Since launching early last year, young social travel site
Gogobot has been off to a pretty good start, or at least it has, shall we say, been hitting all the stops.
As Jason pointed out recently,
it was named one of Time’s top sites for 2011, won a Crunchie for best
design in 2010, and brought its total funding to just under $20 million
with a series B raise from Redpoint Ventures, Battery Ventures and
CrunchFund.
It launched a good looking iOS app in October, and has seen its user base grow 10x in the last six months.
But, so what, right? As we’ve
written before,
the travel space is rife with newcomers. And TripAdvisor, the leader in
the space and the veteran incumbent is on its way towards an IPO, but
there are still a few things it doesn’t do as well as some of the
younger travel sites. Gogobot CEO Travis Katz specifically cites fraud
and the fact that most reviews are left by strangers — not your friends —
and it’s this social travel recommendation functionality that Gogobot, I
would agree, does fairly well.
The trick for these young startups is to leverage the wealth of data
now available from social and LBS services to give their own apps and
websites a more robust set of features, and Gogobot has followed suit,
integrating with Facebook, Foursquare, sharing via Twitter, etc. Part of
its success is thanks to a veteran team of former Myspacers (and Ori
Zaltzman, one of the guys who built Yahoo Answers), who’ve gone down
this road before and know which social buttons to press (and which ones
not to touch with a 10 foot pole).
The other key is that Gogobot has built a reservoir of travel photos,
and its iOS app allows users to select their current location, snap a
photo choose from different filters (like the Instagram for travel), and
turn those into geo-tagged postcards. With its new mobile app giving
users the ability to create geo-tagged postcards on location during
their travels, Gogobot’s announcement today that it will be integrating
with Flipboard — the iPad’s social magazine of record — makes a lot of
sense.
The integration will take a realtime stream of travel photos and
experiences from around the globe, generated using Gogobot’s iOS app,
and transform them into a travel magazine. This will allow both users to
flip through global postcards in a Flipboard magazine-like experience
to reflect on their travels, or to let users at home browse photos from
the comfort of their iPads, discovering new places and getting
inspiration for their next trip.
Each photo that one takes with Gogobot can now be transformed into a
postcard, automatically uploaded to their Gogobot Guide, easily shared
to Facebook, Twitter, and now Flipboard in a magazine-style spread.
Also of note:
Fotopedia launched Flipboard integration this week to create a tech-style magazine for the Le Web Conference in Paris.
For more,
check out Gogobot at home here.