Tripshare, an iPad application for travel planning, is joining a crowded space. But its CEO knows a little something about the industry – Bob Dana was the former employee No. 1 and first CFO of Virgin America. He once wrote the business plan and feasibility study for Sir Richard Branson in 2003. And now he’s doing a travel startup.

Dana tells us the inspiration for Tripshare was based on a personal experience he had years ago. As CFO, he spent 10 hours on a plane each week flying back and forth from New York to California. In 2006, Dana was trying to convince his family to come out to California for a vacation, so he put together a proposed itinerary to help sell the idea.

“I ended up preparing this 10-page Word document that included text and photos I cut and pasted from various websites. It was intended to be persuasive in nature, and collaborative, too,” he explains. “I thought afterwards, that collaborative travel planning was something that was rather difficult to do.”

But not only was it difficult to plan, it was also hard to move from the point of inspiration and discovery to actually booking the trip. This idea later formed the basis for Tripshare, which he founded two years ago.

The app was originally built in conjunction with then co-founder and CTO Ken Goto, a former director of engineering at Apple. Goto has since moved on but his ex-Apple development team, including acting CTO Eric Kapke, now continues the work.

The app itself has actually been live in the iTunes App Store as unpublicized beta since August 2012. However, though that app was functionally similar, it drew some criticisms from early users because of its user interface. Today’s version is an overhaul and much improved.

Still, despite having done no publicity or marketing, Tripshare has been downloaded nearly 20,000 times while still a work in progress. In other words, today’s release is technically a version 2.0, but for all intents and purposes, this is the big debut.

Designed for those planning vacations or other complex trips with multiple destinations or activities, Tripshare allows you to browse, collect and share information with others before booking. Using the iPad’s big screen, you can flip through photos of destinations and lodgings, create itineraries and discover flights, hotels, restaurants, activities and more.

Today, the app allows you to explore more than 20,000 cities worldwide, plus 500,000+ lodging options, thousands of flights, and more than 200,000 tours, activities and restaurants.

After creating a sample itinerary, you can then share it to other Tripshare iPad users, or via email, Facebook, and Twitter. For those not using the iPad application, the shared trip displays in the web browser. These trips can include all the details, too – photos, descriptions, reviews and prices – so your family and/or friends won’t have to redo the work on their end before giving you their feedback. Pricing and availability also update in real time, something another new planning app, Pintrips, offers as well, but on the web.

Users can also communicate with the trip organizer within the application using an IM-like chatting function, or leave suggestions if the trip’s planner is offline.

While there are quite a few trip planning applications and services on the market (and that’s an understatement ) what makes Tripshare stand out is not the uniqueness of the idea, but the overall package. The app’s user interface is easy to use, which is critical when planning complicated trips where you’re trying to pack in a lot of activities and outings.

At first glance, Tripshare seems inspired by Khosla-backed social travel app Jetpac, which uses smart technology to index photos from social networks, allowing you to see where friends have traveled in order to find inspiration for trip-planning purposes. It has the same general layout, and it shares some common features, such as the idea of making a list of places you want to go.

But Tripshare’s photos don’t come from Facebook. They’re high-resolution images from its travel partners, including HomeAway, Fly.com, the Expedia Affiliate Network, and Viator.com. Plus, the overall vision for the application is not one of just inspiration, but converting that inspiration into an actionable itinerary by actually allowing you to book the trip, including the flights, hotels, outings and more, directly in the app.

Dana says the company plans to integrate content from more travel aggregators and services into the app in time, including things like vacation rentals from Flipkey, car rentals, restaurant reservations, cruises, safaris, and even travel insurance. By year end, the plan is to have many of these live, as well as an iPhone-optimized application. Afterwards, the goal will be to further build up the social community.

Tripshare is backed by $1.47 million in angel funding; some of that is founder money, and the other part comes mainly from the New York angels community, including David S. Rose.

The app itself is free to users, as it will earn revenue via a percentage of the bookings users make. Tripshare is live here on iTunes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

My car’s steering wheel has taken a beating because of the all the lousy drum fills I’ve banged out on it over the years, and at least one entrepreneur thinks that experience could use a little bit of improvement.

Gregor Hanuschak (who, in a previous life worked for NASA) has put together a Kickstarter project for the Smack Attack, an in-car gadget that lets users make those steering wheel drum solos a bit more substantial.

Here’s the project in a nutshell: the Smack Attack system consists of two separate parts, a steering wheel cover and an app for the iOS device of your choosing. Once that wheel cover is connected to your iDevice via Bluetooth, wannabe Ringo Starrs out there can trigger preloaded drum samples in the app thanks to eight pressure sensors that are nestled snugly inside the fabric of the cover. Naturally, you’ll also be able to customize the samples that get triggered so you can swap out that snare drum for a Wookiee bellow (because, you know, why not?). Oh, and in the event you’re not traveling alone, the app allows for other would-be drummers to jam at the same time… which could spell disaster for your trip depending on how talented your companions are.

As downright silly as the project seems (just take a look at this early Smack Attack promo, for heaven’s sake), Hanuschak is actually trying to tackle a real problem — that tendency for drivers to space out during long stretches at the wheel. By giving drivers something right in their hands to focus on, Hanuschak hopes that the Smack Attack will keep them from making some potentially deadly errors. Of course, one could argue that sticking a musical toy on a steering wheel presents some safety concerns of its own, so it goes without saying that the Smack Attack isn’t the right gadget for everyone. Hanuschak is looking to raise a whopping $200,000 to bring the steering wheel cover/app combo to market by the end of the year, and (assuming you’re a responsible driver) you’ll be able to claim your own in-car music maker for $149.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We were lucky enough to meet with Vernon Kerswell at ExtremeFliers, a 20-something inventor with a passion for little flying things. His latest creation, the Microdrone 2.0, puts a surprisingly powerful brain inside a drone that is about as big as a baseball.

The Microdrone has built-in IR sensors as well as a six-axis gyroscope that stabilizes the copter immediately. Vernon was an effusive and effective presenter, running the drone through its paces as he described his trip to China to find the parts he needed to mass produce these little things.

Kerswell is the epitome of the start-up salesman and his excitement about his new product is palpable. I’m looking forward to trying it out in the harsh environment that is my home when it is launched in May for about $100.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Minube, the social travel startup that focuses on inspiration for would-be travellers, has rolled out a nice update to the trip planning feature of its iOS app.

After creating and sharing a list of things to do and see or where to stay or eat — which works like a draft itinerary — any friends or co-travelers who can been granted access to that list can now message each other in real-time, making it a lot easier to communicate with the group, especially when plans typically change.

In this context, Minube’s travel list making feature has the potential to become a hub of activity not just at the planning stage of a trip, but also during the trip itself.

Despite users creating 65,000 travel lists last year, either for personal use or to share with friends or the wider Minube community, after receiving feedback the company realised there was something missing. Because plans change, lists on Minube needed to be more dynamic, and that meant giving travellers the ability to communicate before and during a trip. In other words, the social travel app wasn’t social enough.

“This way, people on a group trip can keep up-to-date about new developments, like a change in the meeting time, a new restaurant to check out, or simply plan the next day’s activities, without having to leave the list which contains all the places they plan to check out,” explains Minube’s Chris Pearrow.

The new real-time messaging feature works as follows: Users create a list by searching and browsing the app’s travel guides and user-generated recommendations and content, and saving their favorite places. They then invite friends and co-travellers into the list, from which they can access the new real-time chat features.

The new feature builds on Minube’s goal to cover all parts of the travel experience and customer journey — from inspiration, planning, comparison, booking, travelling and sharing travel experiences upon return — though it tries to differentiate its offering from others in the space by starting from the point of inspiration.

The visual app enables users to explore new destinations and discover new sights, restaurants, shops, and hotels, based on various criteria like mood, distance from home, type of trip, and length of trip (and even favorite color). The source of this content is recommendations from Minube’s community who have shared their personal experiences, including uploading videos, and photos, from their travels or local area.

Minube says it plans to bring the real-time messaging feature to the company’s Android app, though — perhaps tellingly — isn’t able to confirm that they’ll reach its Windows Phone offering.

Also new to Minube’s iOS app is support for Instagram, Flickr, and 500px, so that users can access all their travel photos from within the service. To date, the company claims 600,000 registered users who have shared over 900,000 photos, 11,000 videos, and recommended over 500,000 places.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I feel oddly guilty rejecting my Uber driver’s offer of a beer and a blunt. It’s 4 am. I’m drenched, hungover, and bewildered as to why I’m in a rustic garage on the outskirts of downtown Austin, watching tattooed pedicab drivers dance with a tiny dog in a pink tutu. This was not the ride home I expected.

Yet, my experience isn’t entirely unusual. After two years of experimenting with Internet services that allow everyday individuals to sell their cars, houses, and things — the so-called “sharing economy” — I’ve become accustomed to getting a face full of the sellers’ hopes, fears and quirks. Between services rendered and cash exchanged, friendships are forged, awkwardness is experienced, and memories are made.

Before the Industrial Revolution uprooted us from our small-town community roots, I imagine most business transactions included a side of humanity. Modern-day business sterilize transactions of the personal element. Human resource departments have hollowed out their employees, leaving little more than a pleasantly smiling husk of a person.

South By Southwest By The Sharing Economy

Every March, over 25,000 technology enthusiasts cram into the moderately sized metro of downtown Austin for the annual tech pilgrimage, South By Southwest Interactive. Hotels are sold out six months in advance, and every public service is bleeding out their windows with demand.

You’d have an easier time catching a cab stumbling naked and drunk down Times Square on New Years Eve than hailing a taxi during SXSW.

At 4 a.m., after the final after parties had simmered down, the only shot I had at making it back to my bed before I had to wake up the next morning was Uber, the popular smartphone taxi application that had contracted with independent pedicabers during SXSW, to usher sleepy technologists to and fro downtown Austin.

I did not, however, foresee the torrential downpour halfway though my trip that instantly saturated my clothes to my frigid bone. No longer able to stand the sharp icicles falling from the sky, yet still needing to finish the ride, our courtesy pedicab driver took a pit stop at Pediacab HQ to pick up his car and stow his bike.

Pedicab headquarters is like the second-class deck of the Titanic, a dimly lit haven where free-spirited tattooed servicemen party their blue collars off to loud music, an abundance of cheap beer, and liberally available recreational drugs.

“I got jungle juice for sale! It’s strong,” yelled a muscular African American man in his mid-thirties, who backed up a truck full of tortellini and cheap liquor, during what appeared to be his nightly run to the breaking pedicabers. Passing off a blunt, a line forms to offer him wads of crumpled dollar bills in exchange for a styrofoam box filled to the brim with cheap, delicious carby goodness.

“They just aren’t cut out for straightforward jobs,” explains my pedicab driver, about his uniform-less colleagues. “I had a regular sort of office job,” he adds. But, pedicabbing “filled a niche that I didn’t even knew existed.”

Indeed, eccentric personalities seem to flock to the peddling business. The night before I had been driven home by a red-headed engineer, whose super-skinny, yet muscular body supported a head with a beard so thick and unkempt, it look liked it had burst out of his chin. He told me that between judo tournaments, he was pulling 22-hour days as a driver to pay for graduate school in geographic information systems.

It goes to show that behind every invoice and credit card terminal is a person who has experienced their own unique set of crazy, which life inevitably presents while living on our crowded Earth. Traditional retail robs us of a truer view of humanity, with its memories and the tangible sense of its diversity.

Though I wouldn’t knowingly pay money for it, sometimes the worst experiences are the most enriching. I once endured 20 minutes of forced laughter, as my driver regaled me with his amateur comedy routine. Lyft, a popular car-sharing alternative in San Francisco, encourages its drivers to be extroverted. Usually, this just means a mandatory fist-bump and a “how’s your day?” On occasion, it’s much more.

My would-be comedian driver reminded me that not every starving artist is hocking paintings on a street corner. More often than not, it’s a cashier scribbling notes in between customers, dreaming of the day he’ll make it big and tell his boss to screw off. Many of the world’s cherished artists, scientists, policymakers, and businessmen have humble roots.Who knows how much creativity and innovation the world has lost due to the callous whims of an entitled consumer.

So, while I can’t give our comedian his big break, my time with the sharing economy has made me more patient with those I regularly interact with. I’ll think twice about giving the stink eye to a barista who forgets my request for extra-foam on my no whip tazo chai frappuccino. I’ll wish my Verizon customer service agent a happy Easter. I might even refrain from tweeting nasty remarks at a politician or vote for a bill to fund a community arts center.

Or, as the Scottish author Ian MacLaren once reminded us:

This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched. It is a fact, however surprising. And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re looking for stuff to do, in a new city or your own, there are various ways to get that info, including Yelp, Zvents, Frommer’s guides and more. Waterloo-based Rebellion Media would rather all that data was collected in a single hub, however, where travelers could get a quick look at everything they need for trip planning in a single place, based on a map-centric interface that’s fast and easy to use, which is why they created TripWhat.

TripWhat is a travel-oriented search engine for iPhone and web. There are lots of different travel apps out there, which is why I asked TripWhat co-founder Chris Reid about the decision to add another one to the mix. After all, even if there’s still a lot of demand for travel products out there among consumers, it’s beginning to get harder to distinguish yourself as an app in the travel category.

“One problem we really see is that a lot of this information is siloed, so you’ll have something like SeatGeek, you’ll have Wikipedia, you’ll have Yelp, you’ll have Urbanspoon and you’ll have OpenTable,” he said. “So everyone has their own siloed data set, a little bit of info and a little bit of value-add that the other one doesn’t, so if you’re trying to figure out what’s best in a region, normally you’d have to search across all these siloes to piece it together.”

TripWhat’s goal, then, is to unify all this data across separate contexts, meaning that if there’s a band playing an event that SeatGeek knows about, for instance, TripWhat will eventually be able to draw that info in and combine it with data pulled from other sources like Wikipedia and Last.fm for richer context. The ultimate hope is that travelers will be able to go to any city, enter a broad search term related to their interest, and be provided with smart results properly filled out with signals from any relevant data source, to help them build their perfect trip.

With TripWhat’s version one product, you can see the seeds of that larger goal at work; in densely populated areas, it already returns a number of results, and does so quickly, spanning events, restaurants and attractions. Users on mobile can also save their trip for later personal use, and on the web they can do the same, but there trips will be saved to the server and pushed back down to the iPhone app. Eventually, TripWhat hopes to be able to offer community-curated trips searchable by keyword – already it has built some of its own to show how this will look once the curation elements are in place.

Rebellion Media, which is a conglomerate of various startups from the Kitchener-Waterloo area, is using a lot of the natural language and data processing techniques it acquired when it picked up gadget shopping comparison startup Sortable last year. Its project with TripWhat is big and ambitious, but it’s starting with some solid ingredients, including a Google Maps for iOS-inspired design that suits the travel purpose of the app. If it can flesh out this first release to match its larger vision, it stands a chance of distinguishing itself in this crowded market.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We know that Google’s Street View team has been making its technology smaller and more mobile, especially when it comes to people snapping images for Google Maps. Today, the team has shared some imagery from Canada’s Arctic territory of Nunavut.

The difference is that unlike with the Grand Canyon, the person carrying the Trekker on their back wasn’t a Google employee. It was a resident of Nunavut, Chris Kalluk, who works at a nonprofit organization called Nunavut Tunngavik, which is working along with Google to collect imagery and build more detailed maps of the Canadian Arctic.

Much like the Street View team did for its snowmobile mission during the Olympics, the Trekker has been prepped to handle below freezing temperatures, which are the conditions in Canada’s Arctic about eight months of the year, Kalluk explains in the post: “Winter up here is a way of life. And the only way to truly understand it is to see it for yourself.”

Here’s what Kalluk had to share about his experience, the first Trekker expedition in Canada:

I’m wearing the backpack to collect Street View imagery as I walk to the shore of Frobisher Bay, where the wind is the strongest and you can see the tide piling up mountains of sea ice. On the way I’ll pass sled dogs tied up outside houses, yapping in anticipation of their next trip. And I may stop to check out an igloo, built by Inuit craftsmen using methods passed down over a millennia.

As part of its commitment to build a comprehensive and accurate map of Canada’s north, Google visited my home, Cambridge Bay, last August and published imagery of the trip that fall. But this visit to Iqaluit marks the first time the Google Maps team has ventured into an Arctic climate during the winter months, where average temperatures can dip below -30°C [-25°F].

Kalluk and Project Lead at Google Maps, Raleigh Seamster, aren’t just snapping photos with a backpack. The pair spent time with members of the community to discuss how Google Maps would like to collect all of the information about Iqaluit. He says that they spent time with locals explaining Map Maker, the tool where citizens can participate in the creation and updating of Google Maps.

Google is trying to get imagery and information out of every nook and cranny of the globe, and you can imagine a day where we’ll all be able to set out to our favorite spots that haven’t been documented yet, and feed that information back to a global database. In essence, with the tools that Google Street View and Maps have created, we’re all Christopher Columbus, re-exploring and documenting what people have only visited and snapped photos of for themselves and friends for years.

Here’s how Kalluk explained the mission in the Arctic zones: “I like to think of it as our chance to give you the lead sled dog’s view.” In case you never visit Nunavut, Street View is your way of beaming there and visiting. The imagery isn’t available yet, but if the 9,500 Grand Canyon shots are any indication, it’s going to be pretty amazing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google has learned all that it needs to learn about the reception of its Chromebook laptops in the U.S. and UK and has announced availability of Acer, HP and Samsung flavors of its device in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.

As we’ve spent time with Google’s Chromebook and OS, it has become apparent that the goal of the operating system is to focus on what people do on a computer the most, which is surf the web in a browser. Since Chrome has become the No. 1 browser, building an operating system that showcases it makes complete sense.

In addition to this global rollout, Chromebooks will now be available in all 1,000+ Best Buy stores that sell PCs in the U.S. Basically, that’s twice the number of stores that Chromebooks were sold in previously. This in-store rollout will take place over the next two weeks.

As far as the rest of Google’s line of laptops in partnership with Acer, HP and Samsung, there is indeed a niche that has gravitated towards the machine as a lower-cost alternative to the Macbook Air and Windows machines, specifically schools and small businesses.

Google recently launched its Chrome Pixel, which has come with mixed reviews. One thing that most technologists can agree with is that while this machine might not be the end-game for consumer computing, it includes quite a bit of technology that will eventually be priced for mass-markets. I’ve been using the machine for the past few days and the idea of touching your laptop screen is still something of a mind-melt. It’s going to take some time to consumerize this product.

It’s been an active past week in Google Chrome land, as it recently named its VP of Chrome, Sundar Pichai, as head of its Android unit, moving Andy Rubin on to bigger and brighter “moonshots.” Some think that this means the eventual merging of Chrome with the Android OS, which is something we’ve been waiting for.

Can Google get past the “cheap” label? It remains to be seen, but I can say from experience that the machine does exactly what you need it to do, and it does it well. During my trip to India, it’s the only laptop that I had with me, and it did the trick. The only downside to Chrome OS is the lack of popular applications available, such as Skype. That will come in time, and global expansion will help speed that up.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

People spend a ton of money on their cars every year, from car payments to insurance to gas to maintenance. But for such expensive assets, most people normally don’t know a whole lot about what’s happening under the hood, or how they can drive or maintain their cars better over time. The folks at Automatic want to change all that, with a smart combination of hardware and mobile apps to keep people better informed of how their cars are doing.

Automatic has two main components to it: There’s a small hardware dongle that connects to a car’s onboard computer, which provides data about the state of the car and trips it makes, as well as a mobile app that collects and analyzes all that data. Together, they can provide a whole lot more insight into users’ vehicles than they have currently.

The Automatic Link, which connects to a car’s diagnostics port, is a $70 piece of hardware with built-in Bluetooth connectivity for transferring data from your car’s computer to your mobile phone. The app then looks at the data to act as a “smart driving assistant.” Based on what it knows about each trip, it can provide users with tips to help get better fuel efficiency, drive more safely, and extend the life of their cars.

From a high level, the entire app is built to provide insight into the use of your car. It provides a driver score, which is based on a number of factors, such as how many hard brakes the driver takes during a trip, or how often he or she drives over 70 miles per hour. It also provides detailed information about the average fuel efficiency of the car in practical use, versus the EPA-expected gas mileage.

But users can drill down into all of their most recent trips that a driver has taken, giving them a timeline of where they went, how long it took to get there, a map overview of the trip, as well as fuel efficiency and the cost of gas consumed. As drivers get a feel for what parts of their driving are sub-optimal, they can improve them over time, which could save them a ton of money on gas and maintenance.

There’s also a diagnostics aspect to the app: Instead of taking your car to the mechanic to find out what’s wrong when you get that stupid “check engine” light flashing, Automatic can tell users in most cases what’s wrong with the car ahead of time. It also provides a crash alert, recognizing if there’s been an accident and automatically alerting emergency services with the car’s location.

Another handy side feature is the ability to keep track of wherever your car is parked. Once the car shuts down, the app just makes a note of wherever it last connected to the Automatic Link.

Ultimately, though, the goal is to get people driving smarter. “Very small changes in driving behavior can lead to huge increases in efficiency,” Automatic co-founder and CEO Thejo Kote told me. Driving at 70 miles per hour instead of 80, for instance, results in a 15-percent increase in fuel efficiency. And stuff like that adds up to a lot of cash over time.

Kote worked with Automatic co-founder Jerry Jariyasunant at UC Berkeley, where the two spent years working on car tech. The two were originally going to just do Automatic as a set of mobile apps and partner with a third-party on the hardware piece of things, but decided to develop it in-house after all. Automatic investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Y Combinator, as well as a group of angels.

The Automatic Link is available for pre-sale now for $69.95, and is expected to ship in May with the launch of the Automatic iPhone app. An Android version is expected later in the year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch TV sat down with Shaquille O’Neal yesterday afternoon here at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas to talk about his current focus on all things tech, and it was pretty amazing.

People who are successful in the worlds of sports and entertainment aren’t usually the types that you’d associate with nerdiness. But Shaq, who was famously one of the first major celebrities to take to Twitter and had the service’s first verified account, says that he has been a big geek since way before he became a superstar in the NBA and Hollywood — and so being here in the world of technology is coming very naturally to him.

O’Neal is on the advisory board for 15-second video clip platform Tout, and during SXSW he is running a ‘Pitch Shaq‘ contest that invites startups here to send him a 15-second elevator pitch video. The winner, which will be announced this afternoon, will get the opportunity to then meet with O’Neal for a 1-on-1 meeting about an actual investment.

In the video embedded above, you can hear Shaq talk about how he’s proudly embracing his inner geek, what he’s looking for in a startup or founder, how he has bridged so many different industries over the course of his career, the futuristic app that he’s looking forward to seeing, and much more. He’s a really fantastic person to talk to and gave some great insights on business.

What’s unfortunately not in the video is what happened just after our interview wrapped, when I asked if I could get a photo with him. I still have one day left here at SXSW, but I think it’s safe to say that this is the highlight of my trip — if not my career:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch