Technorati founder Dave Sifry, who left the company a little over a year ago, is launching a new company called Offbeat Guides this morning into private beta. Sifry’s blog post on the launch is here.
Think Lonely Planet travel guides, except they are created on the fly from Internet data sources, customized to you personally and then delivered via PDF instantly or (a color printed version) by mail within 4 business days. Data comes from open sources like wikipedia, wikitravel, Flickr and Google Maps, as well as proprietary sources that have cut deals with the company. And you can create a guide for virtually anywhere in the world - they have 30,000 or so destinations today, and will be adding regional versions in the futures (”France” or “Napa Valley” for example).
Users can add or remove sections that appeal to them (museums, for example, or walking tours), and the guides include things like up to date weather forecasts, events that are going on during your visit, current exchange rates, etc. If you tell it where you are staying, the guide will include walking maps based on that location. An example guide that I created is embedded below.
The guides aren’t free - a printed version costs $25, PDF (which can be printed at home or downloaded to a laptop or Kindle) is $10. Unsatisfied customers can get a full refund, the site says, and keep the guide.
Offbeat Guides raised a small seed round of financing (a “few hundred thousand dollars” says Sifry) in February 2008. The first 250 people to use the code “TechCrunch” can get into the beta immediately, along with coupons for two free books.
Also below is an interview with Sifry about Offbeat Guides from last week (Thanks to Michael Pick for the video branding work). And see our coverage of Nile Guide, which is also allowing users to create personalized travel itineraries.
what a great idear
Fair play to this guy for his cheek. Selling outdated content - written by amateurs and almost certainly unverified by a fact checker - at stupid prices. Wonderful.
Has anyone actually been through the Paris guide? It is useless. Nothing is plotted on the maps, there are no map references for any sights, no street index… It is one great big exercise in copy/paste.
I also wonder what a guide for less well wiki-ed places would like like? What would an offbeat guide to Albania contain?
Anyone who is idiot enough to order one of these should send me $10 too for pointing out their folly.
Perish the thought a travel start-up actually considers visiting the places they cover.
@48 he has definitely violated any Creative Commons licence that only allows copying for a not for profit purpose, it is irrelevant whether the purpose is useful to others or not. I suspect, as No 37 does, that he will also take a hit from the sensibilities of the original open source community.
The bigger issue is this - if sucking data off other sites for resale is accepted as a general practice, we are going to see a fairly major restructuring of the web publishing game.
There is no practical difference between this and me sucking data off TechCrunch et al to resell as pdf books about technology companies - After all, we are one big naked conversation, right ;-).
(Actually, I note TC uses full copyright - thats one rapid change I expect to see on blogs and public wikis)
This is a classic scrape of the commons gig…… I can now safely predict the rush of a thousand scraper-publishers, the defensive acts by several thousand websites.
Mo’ thoughts here:
http://broadstuff.com/archives.....mmons.html
You might know wikitravelpress.com who reprint wiktravel content with additional editorial content. So less sources, but at an editor. And available on Lulu print on demand.
And again I wonder how this fits with the Creative Commons (CC) licence. I understand that if you use content, the result has to apply the same licence. So how can you sell it?
As someone else already pointed out Lonely Planet already do this and it’s cheap… (See: http://www.travelblather.com/2.....e-for.html) And despite recent hoo haa) about one writer who says he didn’t visit lots of places he wrote about for them, their info is going to be a lot more dependable than stuff dragged off the net….
What about copyright issue?
Since they use wikitravel etc which uses Creative Commons license. The resulting materials must also be in the same CC license. That implies their docs can be distributed and remixed freely. Isnt that a problem for them?
Sifry is actually second to the personalized travel guide game. ProfessionalTravelGuide.com recently launched its PocketGuide book, powered by SharedBook.
Now users can print travel guides that contain information from ProfessionalTravelGuide’s database – the same professional database that all offline and online travel agents use – 300 fields of info on more than 159,000 hotels, 7,000 destinations guides, 10,000 hotel reviews, thousands of restaurant reviews, maps, etc.. and the prices start at $18.95.
One can also printout and/or download an eGuidebook from the site for free.
I think its a fantastic product, but I must confess my first thought was copyright. Can I print off wikipedia, bind it, and sell it for $100’s ? (lets ignore the fact about who would but it … or hang on, actually …?)
Presumably David is paying a license atleast for the maps? As they are definitely covered by a different license than for re-use online via an API - in the same way that Google nor MS can allow maps use on mobile as their licenses do not cover allowing users to access the API and use their map tiles (with their knowledge) on mobile…?
Surprised TC didn’t clarify this. Be great if you could…
@Michael - Rummble can provide you personalised content for your trip on your mobile. We don’t provide all the ancillary info, but partnering with others, that wouldnt be hard - we could just partner with OffBeat
We’ll be getting our core offering polished right first, but meanwhile I’ll be making some calls…
From travel price search to travel info search.
I don’t see travel metasearch big success. the same will happen to info search.
if you really want offbeaten info, you will enjoy surfing the web as part of your travel. If you don’t have time than you need aquick list of good places you will ask your friends and concierge.
If I had the money of these (or at least a small part, and we talk about it ..) I would focus on the process of finding good recommendation not the content. And make the process enjoyable.
For people who have money for a service like this I would arrange a truely personalized guide with live agent sessions for getting the full requirements and would build the guide IN COLLABORATION with the client. Like a review process.
I would hire local guide who would sell this small effort as a amarketing tool for further touring sale.
In short I would try to understand the whole process of searching information and the trust issue which different than collecting content and packginfg it.
I wish I had a small part of that money to proove it.
bye
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
sounds good, good luck
Great product, though I cant see why would anyone wanna get it since AIm offers free incoming calls on their local numbers and offers $14.95 for unlimited calling in the US and Canada ( yes they still offer it to a few selected ) They are heavily promoting their call out feature.
If the price here was a little lower it would be a great sell.
very interesting article, I think it was helped so many users, thx for helpful informations thx
you can book tours online with my website and don’t pay advance.
this site provide private tour guide in Egypt with low cost