The Travel 2.0 space has not quite taken off yet although a few early start-up are seeing profits. I picked three here to write about and each has occupied a nice niche. NYC-based Travel Ad Network is the largest Vertical Ad Network in travel. They pioneering graphical advertising and makes things more attractive for both publishers and advertisers. THey sells ads on behalf of a large number of publishers including Lonely Planet and Kayak. They reach 14.4 mm unique monthly users in the U.S. and a total of 22.5 mm worldwide. They closed a $15 mm Series A financing round led by Rho Ventures, Village Ventures and individual investors in April, they are getting an estimated $50 to $75 mm valuation. I believe they are running at breakeven but expecting profits soon.
A travel vertical search engine company, Mobissimo has been successful focusing on the niche of global travel which has largely been neglected. They index a large number of low-cost airlines, and online travel agencies and consolidators, including Lessno, Lastminute.com and Travlguru. Its search tool called OneBox Search lets users enter all their itinerary information in one search field as opposed to filling out several online forms. A user types in the departure city, destination and travel dates, such as "London to Boston August 20-27" directly in the search field. This is a very smart feature. Usability in general is not bad, there could be a few small improvements. Although there’s question on their business model but they claimed to be profitable. The online travel market, which is expected to reach $128 billion in revenues by 2011, has numerous niches that are waiting to be filled.We have a few very cool idea and may decide later to take them futher.
Yahoo's formerly experimental geolocation platform, is officially opening up to all users, a couple of companies are announcing products that work with it. Yahoo’s Fire Eagle is a storehouse for personal location information. If you tell Fire Eagle where you are, or have applications or devices that can do so on your behalf, then other applications can grab that info (with your permission) and provide you geo-related services or social network features. One of the most interesting parts of Fire Eagle is its variable privacy feature. Even if Fire Eagle knows precisely at what address you are, you can set it to only release more general information, like the city, to certain apps or certain groups, or you can restrict location reporting by time. There's also a "hide me" button you can press if you want to shut down location reporting for a period of time. I definitely think there’s so many applications to use this, Movable Type, the blog platform will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service. I think the most promising application is in the travel 2.0 space.
There is another start-up called Planeteye working on geotagging photos (using Microsoft' technology), they have been making good technology progress but I’m concerned, from what I see on the outside having not talked to the company, about their strategic focus. They do state that they are a travel planning service but if you click on a city, you get something like a local guide page. And then you can click on photos which gives you a map. Nevertheless, it is a very exciting space and they have advanced the technology, let's see if they will figure things out along the way. This company is worth watching.
It is always sensitive when there had been contacts with firm that I commented here. For disclosure, we have been contacted by Planeteye 8 months ago for design/UI help, we responded by presenting a proposal but reached no agreement to move further.
