December 18, 2007

Kango Announces $4 Million Round From Shasta Ventures

Erick Schonfeld

16 comments »

Kango, a semantic search engine for travel, announced that it raised $4 million from Shasta Ventures earlier this year. The terms previously were not disclosed. Kango looks at travel reviews and other information across the Web and automatically generates tags so it can categorize results by how “kid friendly” or “romantic” they may be. I wrote about Kango earlier here.

Today, Kango is also opening up its beta, and accepting more sign-ups on its home page.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 4:55 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Kango Blog » Blog Archive » Private Beta for Family Vacations and Romantic Trips

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December 25th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

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March 24th, 2008 at 3:47 pm

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startupwatch

December 18th, 2007 at 5:15 am

nice concept and a well designed site. seems to have loads of information already.

quite a few startups being launched everyday. another new interesting idea being executed in mobile heavy asia is tagg.in

check it out for yoruself http://tagg.in
Live Crunch

December 18th, 2007 at 5:26 am

I like that, hope that site could help me find new spot in Hawaii.
Tom

December 18th, 2007 at 7:15 am

I love the idea of “themed” travel. Anything that gets away from stars as a stand-in for meaningful ratings for travelers… Not everyone travels the same way…
micfo.com

December 18th, 2007 at 7:21 am

Seems best tour planner, nice idea!
Jeremy

December 18th, 2007 at 9:02 am

I know Yen Lee from Yahoo, he’s an incredible leader and knows the travel space like no other.

Given the success of other Yahoo’s I worked with that have since left the mothership, I’m expecting huge things from Kango. It’s a very nice site, and the concept is original, which is a challenge in the travel space because it is very saturated.
Brian

December 18th, 2007 at 9:31 am

Live Crunch:

http://www.kango.com/hawaii

Kango will indeed help you find things to do in Hawaii; Maby even some new ideas that you have not tried out yet.

There are 342 things to do in Honolulu alone listed in the Kango database
http://www.kango.com/things_to.....60948.html

That should keep you busy
Ballmer

December 18th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

Shasta! I do like their cherry sodas!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
2001-2008

December 18th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

when is this going in deadpool!
no wait… scatch that… when is AOL buying this for 360 mills!
Eliza

December 18th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

The concept behind Kango has HUGE potential - v. v. cool.
I checked out their “almost beta” site and it left me wanting more - in a good way. I can’t wait till all the search methods are available and the site is fully up and running. (thought: it would be nice to be able combine search themes for cross search results)

The design is clean and user friendly and it looks like a huge amount of work has been put into the info architecture. Smart site, exciting capabilities.

My only complaint: I’m not crazy about the font they’ve used - oh, and the blue used for the search results links doesn’t jive with the purple of the tabs above… Nitpick much?
Alexa

December 18th, 2007 at 3:22 pm

Hope they have information on visiting me in Brazil! Good luck with the venture!
Chin

December 18th, 2007 at 4:26 pm

For our two recent trips, my wife and I have tried to use kango. Even in its pre-beta stage, it’s quite impressive.

I also have had the pleasures of talking to a couple of insiders of kango lately. I think what they do indeed refects what will be done by most in this space in the future, but by then all of them will be playing catch up with kango.

The kango people I have spoken with are not only knowledgable and open, but also very progressive. This is a travel site that I am confident will get better and better quickly as time goes by. I encourage you to try it out too, and send in your feedbacks. The kango people do listen!
KR

December 18th, 2007 at 8:51 pm

I enjoyed Tim Ferriss’ “4 Hour Workweek”, but have not been able to reduce my work load to this level… yet.

When my family travels, we are looking to get some good bang for the buck in terms of fun activities/time. Kango provides an excellent way to find popular destinations and tips for managing the crowds and expenses for these places, but perhaps more importantly provides the hidden gems off the beaten path.

Google is busy trying to organize the world’s information, and doing an excellent job. However, there is room for vertical search. In many respects FaceBook, MySpace and LinkedIn have become the new people search engine. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia search engine.

Travel is a complex, ever-changing, and popular sector that should garner significant pageviews and traffic. No reason that Kango with its financial backing and seasoned executive staff can’t emerge to be a major force in this space.
Kevin

December 18th, 2007 at 10:00 pm

not bad for an “almost beta” site - I have seen much worse public launches. This concept has legs - and I am anxious to see the next version. Since I am a family guy (not THE Family Guy) I really liked the idea of being able to search for family-friendly vacations. It is soooo hard to find really good places to stay and go where my 3 children will actually like stuff the brochure-ware online says are “great for kids”. And the little things like showing me maps and reviews together - simple but exactly what you want to see right up front. Hope this goes public before I have to plan our summer getaways…