hasn’t tweeted since June 2011 and the official TraceMyTrip Twitter account last posted a message the month before to announce its up-time had returned.

The site was taken down shortly after the TLabs Showcase article in April last year when a number of people questioned the veracity of the claim to have 1.5 million users register for the service.

Adams claimed at the time that the site had been the victim of a hacking attempt.

It is difficult to determine when the site was eventually pulled down completely and when the URL was handed back to a domain registration service.

Strangely, none of the 1.5 million registered users took to the social media airwaves to lodge their dismay at the end of the service.

NB: All reasonable effort was made to contact Adams to discover more about the fate of TraceMyTrip, but no response was forthcoming.

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

Travelomy is a South Asia-focused travel portal that was launched in June 2011. The parent company behind Travelomy is Ciafo, which also has two other consumer web products.

The key team behind Travelomy consists of TWO people – Gurjit Sidhu and Amarpreet Kalkat, who are also co-founders of parent company Ciafo.

• Gurjit Sidhu handles engineering for Travelomy. He is a business grad who is a developer at heart. Sidhu has spent almost ten years working at companies like Cap Gemini, Trilogy or doing multiple entrepreneurial activities. He has coded Travelomy almost single-handedly. Sidhu holds an MBA from the prestigious IIM Calcutta and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from Thapar University, Patiala, India.
• Amarpreet Kalkat handles the product and business for Travelomy. Kalkat has spent almost ten years building internet products at companies like HP, Trilogy and Nokia before co-founding Ciafo. While he still dabbles in coding a bit, his core strength is in architecting and designing products that solve people’s problems in a simple and smart way. Kalkat holds an MBA from the prestigious IIM Kozhikode and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from Punjabi University, Patiala, India.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Travelomy is currently bootstrapped by the co-founders and has not raised any funding yet.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Existing travel experience online is fragmented. There are travel guides that are primarily content plays, booking sites that are primarily pricing plays and half-successful social efforts in between to bridge the gap and build a wholesome experience.

Travelomy wants to build an online home for travellers leveraging social engagement and collaboration, which brings all of the thing mentioned above together in a sublime way.

While Travelomy is initially starting with South Asia, the ultimate aim is to build a global travel portal.

Describe the business, core products and services?

While Travelomy ultimately aims to be a comprehensive travel portal providing services that help in planning to booking to undertaking the trip, it is currently focused on the first phase, trying to build’s the world’s best travel guide.

Travelomy focuses on three key aspects – rich content, geo-location and social media – and uses them effectively to build a useful information source for a traveller.

Travelomy also differentiates itself in the way it collects and presents information. Almost all of the content on Travelomy is crowdsourced and can be updated by any user who is signed-in. There are no advertisements anywhere on the website, making it one of neatest user interfaces in some time now.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

An active traveller instead of a passive tourist is Travelomy’s core customer. We define a “active traveller” as somebody who like to go and do things rather than purely sight-see around as a tourist.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes. Travelomy now has more than 20,000 unique visitors a month and we have been getting increasingly better feedback with every new feature and iteration.

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

Travel related ecommerce is going to be the core of the revenue model. Working with its partners, Travelomy aims to provide all kinds of travel related bookings – hotels, flights, packages, deals etc.

As building engagement with the travellers is the biggest single focus on Travelomy, we hope to leverage that as a competetive advantage for gaining a bigger share of the pie.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Technology is Travelomy’s biggest strength and we plan to leverage that effectively across all the product features. An example is the recently introduced “real-time curated travel feeds” based on Twitter which make Travelomy the first-ever travel guide globally to introduce a cool and dynamic element to usually static destination information. See the Kathmandu page on Travelomy to see how this feature really adds value to content.

Weaknesses:

• Operations is an area of weakness. As any travel product at some point would involve a significant operational aspect, it is a weakness we need to mitigate.
• While our goals are hugely ambitious, it also means that we end up pitting ourselves against many broad and niche players. As a startup, we might end up having one too many competitors.

Opportunities:

• The lack of a brand in the travel domain is the biggest opportunity. Almost all major players are either content or pricing plays. Lonely Planet is perhaps the closest travel has to a global brand, but it is almost entirely associated with the guidance phase of travel. There is an opportunity to build for travel what Facebook is to social, and that is what where we intend to take Travelomy.
• Active travellers are a growing tribe in travel. And one that traditional travel heavywieghts have ignored in favor of tourists where the volumes lie. While it is easy to find information or make bookings for a sign-seeing trip to Taj Mahal, it is not exactly easy to find information on motorcycling routes in Bhutan or make arrangements to travel by motorcycle. We are soon launching an Activity module built on top of Google Maps that would increase the quality of information related to things like trekking, hiking, motorcycling, biking etc. by a big margin.
• There is no truly platform company in travel. We intend to make Travelomy one.

Threats:

• Technology, which is our strength is not impossible to replicate. Our technology based advantages therefore might not sustain for very long, we would therefore need to pad them up with something else as well
• There are big players eyeing a pie of huge online travel vertical. Their marketing muscle gives them an enormous advantage in taking out smaller startups, how so much innovating. Travelomy would need to beat such players with speed, both of innovation and execution.

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

Many of our peers advised that travel is a commoditized market with strong incumbent benefits.

We believe in innovation’s ability to challenge the strength of incumbency, so we chose to ignore thir advice and validate our product at a minimal cost.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

One million monthly unique visitors, with more than 30% direct traffic and a return rate of 30% is our (somewhat) stretch target at this point.

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

Previously available via its mobile apps, the launch of this feature as a section on the Foursquare website shows the company is making a serious push into local search on the web.

But more than that, the company may have finally nailed the “holy grail” many travel planning startups have been yearning for: utilizing your friends’ behaviors and preferences to recommend things for you to do.

How it works

Let’s take a brief look at how the feature works. Upon loading, you’re presented with a simple dialog asking what you’re looking for:

Note the options in the bottom right. In addition to being able to simply explore new places you haven’t been to yet, you’re also able to easily search for places your friends have been to.

Here’s a quick example of a search for coffee shops in London:

You’re quickly shown a map with places your friends have visited, how often they’ve been there, and what they’ve had to say about them. Of course, this feature exists on countless other travel planning sites.

But Foursquare has a secret weapon that no other travel startup can come even close to matching: Over 1.5 billion checkins worldwide, a truly massive amount of data on past consumer behavior. Each of these checkins has tracked:

• Where the user is
• The time of day the user checked in
• Whether they’re with a friend
• Any comments the user has left via Foursquare’s “Tips” feature
• Any photos the user chose to attach

Utilizing big data technology, Foursquare has been able to analyze this data on an aggregate level and extract value from it by determining a plethora of useful patterns such as:

• What places my friends like going to at specific times of the day, eg: “Your friends prefer these lunch spots”.
• Where my friends like to stay, eg: “Your friends stay at these hotels when visiting New York”.
• What my friends like to do, eg: “Your friends love doing the Eiffel Tower tour when in Paris”.

What’s different about Foursquare’s effort is that unlike most travel planning sites, Foursquare hasn’t had to ask users to recommend things post-facto or bribe them into having to manually enter this data — this data was shared in real-time, giving it authenticity and lacking the sort of bias towards popularity frequently seen on other sites.

But Foursquare hasn’t stopped at just allowing you to search for places: Explore also now searches the massive amount of data contained in Tips and Reviews left by users, enabling a user to free text search for places and recommendations such as “chic boutique hotel” and really dig into what users think about particular places.

The power of this is perhaps best demonstrated when combined with the ability to follow brands on Foursquare.

Imagine you follow The Travel Channel on Foursquare – now, when searching Explore for places to eat, you might find places with recommendations left by popular Travel Channel personalities such as Anthony Bourdain.

Enabling users to easily find things they’ve previously expressed interest in is another important feature of Explore.

Utilizing the “Save for later” feature, a user can easily bookmark spots in a city they wish to visit in the future.

When visiting that city, Explore would allow the user to easily find spots they’ve bookmarked. This is in addition to Foursquare’s Radar feature, which can automatically alert you when you’re near a place you’ve saved.

Why planning startups should worry

It’s easy to dismiss Foursquare’s efforts as yet another attempt at a problem countless other startups have failed at.

But Foursquare has what many travel startups don’t, including over 15 million registered users, approximately half a billion checkins in the last six months alone, and buy-in from some of the world’s largest brands including a recent deal with American Express. In a word, traction.

But beyond traction, Foursquare’s massive data trove will be hard for most startups to catch up with.

By demonstrating true value to users (such as the recent American Express Small Biz Saturday which saw users who linked their card receive a $25 statement credit), the company will likely continue to accelerate its adoption and usage rates.

This will give it an even bigger trove of data with which to work with and launch new features.

And finally, Foursquare has one of the best startup teams out there. Its discipline in growing the company from a simple location-based game to where they are today shows incredible depth and vision.

But…

Foursquare hasn’t won yet. There are of course other companies with even more data making efforts in the local space, including the recent launch of Google’s Schemer.

Facebook can’t be ignored in this space either, tracking the location of its users everytime their mobile apps is launched. The fact that only 5% of US adults use location-based apps can’t be ignored either.

Will 2012 be the year that this changes? We’ll see.

One thing is for sure: By moving Foursquare Explore to the web, Foursquare has a serious contender in the battle for the travel planning crown.

It’ll be interesting to see how other startups respond.

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

GlobeTrotr is a members-only social travel-planning site. It’s a community for travel enthusiasts to meet people, explore new places, and share new adventures.

Users’ travels, comments, reviews, points of interst are curated and serve as timelines. Members join trips that others are planning, plan trips, and find others to join their trips and generally connect over travel via their social graph.

GlobeTrotr shows the travel sector how consumers now influence brands. We create the community where users can build their brands, create voices and find themselves sought after by the brands they once sought.

• Jonathan Palan: Deep experience in web-based financial start-ups. Jon came up with the idea for GlobeTrotr when he tried and failed to connect with like-minded travellers going to the same destination.
• Sam Feuer: Founder of MindSmack Team, awarded Best Web Design Company by TopSEOs.com. MindSmack is ranked No. 6 in Inc. magazine’s media category of “500 Entrepreneurial Superstars.”
• Jason Jones: Founder of HighStep Capital, an investor in web-based companies, and previously co-founder of four venture-backed, web-based start-ups.
• Greg Arrese: Hedge fund manager at Scoggin Capital Management and angel investor (Knewton, Buuteeq, Energysavvy, Shopkeep). Greg follows the media and telecom industries and graduated from Harvard Business School.
• T Trent Gegax: President of The Gramercy Fund, a seed-stage investment firm (Knewton, Buuteeq, Energysavvy, Shopkeep). He’s a former correspondent for Newsweek magazine, where he covered politics, the military, and the advent of the Web in the mid-1990s.
• Tony Coretto: Founder and CEO of PNT Marketing, a provider of marketing support services to financial services firms. Tony is a member of the World Entrepreneurs Forum and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We are a self-funded project

What problem are you trying to solve?

Travel is naturally a very engaging subject. People love to share experiences, photos, videos, and reviews as well as meet new people to explore new places and adventures.

Yet today’s social media tools—Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin—are too broad and too general to make it easy to share travel ideas with friends that you trust and people you’d like to meet.

The quantity-versus-quality quandary is driven by a dearth of niche sites that focus on specific verticals.

Few if any web-based communities facilitate engagement in the physical world or allow users to monetize their online presence.

Given that the consumer is now the main influencer, we are giving consumers a platform to extract the true value of social media.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Two things cause GlobeTrotr to stand out in the travel space:

It allows users to connect in the real world while sharing common interests and travel and adventure tastes
It connects user-mavens with brands that sponsor users in form of cash, products, and other perks.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Tech-savvy travel bloggers, adventure capitalists, and anyone looking to explore new places and share new adventures.

The concept is demographic and geographic agnostic.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

First, we self-funded and started building. Then we received positive feedback from jetsetters, yoga masters, adrenaline junkies, beach bums, and gypsies.

We have taken no outside money.

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

We have a highly targeted audience that is providing very specific granular data on their travel plans and bucket lists in a very competitive large space.

Granular Data + Competitive Market = Good Advertising Platform.

We will also grow into transaction-based revenues as we integrate with travel sights and search engines so users can live within the application or site.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• A dynamic, diverse team collaborates well and our design and development team consists of some of the most talented people in the industry.

Weaknesses:

• A rush of too many ideas flooding our core concept.

Opportunities:

• To make travel planning social, fun, and easy which will ultimately facilitate the transfer of power from brands to consumers.

Threats:

• The ever-increasing pace of innovation that occurs on a daily basis.

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

Lots of people whose opinions we respect told us the idea wouldn’t work. Most people say it’s a saturated market, and what do we know about mobile?

Like one of our fathers said, no matter how crowded an area is there is always room for another good one.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

It’s hard to say on a quantitative scale what success looks like.

But we think success is a user-driven product that scales at virtually no cost because once they try us people cannot imagine planning trips any other way and GlobeTrotr spreads by word of mouth—and share of post.

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

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

TravelaBunch inspires people for great travel experiences with their friends and offers a simple group booking tool.

The company was founded in November 2011 by three young entrepreneurs who all love to travel and enjoy great travel experiences.

• Mariano Kostelec has a background in fast-growing startups having worked on the international expansion of Groupon and Wimdu in Asia.
• Ben Grech recently left the private equity fund HIG Capital to focus on his passion for travel
• Miguel Santo Amaro recently completed a Masters in Global Entrepreneurship at Babson College, splitting his time between France, China and the USA.
• Leo Lara has over ten years experience in scaling and developing web applications and has worked at ARM and other startups in the past.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Bootstrapped and self-funded at the moment.

What problem are you trying to solve?

TravelaBunch solves two major problems. Most people love to travel and share great experiences with their friends.

However, they often lack ideas for great holiday experiences or think it’s too expensive or too complicated to organize something more unique and exciting.

Moreover, one person usually has to take full responsibility of collecting all the money and making the booking, complicating things even further.

Describe the business, core products and services?

TravelaBunch sources and packages amazing travel experiences for friends travelling together, while offering great value for money.

Our innovative group booking functionality makes it simple to book and share the cost with everyone in the group.

We make finding a holiday an entertaining and enjoyable experience, giving people inspiration with specific travel experiences for them to book.

We also use the fact that people travel together to minimize price per head (e.g. using villas and chalets, rather than hotels), and we offer a simple booking tool allowing them to split the price among everyone in the group.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

TravelaBunch targets young people, 18-34, who are adventurous and travel more than once a year.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We have received very positive feedback from potential customers and suppliers before launching, validating our proposition.

We’re currently working on a prototype.

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

We source and package travel experiences and we take a small commission on each experience we sell.

We make an effort to prepare unique packages that people would have not imagined they could get.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We have a solid value proposition and the ability to develop the business
• Partnerships with selected suppliers

Weaknesses:

• After we prove the demand for our service other people might try to copy our business and offer the same proposition

Opportunities:

• More and more people are looking for inspiration to find more exciting holidays, creating a large demand for our offering

Threats:

• Large companies actively competing for our customers
• Other online travel providers entering our niche of travel experiences for groups

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

The feedback we have received so far has been extremely positive.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

• Be recognized as a leading travel experiences provider.
• Established strong partnerships with our suppliers.
• Provided excellent service to our customers.

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

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

Tripbirds is a travel startup in Stockholm, Sweden. We currently have seven people on the team.

My name is Ted Valentin, and I’m one of three co-founders. Prior to Tripbirds I built a network of user generated review sites in Sweden where visitors can rate restaurants, hotels, cafés and more.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

I cannot comment at the moment.

What problem are you trying to solve?

The main problem is it’s hard to trust existing reviews sites, like Tripadvisor. Old-school review sites attract a lot of fake reviews, and there are even companies helping venue owners with “review optimization” on Tripadvisor.

For users, it’s hard to know which reviews you can trust. The solution is turning to your friends for trip related advice, just like people do in the offline world.

Describe the business, core products and services?

You use Tripbirds to get travel recommendations from friends. If you’re going to Barcelona, for example, you can see which of your friends have been there, which friends live there, and much more.

We collect data about your friends from Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla and Instagram. The service hasn’t launched yet, but you can sign up for the private beta. When you do, we give you some quite advanced statistics about your friends trips.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Since Tripbirds is built on top of checkins from other services, it helps if you understand the concept of checkins. If you a lot of friends that travel, that’s another big bonus.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We’re doing user testing as we go along. It’s obviously a continous process.

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

The business is built on some straightforward and proven revenue models in the travel space, where we have experience from previous sites.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We have a great, very technical, team.

Weaknesses:

• We’re quite reliant on Facebook, and people’s trust in Facebook.

Opportunities:

• Travel is one of the biggest markets on the internet. I also think the timing for this is quite right.

Threats:

• As you all know there are many new entrants in the social travel space. The biggest threat is probably some awesome startup that hasn’t launched yet.

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

We have pitched to some people who are not active on Facebook, and they don’t always get it.

One big challenge for us is creating a service that mostly anybody can use, not only tech-savvy people with lots of traveling friends.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We’re aiming for a million users. There are social sites and apps have have reached a million users in a very short time in many different areas; jobs, deals, gifts, games, photos etc.

By piggybacking on existing social sites like Facebook, growth can happen quickly. But it still hasn’t happened in travel. It will, though.

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

The likes of Blumberg Capital and Dave McClure of 500 Startups are part of a group also that also includes Lewis Cheng, Mac Harman, Priyavrat Bhartia, Sandeep Bapna, Aldo Monteforte and Alvaro Gutierrez that have now invested in the company.

The trip planning company, now two years old, says it plans to use the investment round to “expand our global footprint of guides and build out the product”.

MyGola, the brainchild of ex-Googler Anshuman Bapna, is different from many of the trip planning sites hitting the web over the past 18 months or so, being a travel planning service that connects human guides with users, who then do all the online research for a trip.

The Mygola twist is that the answers come not from the so-called crowd or a user generated content-based exchange of ideas with other contributors but from paid staff of guides who research the question and provide and answer.

The first few answers are free, after that there are annual and trip-based pricing plans.

Bapna says the company has built a technology platform that “aggregates the entire travel web and auto-categorizes it – deals, events, hotels, sublets, even tips from locals on Foursquare and your friends who’ve recently been there”.

Other investments from Blumberg include Carwoo and Appboy, while McClure can name SlideShare and Bit.ly on the roster at 500 Startups.

The travel planning app, which was unveiled in beta in March, now includes a Trip Guide function enabling users to compile and save a ‘to do’ list which can be shared on Facebook.

Further enhancements include the ability to add notes or recommendations to a specific location on an interactive map as well as destination content from Frommers, reviews from other travellers via TripAdvisor and local tips and insight via Yelp.

The Trip Companion app also offers hotel recommendations within the chosen location, exchange rates and a five-day weather forecast.

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

We are a team of three backpackers who met during a trip and decided to create a sharing service that would get our fellow backpackers out of the overcrowded “Lonely Planet Path”! Here’s who we are exactly :

• Antoine Heber-Suffrin, co-founder and CEO – discovered backpacking at age 18 during a 1 month Inter-Rail trip around Europe. He travelled in 21 countries to date and built strong relationships with backpackers he met on the road. He has a Masters’ degree in management and has worked on community websites in the entertainment industry.
• Kevin Creusy, co-founder and COO, is the most recent backpacker of the team. Kevin fell in love with backpacking three years ago, and has since backpacked 5 countries. He has a Masters degree in finance and is also front-end developer at Backpackmojo.
• Pierre Margueritte, co-founder and CTO, is a passionate traveller and photographer who enjoys revealing breathtaking sceneries using his cameras. He holds a Masters’degree in computer science and is the technical mind behind Backpackmojo.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

The company has been entirely funded through founder’s personal funds and family and fiends. We will soon begin a new round of financing to get our service better and available to more users.

What problem are you trying to solve?

The travel process, for backpackers and other tourists alike, can be divided into three main steps:

• the pre-travel inspiration process (where can I go? what can I do for my time and budget?)
• the travel itself (things I did, venues I attended, adventures I lived, people I met)
• the post-travel sharing process (friends want to see pictures and know what I’ve done, some want advice for an upcoming similar trip).

Two of these steps take place online: inspiration and sharing. They are annoying and time consuming because the current offer is not perfect: inspiration online, even with popular social networks such as TripAdvisor, is only efficient if you actually KNOW what you want to do (reviews of specific things like Hotels), but are not efficient if you want inspiration for an itinerary for instance.

For example, “I want to go to Peru for 30 days”, is the only information you should give a website to get inspiration on a 30 days trip to Peru.

The sharing process is also often limited to a photo album on Facebook, a letter to Lonely Planet to tell them what is out of date, and lots of emails from friends, who want to do a similar trip, in your inbox.

Blogs aren’t the solution because they’re too long, not well organized, and hard to find (someone on the web probably has a blog of your dream trip, but you’ll spend hours searching for it). There is a gold mine of expert travel experience that is lost because not properly addressed by the web.

Backpackmojo is an online platform that aims to solve these problems by being a pre-travel inspiration tool AND a post-travel sharing tool with a single innovative product: personal travel guides.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Backpackmojo is essentially a social platform where you can easily create, share and print professional-looking personal travel guides. The user simply enters his itinerary, and we generate the guide structure where each stop is a different chapter. The user can fill this structure with personal photos, reviews, tips and advices. Each guide can be downloaded as a PDF.

The guides are all available for free on the website and our search system by destination and trip length make them easy to find. The content of each guide is also aggregated in country/city/hotspot pages so that you can access all the information on a particular location on a single page.

Backpackmojo has partnerships with hostel booking platforms so that backpackers can spot popular hostel and book them directly on our site. You won’t find five-star hotels here, we’re dedicated to Budget travellers.

We also have a printo-o-demand service that gives people the opportunity to print their Guide in a professional-looking book and receive it at home. For our beta, each guide completed on Backpackmojo will be printed and sent to its author for free!

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We are dedicated to the Backpacker community, a majority of which is aged 18-29 but being a backpacker is more a state of mind than an age question. This community is already huge, truly international and growing every year.

Youth travel is a phenomenon and around 170 million tourists each year are young travellers that are eager to share good tips with each other in order to avoid overcrowded tourist traps. We want to transfer this sharing dynamics online by disrupting a tool these travellers know well: the travel guide.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

As backpackers ourselves, a personal travel guide is something we’ve been dreaming of for years. Who doesn’t want to become a travel writer and see its name on a travel guide?

The backpackers we’ve asked were very interested by the two aspects of a personal travel guide: a nice Souvenir of your trip that you can keep on your bookshelf and the possibility to browse the different itineraries and tips of the community on the website. The idea seems to be appealing to our targeted users.

A week only after the launch we have amazing feedback from our new users. We are really proud of that.

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

The business model is straightforward: we generate revenue from travel-related advertising, affiliation (booking hostels and flights from our partners) and print-on-demand (you can order the book version of the guide you create, sell it to friends and earn a commission on each sale).

We would also like to create a true collaborative guide book on each country, featuring itineraries, tips and reviews from popular members in the community: a guide book more relevant to Backpackers and always up to date.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strength:

• A unique product on the web, the first Social Network dedicated to Backpackers where you can create and print a professional-looking travel guide for your trips and feel like a professional travel writer.

Weaknesses:

• Completing a quality Guide is a long process for which it is difficult to maintain people fully committed.

Opportunities:

• The lack of qualified information for millions of Backpackers outside of Professional Guide books and aging forums. Most of the unique travel experiences are lost even if travellers would benefit from the tips on a whole trip.

Threats:

• The power of huge travel blog platforms will make it harder for us to educate people to this new way of sharing.

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

Every non-backpacker traveller who questions why people would possibly want to spend a few hours completing a nice travel guide for others.

While we know that backpackers share easily, we listened to these critics and turned our guides into personal souvenir album for you and your close friends that benefits the entire backpacking community.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

The success metric 12 months from now would be seeing a complete stranger holding a Backpackmojo Guide book in a foreign country!

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

The Inspiration tool groups photos into a number of categories including cultured, party animal and natural, enabling users to build up a picture of a destination according to interests and mood.

IWannaGoThere was started just under three years ago bringing destination tips from independent travellers to a wider community in an organised way.

A year ago the company extended its service to offer boutique hotels via Splendia and created a web shop offering PDF and mobile guides and other merchandise.

The Inspiration service is available via the website or as a web app.

So what happened in the intervening 12 months?

Are you making money yet?

No – though we didn’t intend to at this stage. Our strategy has always focused on building strong, robust traffic numbers before looking at any revenue generation models.

However, we’re committed to keeping the site free-to-use and to ensuring the quality of the content and won’t compromise on these aspects.

What has been the biggest problem – building the product/service or marketing it to consumers/travel industry?

Probably the former – it’s been a case of focusing on intelligent development, i.e. only pursuing development areas that bring genuine benefit without breaking the bank.

At every step we’ve been careful to analyse the potential impact of any new development, undertake a cost vs benefits analysis and then go for only those projects that make real sense. Sadly, this has meant that, on occasion, some of our more wacky ideas have had to take a back seat!

Biggest assumption in the business plan that was wrong?

Tough one to answer as we weren’t really locked in to a tight plan. However, I’d probably say the one thing that’s really surprised us has been the preference for planned itineraries over bespoke ones.

Our system lets people build a free itinerary to print and take with them on their trips – but we noticed that people weren’t using it as much as we thought. Once we started creating some recommended itineraries for particular cities and regions, we found a much greater uptake and far more downloads.

This may show that people are looking for recommendations over bespoke itineraries or it could just show we haven’t made it simple enough yet. Either way we’ll be doing more of the former and working on the latter over the next few months!

Is your current customer base as predicted?

Very much so, and perhaps a few additions we didn’t expect – we believed a combination of history lovers and general holidaymakers would use the site, the former heavily and the latter dipping in and out.

For the most part that’s what we’ve seen. However, we’ve also seen a huge uptake among an education-based audience, with teachers and students alike using Historvius to explore history in the classroom. We’ve had some lovely feedback from educators and that’s been an unexpected bonus.

Did you achieve your 12 month goals? If not, why not?

Close but no cigar. We wanted to double the size of our database and are almost there. If we’d have written this in a month or two I’d probably have said yes – as it is we’re still pretty happy with progress on this front. In terms of audience and traffic, we’ve far exceeded expectations, which has been fantastic.

Has the problem you were trying to solve changed?

No, though I’d like to think we’ve helped to solve it. We wanted to help people discover both the well-known historic landmarks and the more obscure sites that are brilliant to visit.

We firmly believe that our search functionality – letting people search by place, time, period of history or historic figure – has really helped our users find a much broader range of great sites than are often found in travel guides or standard top ten lists.

And I’d like to think we’ve made the whole discovery process easier. What may have taken hours trawling online before takes two minutes on Historvius now. It’s fair to say we’re not there yet, there’s still more to cover and new challenges in how we serve up that data, but I think we’ve made a fair start.

Which startup that has launched in the past 12 months did you think “Ah, wish we had done that!”?

Two startups caught my eye – not totally dissimilar to each other – they are Wanderfly and Tripomatic. Both have great designs and a good user experience. In fact, we’ve even started to partner with Wanderfly in a small way as one of their new curators – hopefully it’s a partnership that will continue to grow.

If you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?

Be careful of being overly-obsessive! Though we have a small editorial team managing the content I find I get personally attached to content projects and probably spend time on sites when I should be doing other things!

But we get some really interesting stuff uploaded and, as a history nut, I spend ages exploring and researching them myself.

For example, even though I’ve been to Carthage a couple of times, it seems I still missed loads of stuff and only realised it when we had some uploads through – I think I must have spent about two days solid turning them into a fully mapped-out guide, I barely came up for breath! In my mind though, it was totally worth it!

NB: Tnooz launched TLab Showcase in March 2010, a dedicated channel to give startups in the travel, tourism and hospitality sector an opportunity to explain their vision, company background and strategy to a wider audience.

As well as publishing an elevator pitch-type questionnaire for each business, Tnooz committed to following up with each startup after 12 months or so to see how well (or not) each performed.

NB2: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

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

Twigmore is a travel networking tool on Facebook that connects travelers and locals through friends. The company was founded by Stephen Smyth and Peter Baer.

• Stephen has a product and engineering background and was general manager of Reuters.com.
• Peter has had senior sales and marketing roles at Warner Brothers, CBS and a mobile startup.

We are both travel enthusiasts who wanted to solve one of our own problems: how to find trusted locals wherever you go. We were already friends and we both had some startup experience before we teamed up on Twigmore.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We bootstrapped the business for the first seven months and then received $125,000 in funding from angel investors. Last month we closed another $150,000 in follow-on funding from largely the same group of investors.

What problem are you trying to solve?

It’s hard for travellers to find trusted locals who can answer questions, show them around or just help when things come up. We kept seeing Facebook posts such as “Heading to Seattle this weekend. Does anyone know anybody there?”, so we set out to answer this question. This is the first step on our path to put people, not places, at the heart of travel.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Twigmore is a Facebook app that connects travellers and locals through friends. Without leaving Facebook, users can now easily tap into their friend network to find real people on the ground wherever they travel.

For example, on Twigmore, when a user is planning a trip to Berlin, they may discover that a friend knows someone living there. If the user likes live music, with a couple clicks, they can get introduced to this local contact for the scoop on concerts, and perhaps even go see a concert with the person when they get to Berlin.

Additionally, the user can get notified if other friends are going to be in Berlin at the same time.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We’re targeting English-speaking Facebook users aged 18 to 34 years who travel at least four times a year. We believe our product is most useful for people travelling by themselves – whether for work or fun.

Our target customers are lodging, dining and live entertainment companies who want to market to our audience.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Yes, Peter and I spent our own money to design, prototype and test several concepts in the field before asking investors to get involved. We felt that it was really important for us to have confidence in the concept before asking others to do the same.

In our experience, the best way of doing that is through field testing.

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

We currently make money when a user buys things to do in their destination. Last month we integrated and started testing Groupon daily deals and our users can now get discounts on everything from restaurants to concerts to spas in over 100 destinations in North America.

We’re also developing an advertising product for lodging companies.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Our friend-of-friend technology has enabled us to build a database of over 1.7 million local contacts in just a few months of beta testing.

Weaknesses:

• Having to educate travellers on the benefits of connecting with a trusted local contact in their destination.

Opportunities:

• We can take travel networking mainstream.

Threats:

• Facebook may release similar travel features.

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

The initial idea for the product came from a solo trip one of the founders took to Japan and Korea. He was lucky to get introduced to a few local friends-of-friends and this transformed the trip – and he made a few friends in the process.

Our initial prototype had a broader scope and helped users get introductions for work, dating, travel and more. From our field testing, we learned that it would be challenging to market the product for such a wide range of use cases.

So we went back to the original travel idea. One of our investors felt that we were now focusing too narrowly and that there was indeed demand for a general purpose networking service.

Based on what we learned, marketing best practices and, perhaps most importantly, our instincts, we decided to stick with the use case we knew best – travel.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We’re aiming to have over one million registered users by the end of 2012.

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

Tnooz has covered its fair share of trip planning sites on the TLabs Showcase over the past 18 months and here, at the latest Travel Innovation Summit from PhoCusWright, there is a string of similar sites again.

Now, it is worth pointing out out that almost all of the trip planning sites, especially those that have integrated the sharing elements at the heart of social media, are good.

Really good.

By good, this means the designs are more often than not first-rate, the overall user experience is infinitely better than many of the online travel agencies and supplier sites on the web, and – hey! – everyone loves social media.

Right?

Well, many, many people do indeed love social media (Facebook will probably hit one billion profiles some time over the next 18 months, for starters), so there is obviously potential to tap into the enthusiasm that at least a tenth of the world’s population seemingly now have for sharing the minutae of their lives on the web.

And the apparent opportunity from integrating something as inspiration and aspirational as travel into social media, and subsequently forming content-heavy, trip planning sites, has not escaped the attenton of investors.

In the past two weeks alone, Gogobot has attracted $15 million and newbie Trippy landed $1.75 million.

But, as a succession of startups at the TIS event have found, when facing the quartet of cynics in the so-called critics circle (including Tnooz CEO Gene Quinn), there are huge questions over where these sites go after their initial launch phase.

There are a number of issues in play:

1. Scale

How do such businesses grow beyond their initial fanbases? Is it all about marketing? Can they – in the case of the Silicon Valley darlings – rely on the buzz of the tech community to spread the word to gain traction? Do they actually need massive traction to fulfil their objectives?

2. Investment

Where should these companies channel the often vast sums of money they are receiving? Marketing? Product development? What should be the priority to give backers a return on investment? Nobody seems to have answered this question yet.

3. Differentiation

Simple. How do these trip planners REALLY set themselves apart from one another. For all the user experience and cracking design, functionality is often too similar.

4. Facebook

The elephant in the room, obviously. While so many social media-led trip planners rely on Facebook for the social graph, integation through Facebook Connect, etc, will the omnipresent social network – as it evolves – become the place where people do their trip planning? Why bother with all those others?

Trippy launched just two months ago, bootstrapped initially, by J R Johnson, former founder of VirtualTourist (later sold to Expedia) and OneTime.

Also participating in the round is SV Angel as well as individuals including Rob Solomon, Tim Ferriss, Brian Lee, Gil Ebaz, Brandee Barker, Chase Jarvis, Randi Zuckerberg, Jason Mraz, and Rachel Zoe.

Johnson says the investment will be used primarily to build the product development end of the business.

Trippy ties into social sites such as Facebook to find a user’s friends who know about where they might be travelling to and who already know your personal details.

The idea is that tapping into the travel experiences of a user’s friends is a more valuable than getting unverified information from random strangers.

YourTour hopes the move will open it up as a leisure destination planner to larger tour operators and travel agents.

A partner to pilot the technology is being sought, according to an official.

Amadeus launched the amadeus.net platform in 1997 and has mostly used it as a test bed for new functionality and services for the consumer market.

In 2008, Amadeus integrated the Kayak metasearch engine on to the site.

YourTour, which is part of Decizium, attracted funding of Euros 1 million in June from private and public investors in Belgium, where it is based.

The trip planning technology is now integrated in a number of destination websites across Europe and the US including the French Basque Country, Philadelphia and Rapid City.

The company has not yet made a big deal of its consumer website but continues to add new destinations in France, Germany, Spain and Florida while plans for California, Arizona, Utah and Nevada are next.

YourTour also wants to add a profile system to the website so it can begin to gather people’s email addresses.

You can log-in on the Uptake homepage using your Facebook credentials to access Uptake’s new Travel Q&A feature in beta and get recommendations from your Facebook friends about destinations on your bucket list.

But Uptake believes its solution is superior to those of other social travel sites, such as Gogobot, because Uptake’s search technology goes beyond analyzing structured data (i.e. check-ins and places people have lived) and retrieves unstructured data (status updates, photo tags and comments) from Facebook.

“It is interesting and a good place to start,” says Yen Lee, Uptake co-founder and President, of Gogobot’s allegedly more limited approach, “but how many places have you lived and how many places have you checked-in?”

Travis Katz, Gogobot co-founder and CEO, didn’t react to Uptake’s claims about the nature of Gogobot’s data, but said: “There are lots of companies these days who are trying to imitate what we are doing at Gogobot. We wish them well.”

Uptake says of its new Travel Q&A feature:

This new service analyzes both friends’ explicit location data, such as hometowns and check-ins, as well as friends’ less-obvious, implicit location data, which contains nearly 70% of friends’ destinations in the form of photos, status updates and comments.

Lee claims that Uptake, using natural language search and by “structuring the unstructured data on Facebook,”  usually knows of more than 1,000 destinations that each Facebook user’s friends have been and therefore can better determine who the Uptake user should ask for travel recommendations.

Uptake has two other major differentiators when it comes to social travel, Lee argues. Uptake’s 3 million unique users in October made it the third largest trip-planning site, behind TripAdvisor and Yahoo Travel, and Uptake offers the “most comprehensive library” of activities when users are trying to get more information about their friends’ recommendations, he adds.

Uptake says it has categorized 1.8 million “destination ideas, hotels, restaurants, activities and attractions.”

So what happened in the intervening 12 months?

Are you making money yet?

Three months after launching the new site, we did a pivot and decided to focus on a larger opportunity.

We opted to stay in the group space and focus on building the first fully automated group hotel booking engine for 5+ rooms, which will launch in February 2012. Groupize ended up doing a few million dollars in group revenues in 2011 on the legacy group product and is now profitable.

What has been the biggest problem – building the product/service or marketing it to consumers/travel industry?

The biggest problem has been raising money as a non-technical CEO for this new venture.

Although we had an existing business, the right team in place and a good grasp of the opportunity, VCs and Angels weren’t ready to believe in us. They wanted us to prove the technology first, which we now have done.

Biggest assumption in the business plan that was wrong?

Last year’s model was based on our available resources at the time. We were going to offer a semi-automated lead generation process to handle group business, which probably wouldn’t have worked.

We have re-tooled and are re-launching with a fully automated and scalable model for the planner and the suppliers (hotels).

Is your current customer base as predicted?

From a business development standpoint, we are seeing encouraging interest for our upcoming white label application of the group hotel booking engine.

We will start to get real data on consumers and bookings trends once we go live in February.

Did you achieve your 12 month goals? If not, why not?

We achieved our goals for the legacy product, but not the goals we listed in the original TLabs article, due to our new focus on the group hotel booking engine as mentioned.

Has the problem you were trying to solve changed?

The problem hasn’t changed. Small groups is a $31 billion market that is offline and broken. Planner and hotels want more efficient tools than RFPs, emails and group desks.

A year later, Facebook and Google+ now offer better tools that we are integrating in our social sharing component.

Which startup that has launched in the past 12 months did you think “Ah, wish we had done that!”?

The group space is still where we want to be, but I have to admit Airbnb caught me off-guard. I didn’t think the model would work, but I guess I was proven wrong.

If you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?

A startup is all about uncertainty and learning. I guess not being able to raise money originally forced us to scale down the product to an MVP (Most Viable Product) and to find solutions to raise our own funds.

Fortunately, we still own 100% and are in a much better position now that we’ve proven the technology and are about to prove the demand.

I now realize there’s no shame in bootstrapping until it is really necessary to scale up.

NB: Tnooz launched TLab Showcase in March 2010, a dedicated channel to give startups in the travel, tourism and hospitality sector an opportunity to explain their vision, company background and strategy to a wider audience.

As well as publishing an elevator pitch-type questionnaire for each business, Tnooz committed to following up with each startup after 12 months or so to see how well (or not) each performed.

NB2: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

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

My name is Benoît Le Ny, founder of MobilyTrip. I am 31, graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and ENSTelecom Paris in 2004 . I worked for four years at General Electric Healthcare, then for two years at reverso.net, before starting MobilyTrip end of 2010.

I am a passionate traveler (in particular in South America) and while traveling, I realized there is a lack of good tools for people to keep their trip memories alive, and to share them with their friends and family.

On my way I met two entrepreneurs, Alexandre Larribeau and Matthieu Godon, who launched ALKEO, a mobile development startup, and we decided to work together on MobilyTrip to make a product people would love to use when traveling.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Love money. I had the opportunity to find people in my circles who really liked the idea and wanted to be a part of it. Now we have hundreds of travelers using it, more than 50 thousand photos and really good reviews. We are currently looking for new investors for our next round.

What problem are you trying to solve?

First, helping people remember their trips. Currently, most people take pictures while traveling, and only put them into a folder of their computer when they come home.

Remembering where exactly a photo was shot, and above all, in what context, is generally lost after a few months. With MobilyTrip, they can reopen a trip done many years before and see exactly what they’ve done, where, when and how.

Second, help people communicate about their trips. Currently, most people send an email with a few photos, or post them on Facebook, but it does not reflect what they are really experiencing. When they come back home and want to share all their photos with friends, one by one, everyone gets bored quickly. With MobilyTrip, people can show their path, the places they visited, they can share their feelings… and have people following them, during their trip and after.

Finally, make people contribute to travel knowledge. If you have friends that went to Japan a few months ago and ask them what places they’d recommend, they can give you some advice but generally not the exact spots, and how to reach them.

With MobilyTrip, they just have to show you their journal and you’ll be able to navigate around, see the exact locations on a map, related photos and comments, ratings. More generally, you can follow people you don’t know in person, and identify good spots in other travelers’ journals.

Describe the business, core products and services?

MobilyTrip starts with a mobile application which allows you to annotate important things along your trip: record your path in continuous mode, add places, enrich them with photos and comments. Everything works offline (remember GPS is free, everywhere in the world).

And when you get an internet connection, you can synchronize your data in one click with the server, so anyone following you can get your updates.

In addition, the mobile app it contains 100 free travels guides for the major cities in the world, I recommend you to check them out! And many more are being prepared. For now, we have an iPhone version and the Android one is coming soon.

MobilyTrip is also a website: it allows people to review other people’s journals, comment them and get inspiration for their next trips. And authors can experience again their own trips, anytime.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We do not target a specific profile. MobilyTrip is a new way to communicate while traveling; we give this tool to travelers and let them use it during their weekends, longer trips or even world tours. We have business trips, leisure trips, honeymoons and even an on the road truck driver in the US!

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Our first travelers recorded their path with a GPS device (QStarz), and the website found the location of the photos through their timestamp. But it required users to document their trip when they came back home (which takes a long time) and it did not allow them to share their trip in real time.

Now everything is done on mobile, it’s fun, easy to use, effortless and immediate. Our investors were among these people. They were, and still are, our best beta testers!

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

We offer a free mobile application and free data storage, in exchange our users provide us with structured information about their trips that we can process. Our business comes from the result of that processing, by providing travel guides that we can update in real time.

We believe that there is a lot of travel content about many destinations on the web, but not enough structured content that you can easily browse.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• People like the concept, and are easy to convert into active users when they have an iPhone and know about MobilyTrip.
• Our service is probably the most robust and ergonomic tool to record your travels, and provides an amazing user interface online to look at your travel memories and share them.
• Our team is strong: we have senior web and mobile developers, both on iPhone and Android (the Android version will be available soon).

Weaknesses:

• The main weakness is probably the fact that people cannot use this kind of app everyday since they are not always on holiday. But you can do very nice travel journals on weekends, too.

Opportunities:

• The tourism market is huge, and travelers obviously miss mobile tools: they communicate a lot in their daily life but when they’re abroad, it’s a black out.

Threats:

• Travel industry’s big players are still mainly web-based, not really mobile. This can be a threat, or an opportunity!

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

Most people admit that there is a need for people to organize their travel memories, and to share them. Some people might not see the need but those people generally don’t travel often.

Then, it’s a question of implementation: we really focus on building the best product, and if we can do that and getting known for that, the idea will be successful!

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We’re currently focusing on user experience. We analyze how people use our app, and made several major updates since we launched in July 2011.

Now we are confident that you can record a trip for several months with hundreds of photos seamlessly. As for the website, we’ll make it more social in the coming month, with the possibility to see other travelers’ trips. In the coming year, it’s all going to be about getting users, and making them happy.

We aim at getting more than 10,000 trips after one year.

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

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

I am J R Johnson, founder and CEO of Trippy.com as well as three other consumer web startups. My first two travel sites, VirtualTourist and OneTime, were both bootstrapped and ultimately acquired by Expedia in 2008.

I launched Trippy to change the way people travel. Trippy is the first website that allows your friends to plan your trip, helping you travel better.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

So far, Trippy is self-funded. This is my fourth bootstrapped company, for which we have yet to take any professional investment.

What problem are you trying to solve?

There are hundreds of travel sites made for YOU to plan your trip. This doesn’t really make much sense, considering you’re probably not an expert on places you’re visiting, especially if you’ve never been before.

Trippy is the first web and mobile app that allows your friends to plan your trip, helping you travel better.

Trippy is solving the long-standing problem of untrustworthy and irrelevant travel content. It is a “friend-sourced” solution that avoids the pitfalls of crowd-sourced travel advice – which usually comes from strangers (particularly as paid reviews and questionable content sources have become so ubiquitous).

Travellers want tips from people they trust and who know their interests and needs the best — their friends and family.

Your friends already know your personal details — like if you’re vegan, traveling with kids, or love craft beer — so any recommendation they give is relevant and more valuable.

The travel space today requires a lot of work, and it’s just not fun. This is travel we’re talking about – it should be fun! Creating a truly social experience makes the whole process more efficient (by tapping our social graph) and more fun.

To us, that means creating a product that is social-engineered from its core.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Trippy ties into social sites like Facebook to find your friends who know about where you’re traveling to (those who have checked in, live, work, or go to school there) and who already know your personal details (because they’re your friends!).

The idea is that tapping into the travel experiences of your friends is a whole lot more valuable than getting questionable info from random strangers.

Easy one-click recommendations and Facebook-style comments let friends say what hotels, restaurants and things to do would be perfect for you.

We have an easy auto-complete tool that quickly pulls up whatever your friends are looking to recommend from a whole database of locations. You can also add places you’re already considering so friends can chime in with feedback.

In Trippy’s social setting, friends spur each other on to remember more helpful advice, extra details and insider tips.

Trippy’s mobile app lets friends travel with you by seeing your pictures in real time as you follow their recommendations on your itinerary and share back photos and comments. We’ve also made it easy to copy trips you’d like to take or use as a jump-start to plan your own.

You might have a specific trip in mind, or maybe you’re just dreaming of a “someday” destination. You can use Trippy to keep track of all the trips you’re thinking about.

Along the way, we hope we can spread a little something we like to call “helper joy.” It’s that happy kick you get when a friend has a great experience thanks to advice you shared. It’s just human nature. We want our friends have as great of a time as we’ve had.

You get helpful suggestions to make your trip great, and your friends get to relive their favorite travel moments and share their passion for places they know and love.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

People who travel, whether for work or pleasure. Anyone can share recommendations for a friend’s trip, whether they’re a Facebook friend or part of your other social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare, Foodspotting, etc.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

This has happened pretty simultaneously, so far. We did user testing from the time the concept was created, while also getting feedback from professional investors and some really all-star advisors (to be announced soon).

We also tapped into over ten years of deep experience we’ve acquired while building online travel communities and social media tools.

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

The business model is based on proven revenue streams in the travel space, through affiliate programs and advertising.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Team/experience/product

Weakness:

• We’re fast and sometimes we break things

Opportunities:

• Huge market and time is right

Threats:

• If people quit traveling or stop talking travel with friends.

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

It’s interesting. People who are really attached to the crowd-sourced model have a tendency to focus on re-building various takes on traditional travel communities.

Having created and grown both traditional travel communities and more social platforms, we’re able to see that people overwhelmingly prefer advice from friends over strangers. This has really driven our focus on a friend-sourced solution.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Trippy is social-engineered and works best with friends. Our tracking is focused on optimizing the social interaction of each traveler and the subsequent helpers they bring in to participate (who then become travelers themselves, starting new trips).

Here is a clip:

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