

OpenCoffee 6/16 at Andala in Cambridge, MA - sanj

My team's first big release here at TripAdvisor just went live!<p>I was going to be heading to OpenCoffee tmw, partly to blow off some
steam, partly because I'm solo w/ the baby and partly to talk to folks
that might be interested in joining us to build the next big thing.<p>I'm happy to buy breakfast for anyone that shows up that, at a minimum, can explain what we built.  Or why its cool.<p>I'm aiming to be there at 9am: www.andalacafe.com
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ynniv
TripAdvisor is a big (by startup standards), well established company, but
we're a small, young team and built this feature in a startup timeframe (~ 3
months). Much of our effort was rapidly executing on some ideas of how to make
travel planning more social, while coping with changes to Facebook's API's and
their various announcements at f8. Now we get to leverage ~10 million unique
monthly site visitors and scale for those ~5 million active Cities I've
Visited users sanj mentioned. Sure beats fighting for 10,000 views while
eating ramen.

We've heard many folks say they will "change the game" in travel planning, but
only have some VC funding to show for it. Seems like you might want a product
to go with those claims...

Consider the gauntlet thrown.

 _east ~ side_

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sanj
My team's pointed out that I didn't actually say what we built.

TripAdvisor runs the Cities I've Visited Facebook app:
<http://apps.facebook.com/tripadvisortravelmap>

Over the last 3 years, we've collected over a billion "pins" worth of data
across millions of users. Our MAU is about 5m.

We've added Facebook Connect to our site and now have a box on each geo-
specific page on our site which shows you which of your friends know about
that location, based on their data in our pin database.

What this means is that we find the short list of friends that can actually
help and influence your travel decisions. The tools also pulls together
responses from email & wall posts so that they don't disappear into the
Facebook limbo.

The part that I think is awesome is that we got to build something truly
valuable and useful based on data gathered from a compelling and popular
Facebook app.

See it yourself: <http://www.tripadvisor.com/cambridge,ma>

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sanj
I'm going to Andala. What should I order?

