Hitwise published a report of travel website rankings in the U.S (pdf, 216kB). According to the report, the Top-20 sites get almost 50% of all visits to travel sites. And Top-100 sites get about two thirds of visits. Winner takes it all, eh? Absolute visitor numbers are not estimated in the report, only relative values. …
I’ve read a number of forecasts for year 2009 regarding travel industry. Various experts have tried to analyze what’s going to happen next year and what will be the main trends. The credit crunch and economic downturn play a major part in every report – of course – but there are many theories about the …
What sights should I see in Barcelona, Spain? Which trails would be suitable for my type of hiker in the Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado? TripSay answers to these questions by providing recommendations and tips from friends. The idea is simple: instead of browsing through a number of websites and guidebooks, just get the travel …
Regards from the sunny Barcelona! The European early stage investment forum (Easy) was organized in Barcelona this time and I was here representing TripSay. The forum aims at matching startups with business angels around the Europe to create cross-border investment opportunities. Sounds complicated, huh? In reality the event worked quite well. The organizers had invited …
I was asked to speak at the Creative Lapland Seminar in Rovaniemi. The seminar is about experience economy and tourism. In their words: Although experience has become an everyday buzzword, most businesses do not know how to change the core business processes to render customer experiences. A holistic multi-sector approach is a key for successful …
As you probably know, we changed the name of our online travel service from Vailoma to TripSay. The rationale behind the name change was to get a name that’s easier to remember and that gets associated with travel also by people who don’t speak fluent finnish. Anyway, it seems that an other travel start-up changed …
In these digital times it sometimes helps to explain things in analog terms. How to tell about a web 2.0 start up to people who associate business on web with selling dog food at a loss to huge number of potential (vs. buying) customers? One solution: find an analogy from the “real” world. Here’s my …
The “million dollar question”: What makes a good social media web site? Providing a useful service and putting in the standard social media concepts such as social graph, wisdom of crowds and UGC are the pre-requisites but hardly enough if the site doesn’t provoke people’s interest. The diminishing attention span of the Internet public calls …
Social media is one of the Web 2.0 core concepts. As such, understanding the concept thoroughly is one of the keys in developing a successful Web 2.0 web site. Basically social media denotes a site that gives its users tools for interacting with each other. Thus basically any blog or wiki or photosharing system is …