Tuesday, September 16, 2008

GoPlanIt - the Travel representative in the TechCrunch50

The second annual TechCrunch50 conference is over. This is the start up demonstration conference organised by web-celeb and CEO of Mahalo Jason Calacanis and uber blogger Mike Arington of TechCrunch. The conference profiles 50 web/tech start-ups, which compete for a $50,000 prize.

This year's travel nominee/competitor (there only ever seems to be one) was GoPlanIt.

GoPlanIt is a trip planning site. Enabling consumers to add activities, trip itineraries, maps and commentary to a trip plan. Naturally it comes with reviews and social networking/sharing/mobile access elements. It's difference from a "standard" web 2.0 planning site is that you can hit the PlanIt button and have a trip itinerary automatically recommended and built based on the behaviour of other users. This of course can then be modified and edited. The only downside is the that it takes time to build up the necesary history nad connections. Hence the service is currently only available in America. Here is the TechCrunch review/profile.

Being the travel nominee for 2007 was a great kickstart last year for TripIt. Since being part of TechCrunch50 they have raised another round (including an investment from Sabre). Just recently announce that the CEO of Mozilla Corporation (John Lilly) joined the TripIt board. Just this week king of the blogs Robert Scoble asked his readers/twitterers which online travel services they used. TripIt was mentioned again and again in the replies. You can re-read my interview with TripIt CEO Gregg Brockway here.

You can see a video stream of the GoPlanIt presentation here by CEO and founder Steve Chen and the presentation of the eventually winner - Yammer (TechCrunch Profile)

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