Nile Guide, a sophisticated travel planning site that launched just over a month ago, has raised $8 million in Series B from Austin Ventures, Lehman Brothers, and existing investors Draper Richards and KPG Ventures. The round brings Nile Guide’s total to over $9.5 million.
We’re told that since launch, the site has added support for 5 more destinations: Istanbul, Vienna, Sedona, New Orleans, and Cusco. The homepage has been simplified so you can select destinations from a list. And Nile Guide now suggests particular neighborhoods that it thinks you should check out when visiting a destination.
Internet Explorer 6 support is planned for July 1st, as is support for Moscow, Shanghai, Vail, Calgary/Canadian Rockies, and Costa Rica. No word yet on when the site will work in Safari.
Also see our coverage of Dave Sifry’s Offbeat Guides.
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I just have to wait for I.E 6 support .
I dont really want to deal with any issues I.& may unleash on my computer at this time .
My I.E 6 works just fine …
How are these guys raising money so fast? Their browser support is awful and the site design feels very dated. Table-based layout? Animated gif logo?? Really?!?
Couldn’t agree more with #2.. the logo is just annoying because I keep looking at it waiting for it to do some magic at the end of it’s loop.. but alas. The support.. IE6 in July? After launching the site? right, that’s the way to go, you start with the smallest usergroups and then work on the big ones, minimalize revenue and maximize development time as the newer browsers are pretty much capable of doing everything the old browser can do.
For a travel guide like this, the content is king.
However, as a New Yorker in the past 3 years… I can’t disagree with the recommended activities more. First of all, “Harlem” as a top recommended activity? I hope they also recommend a bullet vest. I also do not recognize any of the nightlife/restaurants (and I’d like to think I have explore a good portion of NYC).
While I do not know how contents are in other cities, but if they are similar to NYC, the NileGuide folks need to drastically improve the quality of their recommendations.
No Safari support!! Apparently Mac owners don’t travel!
The lack of browser support is hard to fathom, considering the site is a Google Web Toolkit application that handles a lot of the cross-browser issues for you. In my experience, GWT apps that run under Firefox tend to do well under Safari, both being standards-compliant. And behind the scenes, GWT doesn’t differentiate between IE6 and IE7, so it is a mystery why one is supported and not the other.
A site that “works in one or two browsers” is a site that is not finished, but I would imagine that these issues will be sorted out in the near future. You can’t have a press releases without a site, and only nileguide know whether the site release was premature or not, but I imagine a decision was made to go with what was there.
Nile is a joke. I live in Amsterdam and I looked at their top rated Amsterdam restaurants — they’re among the worst in the city. Completely ridiculous and misleading but that’s fine. If Nile Guide sends all the tourists to the dodgy places in town, that means we locals get to keep the gems to ourselves. Bravo!
I need to add another warning about Nile Guide’s Amsterdam recommended hotels. Their No. 2 recommendation is the Hotel Belga. I live across the Belga and have even seen the rooms (because I was trying to figure out if I should recommended it to a visiting friend). It was rather frightening. Nile Guide also recommends a Van der Valk hotel outside Amsterdam. I have no idea how they get their content but it might help to ask a local. Oh my goodness. Let’s just say that Dutch comedians often include the Van der Valk hotel chain in their comedy routines.
“NileGuide.com is best experienced using an Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox browser. At this time we don’t support Internet Explorer 6, Safari, Opera, or other browsers. If you’re a Mac user, please visit us via your Firefox browser. Thanks!”
NileGuide - epic fail.
$8M and not only limited browser support? It still amazes me how projects are managed these days
How are these guys raising money so fast?
This funding is really good news both for consumers and companies in the travel space. With investors beginning to back this next wave of online travel planning - companies will be able to build more robust tools & features to help us do more than just book and/or review things.
The offering that we’re developing here at GoPlanit.com aims to make trip planning easier and less aggravating for people. Hopefully we’ll help lead this wave~
I have to agree with most here that their site isn’t all that great and the lack of Safari support is sad (I’m even on a PC!). This site interested me because I’m working on something similar and with the exception of a few features ours will be much nicer
Being a developer I also had to take a look at the code and I agree with #2. Also, did you see those URLs?? Holy cow what a mess. Trying copying and pasting one of those in an email to a friend. Wake up guys.
#12 (Steve) I look forward to seeing yours
What exactly do you have to do to raise $3M for a site like that?
Thanks to everyone for their feedback. We’re doing lots of exciting things here at NileGuide, and as I’m sure most of you know, building a world-class product is a constant exercise in prioritization.
We’ve heard from many of you that browser support is an important issue. To that end, as the article mentioned, we’ll be adding IE 6 support in our upcoming release. Of course we could enable IE 6 users to access the site today, but we want to make sure the experience is as good as possible…meaning we want to make sure each supported browser has a QA process in place.
Since Safari is only 3% of the browser market, and since Mac users can access us using Firefox, we made the decision to focus on making the site more powerful, intuitive, and easy to use before investing in additional browser support. When dealing with limited development bandwidth, it’s always a tough call. There are always tradeoffs to be made between, for example, bug fixing vs new features vs site performance vs design enhancements. However, given the feedback, we’ll consider whether to make the site available to Safari users in our next release, even if we don’t have the capacity to make all the little fixes necessary to make the site look perfect. Perhaps that strikes a good balance. As a side note, we also recognize that a) many Mac users prefer not to use Firefox and b) many Mac users are thought leaders, web-savvy, technophilic early adopters who drive mass market opinions, so we know that the impact of Safari compatibility may extend beyond pure market share data.
In addition, we’ve received comments from some of you about content issues — in some cases, out of date information, and in others, inappropriate recommendations. Of course, while still in beta we’re working out the kinks on our content processes, but rest assured, we think that great content, more than anything else, will differentiate NileGuide in the market. In that regard, it’s great when we get feedback about recommendations that should be improved, and we act on them, both with our internal content team, and working with our local experts around the world. With hundreds of thousands of points of interest around the world, we’re striving to find the right balance between pure software automation (which doesn’t reach our target threshold for quality) and pure manual intervention (which is difficult to scale). We think a hybrid approach that leverages existing content sources, but adds key value using Nile software and our human local experts, is the right solution.
Finally, we’ll be adding many cool new features (and destinations), and upgrading the site design over the course of 2008. To date, we’ve been a tiny company with limited funding, and we’re proud of what we’ve built on that basis. Now we’re excited to really invest in building a truly world-class travel planning solution.
Thanks again for constructive feedback and suggestions, and keep them coming.
Dear sir / madam, if you have investment plans, send us your proposals with your required details.
Thanks Regards,
Shaik Saleem
bet investors are wishing they didn’t stink money into this one. I predict they will deadpool