Facebook has added 49 positions to its careers page including a number of positions on Parse, which it acquired late last April. Parse is a cloud-based platform providing tools for app developers.

When Facebook purchased it, the social network bought the company outright, meaning that it would continue operating its service. It looks primed to build upon the company’s offerings and building at a larger capacity.

New listings added to Facebook’s careers page:

• Developer Advocate, Parse (Menlo Park)
• Site Reliability Engineer, Parse (Menlo Park)
• Software Engineer (Platform), Parse (Menlo Park)
• Software Engineer (Web), Parse (Menlo Park)
• Global Head, Developer Support Engineering (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Consumer Communications (Los Angeles – Menlo Park – New York)
• Manager, Internal Communications (Menlo Park)
• Finance Manager – Data Center Infrastructure (Menlo Park)
• Payroll Lead (Menlo Park)
• Procurement Operations Buyer (Menlo Park)
• Sales Operations Analyst (Contractor) (Singapore)
• Tax Manager (Menlo Park)
• Partner Manager Japan, Preferred Marketing Developer Program (Tokyo)
• Project Manager, Product Support (Menlo Park)
• Data Steward (Menlo Park)
• Trust and Safety Manager, Security – Latin America (Miami)
• Product Designer, Parse (Menlo Park)
• Associate, Partnerships Operations (Menlo Park)
• Content Manager, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• Project Manager, Product Support (Menlo Park)
• Video Producer, Creative Solutions (New York)
• Director, Business Development (Menlo Park)
• Integration Manager, Corporate Development (Menlo Park)
• Strategic Partner Development – TV (Los Angeles)
• Strategic Partner Development, Influencers (MPK) (Menlo Park)
• Strategic Partner Development, Public Partnerships (Los Angeles – Menlo Park)
• Global Accounts Measurement Lead – APAC (Singapore)
• Inside Sales Representative / Account Executive, Parse (Menlo Park)
• Strategic Partner Manager Games (Singapore)
• Small Business Specialist (Thai, Korean or Japanese speaking) (Singapore)
• SMB Analyst, Italian (Dublin)
• Team Lead ,SMB (Dublin)
• Client Partner, Finland (Stockholm)
• Account Manager – Retail (São Paulo)
• Client Partner – Travel (São Paulo)
• Client Partner – Technology & Entertainment, Global Marketing Solutions (Sydney)
• Client Partner, SEA (Singapore)
• Client Partner, Agency (New York)
• Client Partner, Atlas (Menlo Park)
• Performance (Direct Response) Sales Consultant (Menlo Park)
• Head of Technical Account Management (Seattle)
• Sales Operations Analyst (Contractor) (Singapore)
• Data Steward (Menlo Park)
• Advertising Technical Support Engineer (Seattle)
• Audience Researcher, Vertical Measurement – CPG (London)
• Global Accounts Measurement Lead – APAC (Singapore)
• Data Analyst, Latin America (São Paulo)

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

After unboxing last week’s Galaxy S4 Mini, Samsung is keeping the pedal pressed to the metal by announcing another new launch variant of its current flagship smartphone — this time aimed at users who want their device to be made of slightly tougher stuff. Iterating its portfolio in this way is how Samsung squeezes the competition by making it harder for them to differentiate on price, size or special features like water-resistance. Sorry Sony.

The Galaxy S4 Active is being badged as a phone for outdoorsy types — hence it’s dust and water resistent to IP67 (one below the highest possible rating) and has a fully sealed design. This means it can be submerged in water one meter deep for up to 30 minutes, so great for dropping in puddles and streams, not so great for dropping when you’re scuba diving.

Although Samsung’s marketing material makes it sounds like a rugged phone, there’s no specific mention of impact resistance or especially toughened glass in the specs — so if you’re after a phone to take to work on a construction site you’re probably better off with one of these bad boys (having seen my TC colleague Chris Velazco do his best but fail to crack the CAT B15′s will by throwing it at some fake rocks). The thing is, truly rugged phones are necessarily chunky so there is always a trade off.

With the S4 Active you’re getting flagship smartphone power and looks in a slightly less fragile package than usual but not one that looks like it belongs on a building site. The S4 Active is 9.1mm thick and 151g heavy vs the S4′s 7.9mm and 130g. So, basically the S4 Active is a phone for Samsung fans who don’t want to have to worry about taking their expensive phone to the beach. Aside from its sealed design, the one notable hardware design change on the Active vs the S4 is the single home button being replaced by three physical keys: menu, home and back.

Under the hood, the Active has a 1.9GHz Quad-Core Processor, plus the same 2,600mAh battery as the S4. The 5.0’’ Full HD TFT LCD screen includes what Samsung calls its ‘Glove Touch’ feature, meaning it can be operated while wearing gloves — a trick the company appears to have borrowed from Nokia.

On the S4 Active’s rear is an 8 megapixel camera (the S4 has a 13MP lens) to which Samsung has added a new software mode — called Aqua Mode — to improve the clarity of underwater photography and video. The camera’s LED flash is also co-opted into acting as a torch via the shortcut of long pressing on the volume key. So handy if you’re trying to stumble back to your tent in the dark.

Other software features include ‘S Travel (Trip Advisor)’ – which offers “travel assistance, local information, and recommendations” — plus Samsung’s ‘S Translator’ software for text or voice translation.

The S4 Active will go on sale this summer, initially in the U.S. and Sweden. Pricing has not been confirmed — nor has specific market availability for the three  colour options: grey, blue and orange.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Skift, the travel industry-focused site that was launched in July 2012 by PaidContent founder Rafat Ali and Jason Clampet (who previously ran content and editorial partnerships at Frommers.com), is announcing today that it has raised $1.1 million in additional seed funding.

The new funding was led by Lerer Ventures, with participation from various funds and angel investors (skip to the end of this post for the full list). It brings the total amount that Skift has raised to $1.5 million.

Skift says that it will have more than half a million unique users this month, and that 25 percent of its traffic comes from mobile. It also says its readers are likely to be “executives and managers from leading brands” in travel and related industries, such as Expedia, Priceline, JetBlue, Starwood and others.

When I asked Ali how this growth compares to PaidContent, a news blog on the media industry that he launched in 2002 (it was acquired by Guardian Media in 2008 and is now owned by GigaOm), he said, “Just the velocity of how quickly you can make a mark, that’s changed a lot now.” Ali attributed much of the speed of Skift’s growth to social media — the company says 10 percent of its overall traffic now comes from Twitter.

Ali added that even though Skift’s topic is the travel industry, he thinks of it as a “business information” startup, rather than a travel startup. He said it’s a company where “media and data go hand-in-hand,” and where Skift’s news content can serve as a “funnel” to its other products.

That said, he acknowledged that the data side of Skift’s business is still early. In January, it released its first report, “13 Trends That Will Define Travel in 2013,” and in February it launched SkiftSocial, which offers social media data for travel brands. Ali said Skift will launch its first subscription data products next month.

“We have a big plan for the data part and we will launch these mini products along the way,” he said.

And like most online media companies (including TechCrunch), Ali plans to launch a Skift conference, though he said he wants to focus on “one flagship conference” that has multi-million dollar potential, rather than a bunch of smaller events.

Most of the Skift articles that I’ve read have been related to tech in some way, but Ali said the company’s coverage is broader than that, covering the full gamut of travel industry news, as well as other transportation trends like ridesharing.

“A lot of the traditional players in the travel industry are focused on specific verticals, while the silos are collapsing in travel, as they have in tech and finance and other industries,” he said. Ali also argued that a site covering business news (though to be clear, Skift wants to serve a consumer audience too) “doesn’t have to be boring”: “Travel is the most creative expression of human exploration. How can it be boring?”

Getting back to the funding, Ali said the company will use the money to double its staff from five to 10 and to move out of its current co-working space and into an office. The new funds in the round include Ironfire Angel, MESA+, Advancit Capital, and GrowLab/LX Ventures. The new angel investors include Jason Calacanis, Michael Cunniff, Duncan Jennings, Sean Keener, Shakil Khan, Martin Nisenholtz, Paul Noglows, and Michael Yavonditte.

Skift declined to say whether any of the previous angel investors have increased their investment with this new funding, but those past backers include Chris Ahearn, Luke Beatty, Gordon Crovitz, Craig Forman, Jim Friedlich, Tom Glocer, Vishal Gondal, Jason Hirschhorn, Peter Horan, Alan Meckler,Mohamed Nanabhay, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Amol Sarva, and Chris Schroeder.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has hired Nicola Mendelsohn as VP, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, filling a void being temporarily filled by VP of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson after Johanna Shields left in October 2012.

Mendelsohn was most recently partner and executive chairman at Karmarama agency in London. She was formerly board director at BBH and deputy chairman at Grey London. She was also the first female president of the Institute of Practitioners of Advertising.

In notable departures news, Facebook’s head of Android product Bubba Murarka has joined VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson as General Partner and Managing Director. He had been at Facebook since 2008, and was most recently involved in the launch of Facebook Home.

As for other hires, Facebook removed 23 positions from its careers page this week, including a Head of Global Marketing Design and a few jobs in user operations, infrastructure, corporate development and other areas.

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Head of Global Marketing Design (Menlo Park)
• Marketing Manager ( Contract) (Singapore)
• Food & Beverage Manager (Dublin)
• Finance Manager – Data Center Infrastructure (Menlo Park)
• Financial Analyst, Network Infrastructure (Menlo Park)
• Fixed Assets Accountant – Systems and Controls (Menlo Park)
• Administrative Assistant – Corporate Development (Menlo Park)
• Administrative Assistant, Engineering (Menlo Park)
• Administrative Assistant, Sales Planning & Operations (Menlo Park)
• Systems Engineer, Citrix (Menlo Park)
• Commissioning and Deployment Manager (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Marketing Communications APAC (Singapore)
• Product Marketing Manager, Developer Monetization (Menlo Park)
• Data Analytics Lead, User Operations (Dublin)
• Team Lead, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• Integration Manager, Corporate Development (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Corporate Development (Menlo Park)
• Merchant Operations Analyst (Menlo Park)
• Mobile Partnerships Strategist (Menlo Park)
• Account Manager, Czech (Dublin)
• Ad Operations Specialist (Dublin)
• Client Partner – Financial Services & Travel, Global Marketing Solutions (Sydney)
• Client Partner, Politics (Washington)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Before he co-founded last-minute hotel booking startup HotelTonight, one of CEO Sam Shank’s previous companies was the hotel review site TravelPost. And today, he’s launching what he said is a reinvention of the hotel review, optimized for mobile phones.

“What makes mobile different is, mobile’s with you all the time,” Shank said. “With hotel reviews, you’re sort of summarizing your stay. It’s text-oriented. But on mobile, the primary input device is the camera. It’s more photo-based.”

The new feature is called Snap Your Stay, and it asks HotelTonight users to take six different photos during their stay — one each of the bed, bathroom, view, lobby, and exterior, plus a “cool find” of their choice. You can adjust the lighting in a photo, but there are new filters per se.

The photos can be shared on Facebook or Twitter, and they’ll also show up on a hotel’s profile page in the app, sorted by things like the type of image (so that you don’t end up with six pictures in a row of beds) and whether other users liked the photo. And the app will also start featuring a page with recent popular photos.

Shank argued that Share Your Stay allows users to capture their experience during their stay (as opposed to trying to remember it afterwards), and to do it in a quick, convenient fashion — he noted that you can take and upload all six photos with just 20 taps, whereas writing a review would take “thousands.” (Put another way: Typing out an in-depth review on your phone would be a pain.)

Now you might be thinking, “Hold on, that doesn’t really sound like a review. How do I explain that the staff was mean? Or that there were a lot of weird noises at night?” And for now, at least, you can’t. HotelTonight already asks users whether they would recommend the hotel — Shank described that as a quality control mechanism (a few hotels have been removed from the app for low ratings) and a way to make users feel more comfortable about their bookings. Meanwhile, he described Share Your Stay as a way to capture the experience, which will help other HotelTonight users decide whether a hotel is right for them.

When I asked whether he’d consider adding a text review feature in the future, Shank answered that the team was trying to make things as simple as possible to start, and that HotelTonight will enhance Share Your Stay based on what users want.

As for what you get for taking those photos, Shank said that HotelTonight is currently offering a $5 credit for completed photo set. He added, “What I’ve learned with reviews in general is, the reason people give reviews is to give back to the community.”

The Snap Your Stay feature is available today in HotelTonight’s iPhone/iPod Touch app. The company plans to introduce it to the iPad and Android apps too.

HotelTonight is also announcing something called the “HT Price Guarantee.” If you can find a lower price for the same room on the same night on another site, then HotelTonight says it will make up the difference in credits.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chute, a startup that offers tools for collecting and displaying photos, has raised $7 million in Series A Funding.

The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and US Venture Partners. Chute previously raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Freestyle.

The company allows publishers and other businesses to pull relevant photos from social networks or collect them directly from users, then display those images on their own websites and in real-world locations. It’s also experimenting with other photo collection methods, like allowing NBC News reporters to post photos of the presidential inauguration directly from a Chute mobile reporting app.

The larger vision, said co-founder Ranvir Gujral, is to build “a complete visual platform.” He said that whenever a company publishes visual content, Chute should be involved in some way: “That doesn’t have to mean we publish everything — it just means that we know about it.”

The first step in making that happen, Gujral said, is “growing our marketshare and awareness,” and indeed that’s one of the company’s main goals with the new funding. At the same time, he acknowledged that there’s work to be done on the product side too.

Chute is also making a product announcement today, unveiling Chute Ads, which allow companies to incorporate photos, whether from the brand itself or provided by users, into banner ads. This helps brands tie together their “paid, owned, and earned media,” Gujrat said.

“As a brand, if I’m putting time into creating great content and posting it to my Instagram and Pinterest, I want to put it into my own ad units instead of a static SWF file,” Gujrat said. “We want to kill the static SWF file.”

The first publisher to offer Chute Ads, which are scheduled to go live in June, is Condé Nast Traveler. In a press release, Craig Kostelic, Head of Digital Global Sales for Condé Nast Travel Network, argues that the ads “give advertisers the ability to also be publishers,” and that since they pull content in real-time, “audiences will never see the same ad twice.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Founded by Dan Gellert and Jeff Arena, Time Warner Ventures and Yahoo! alums respectively, GateGuru is second behind TripIt in terms of users and downloads. The app helps you build itineraries with simple input methods including selecting flights by number or even emailing itineraries into the program. Once you’ve set up your itinerary, the company makes money by pitching last minute car and hotel rentals on the fly – and unobtrusively – while you slog through the supreme indignity of modern travel.

Gellert sees the app as “day of travel” assistant. “We have a lot of unique data in our product such as airport amenity information, TSA wait times, airport tips, maps, etc. For these reasons, as a day-of travel solution, the GateGuru experience blows away that of any of these guys,” he said.

They have raised $1.3 million to date from Amol Sarva, Matt Daimler, Tom Glocer, and others. They are currently seeing 140,000 users per month with 1 million downloads.

The inspiration for the service came when Gellert and Arena spent most of their time traveling yet remained confused about where to eat in airports and which security lines were shortest. “Somehow there was a complete black hole of information for the traveler. Simple things like: ‘Should I eat before or after security?,’ ‘How long is the security wait time?’, ‘Is my flight delayed or on time?’ often couldn’t be answered. I felt like there needed to be a seamless solution to give travelers knowledge about this entire experience; to put the power back in the hands of the traveler.”

“From there, it has been off to the races in going from Yelp for the airport into our larger vision which is reinventing the entire day-of travel experience,” he said.

The team is planning further improvements, including a true “virtual assistant” feature that should make traveling a bit more bearable.

“We will get to the point in the next 12 – 18 months where we can say ‘John – we know you are driving out to SFO, and based on traffic, airport parking availability, security wait times, your walk to your gate and flight status, you should leave for the airport in 30 minutes’ – regardless of if that is 2 hours or 4 hours before your flight,” he said. “This is a big change from the anxiety filled experience of walking through the airport glass doors only to find the place mobbed, resulting in you potentially missing your flight.” The data comes from collections of information including TSA checkpoint wait times and airport maps.

Whether GateGuru becomes a key part of your travel process or just another app that sits in that little folder on my phone labelled Travel and contains Kayak, TripIt, (inexplicably) Shazam, and RideTheCity remains to be seen. However, these lads do have promise.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Superfly launched at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2010 with plans to become the Mint.com of travel, or more specifically, for your rewards and frequent flier miles and travel spending. Following Kayak’s lead, over time, the startup added metasearch capabilities, integrating rewards and points into the flight booking process. Its approach attracted ex-Kayak CFO Bill Smith, who began advising the startup after leaving Kayak before its IPO.

Under his guidance, and backed by seed funding from travel veterans like Smith and Travelport Chairman Jeff Clarke, Superfly is today launching a product that clearly shows the travel startup is headed in a new direction. Whether you call it a pivot or not, Superfly founder Jonathan Meiri tells us that the team eventually became frustrated by the limitations of metasearch and simply trying to “build a better Kayak,” and has instead decided to move in a new direction, focusing on the areas where it can actually provide more value.

“The reality was that we’ve been fairly successful at acquiring customers at a significantly lower cost than traditional travel players, and, over time, our customers had entrusted us with a boatload of their travel data,” Meiri tells us. They quickly realized that this “share-of-wallet” data was its most valuable data, so, over the last nine months, Superfly has shifted its focus exclusively to that data.

During that time, Superfly developed Superbox, which, like LinkedIn, looks at a user’s email contacts to suggest new connections, and like TripIt organizes your itineraries, the service allows users to view and organizes their travel history.

Thousands of users are now our using Superbox to find lost miles buried in their email, the founder says. Beyond finding those lost accounts and emails, the startup’s patent-pending tech extracts data from key data points within emails, like receipts, itineraries, offers and boarding passes, for example, to build a deeper personal travel wallet.

Today, Superfly is adding an important piece on top of Superbox in an effort to expose these emails to users to help them better manage their travel. The product, called Travel Emails, is also part of the startup’s move to collect more nuanced data on your travel behaviors so that it can target flights, awards and promotions more effectively.

Essentially, the new tool collects users’ travel emails in a searchable timeline-type interface, which makes this data easier to parse. In a way, it’s not unlike the capabilities offered by TripIt, while focusing more on aggregating user travel data in a single interface, giving your travel info its own dedicated hub, rather than having it be drowned out in the noise of your inbox.

Superfly has been keen to streamline travelers’ ability to find promotions for their trips, along with loyalty updates for frequent fliers, reservations and so on. However, it’s been tough for the startup to offer any kind of real personalization from the limited publicly available travel profile data out there.

Getting access to this data is important, Meiri says, because it helps increase the opportunities for value (and revenue) generation. Of course, there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with access to this personal data, so the founder was quick to assure us that Superfly with never sell that data to third-parties, instead allowing travel suppliers to target offers to users based on the more robust travel profiles it can create from this data.

“Beyond creating value for consumers, travel suppliers can now leverage the aggregated traveler data to provide valuable offers and promotions to the highest value travelers,” the former Kayak CFO says, “and consumers can now receive these offers simply by joining Superfly.”

The last 10 years in travel have been dominated by the rise of meta search and OTAs. These companies have generated a tremendous amount of the value for shareholders by creating mass market tools, arbitraging web traffic and making affiliate revenue. While this game will continue to work for a while, Meiri says, the next ten years are going to be all about personalization. And personalization, of course, is all about consumer data.

For more, find Superfly at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last quarter, Amazon, which has been a freight train and Wall Street darling over the last year, surprised analysts by reporting lower-than-expected earnings. Expectations were high considering the holiday shopping season, but Amazon saw net income drop 45 percent to $97 million in Q4, compared to $177 million in 2011, although on the bright side, net sales continued to increase (by 22 percent) to $21.2 billion.

Today, Amazon continued the trend, still finding itself in a bit of a hangover after missing expectations in Q4. The eCommerce giant reported earnings from Q1 after the market closed this afternoon, in which it saw cash flow increase 39 percent to $4.25 billion, compared to $3 billion for the prior year, while net sales increased 22 percent to $16.07 billion in Q1, compared to $13.18 billion in first quarter 2012.

And by mixed results, we mean that Amazon blew away earnings-per-share expectations at $0.18 in Q1 on revenue of $16 billion. Leading up to today’s announcement, Wall Street expectations were much lower for EPS, with analysts expecting $0.08 EPS for the quarter. In turn, the Street expected Amazon to report sales of $16.2 billion, which the company just missed with $16.07 billion in sales.

In spite of the mixed results, as the market has been wont to do over the last year, Amazon’s stock was trending up, closing at $274.70 per share, on rumors that the company could be launching its own TV set-top box this fall, bringing more of the company’s hardware into your living room.

Tellingly, in today’s announcement, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t touch on the numbers or falling profits, instead plugging the company’s efforts to take on Netflix with some original programming of its own for Instant Video customers. Last week, the company launched 14 new comedy and kids pilots on Instant Video, which quickly became the “most watched TV shows on Instant Video,” the company said Monday.

“Amazon Studios is working on a new way to greenlight TV shows. The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say,” Bezos said in today’s earnings release. “I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don’t matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production. We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

Other points of interest: Amazon’s free cash flow fell 85 percent to $177 million year-over-year, compared to $1.15 billion in the year prior, due in part to dishing out $1.4 billion to purchase new office space in Seattle. Operating income decreased 6 percent to $181 million in Q1, compared to $192 million in the same quarter last year, while net income fell 37 percent to $82 million from $132 million in Q1 2012.

The upside for Amazon continues to rise, thanks to its move into original programming and the expansion of its selection for Prime Instant Video, which is in part due to new licensing agreements with A+E, CBS, FX, PBS And Scripps. This means that shows like Downton Abbey, Justified and Under The Dome, as well as content from Food Network, the Cooking Channel, the Travel Channel and HGTV will all be headed to Amazon. The company said that Prime Instant Video now has 38,000 movies and TV episodes in its collecton.

In addition, Amazon touted the launch of its new MP3 store for Safari, which allow iPhone and iPod touch users to discover and purchase digital music from the company’s catalog. This comes on the heels of reports today that the influence of the company’s Appstore is growing and shows high revenue potential. Amazon also announced its Cloud Player for iPad and iPad Mini this quarter, extended AutoRip to vinyl records and announced the launch of Kindle Fire HD 8.9″.

Good news also came for authors and readers, as Amazon announced that it will start paying its authors their royalties monthly, ahead of the twice-a-year industry standard, along with the acquisition of popular book recommendation hub, Goodreads.

All in all, it was a busy quarter for Amazon, especially for AWS, which launched a slew of new products over the last few months and again lowered its prices. The company said in its announcement today that AWS “has lowered prices 31 times since it launched in 2006, including 7 price reductions so far in 2013.”

Looking forward, Amazon is lowering expectations, however, as it said today that it expects sales to come in between $14.5 billion and $16.2 billion next quarter — equivalent to a 13 to 26 percent increase from Q2 2012. In turn, it expects operating income to be between -$340 million and +$10 million. In other words, a potential loss.

For more, find Amazon’s Q1 earnings announcement here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Socialising the travel experience – in the way that Airbnb ‘socialised’ apartment rentals – has proved harder than expected. “Hot” Berlin-based startup Gidsy has spent almost two years touting its peer-to-peer booking platform for discovering local experiences and things to do. It attracted $1.2 million in a seed round in January 2012, with Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher participating. But recently rumours surfaced that the company was deadpooling, unable to raise a follow on round based on its current growth figures. It’s now been acquired by competitor GetYourGuide in an undisclosed deal. The latter has offices in Berlin and Las Vegas. Clearly, it’s that Berlin connection that proved vital in this deal.

Gidsy’s investors were Danish VC Sunstone Capital, London-based Index Ventures, SoundCloud CEO Alexander Ljung, Berlin Angel Christophe Maire and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

There’s no guessing where GetYourGuide to the capital to acquire Gidsy. In January it closed a $14 million Series A funding round with investment from Spark Capital and Highland Capital Partners Europe, the newly opened European arm of Highland Capital Partners.

Edial Dekker, CEO and co-founder of Gidsy, said the company and its team of 12 would become part of GetYourGuide, along with his cofounder brother Floris and Phillipp Wassibauer. Dekker will become head of mobile development for GetYourGuide, his brother will become head of design.

Dekker told me: “It’s true we had to change the business model of Gidsy to more sales (and less p2p!), and GYG was already doing that, but in a much better way than we did. It only makes sense, to bring together both teams. All the things we worked on a lot (social, product) we can immediately apply at GYG. We’ve also been working a lot on mobile in the last months, but we did not launch it yet. We’ll have a huge opportunity to work on the same problems we tried solving in the first place: bringing people together around activities.”

Gidsy was founded in 2011 and attracted a lot of interest, building a respectable community with booking activities in more than 140 cities and 40 countries.

However GetYourGuide, founded in Switzerland in 2008, has become a large platform for tours and activities globally, signing a lot of real-world partners, rather than using Gidsy’s crowd-sourced approach. It offers over 19,700 activities provided by professional suppliers in more than 1,930 destinations worldwide and has distribution partnerships with more than 1,500 online travel agencies, travel operators and media companies, such as TripAdvisor.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch