Technorati founder Dave Sifry found himself far from home - Dalian, China, to be exact, a city of 7 million near Shenyang. While hunting for guidebooks, he thumbed through multiple volumes and found plenty on the terracotta warriors and Beijing but nothing about Dalian. Thus OffBeatGuides was born.
We taked about the site in June but it launched today at SIME 2008 in Stockholm.
The site allows you to enter your name, travel plans, and hotel. The system then pulls information from various sites including data from Accuweather and notes and articles by professional travel writers along with Creative Commons licensed homebrew content. It also includes maps, restaurants, and attractions in the area.
Once you’ve built your book you can download it as a PDF for $9.95 or purchase it in physical form for $24.95, which also includes the PDF. You can also connect to the Internet and read it online on the go.
Sifry wanted “something I can look at while driving a car” - presumably meaning he wants a paper book that doesn’t require much bandwidth to open and consult while traveling. He was also excited about “physically holding the object,” a noble goal in this digital age.
The site is currently in public beta.
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very nice! i would just print the pages and use them to do my siteseeing
DK Travel has been doing this already and they charge $5 for the PDF or $15 for the hard copy, so David may need to revise his pricing…
http://traveldk.com/how-to/create-guides
I also like the touchy feely aspect.
Just tried it out. The information is surprisingly in depth.
Funny- In 1999 I was involved in exactly the same business concept. We called it booktailor. In those days it did not fly for several reasons. Today, with the Android Application starting to emerge, there will be a strong substitute on the horizon. Lets see what will happen. For consumers it is a great service.
Here is the link: http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cg.....e?id=14025
Very nice, hope its a success!
pretty cool product, imo.
I wonder what kind of partnership they set up with Accuweather.
also, i haven’t bought any pdf’s yet, but do they protect it so only the purchaser can open them?
Just get a pdf password cracker and you can print them free
Thanks for the kind words - things are still very much beta, so we’re still working on issues, making the information even more topical, personalized, and current, and working with some great travel publishers as well, so stay tuned.
As for @Jeff’s question, we don’t protect the PDFs, no need for a password cracker. What we’re focusing on is making the guides personalized, timely, and topical, so even if you get a PDF from a friend for his trip from last year, you’ll want to get a guide with all the information for the specific dates of your trip.
Feel free to share your PDF with others, it’s the best publicity we can get.
Tell your friends!
Dave
Great work David and all at OffBeatGuides. I have thought for a while now that using Web2.0 thinking the travel sector was totally open for this kind of Personal Print on Demand.
Now you just need to also pull in some social graph details (friends of friends to contact perhaps?, places friends have liked, etc.) and then you’re killing it.
David - I remember that late night photowalk in London when you and Scoble were sharing news of those next big ventures. Seems like just a couple weeks ago. Way to go to you and the staff! FANTASTIC product.
John, did i pay for you to go to stockholm? Why are you in Stockholm?
Are you an investor in the company?
sigh.
I guess this will soon evolve into an iphone app?
Nice product.. I’ve just tried it for some cities in Europe..
If you don’t want to pay for the PDF, you can simply copy & paste the content and print it for Free…
http://www.octoprice.co.uk
You can also steal a guidebook in a bookstore
One point that this article doesn’t really emphasise is that (at least to my understanding) OBG is using licensed content as well as creative commons content. So it’s not just pulling a bunch of free content from the web and wrapping it up in something you pay for, there are content deals going on in the background that the end user benefits from, and this is exclusive content that isn’t simply the Wikipedia page for any given country stuffed into a PDF.
Maybe someone from OBG can clear this up.
Yes, that’s right, @yongfook. We’ve also developed a licensing platform so that we can work with travel book publishers in getting their info out in personalized books, powered by Offbeat Guides…
Interesting application. We were just in Rochester, NY, which is a little out of the way
, so I just built a guide to check it out. Lots of good “static” information - like the history of the city, getting around,,,, I was disappointed with the Eat chapter. We ate at a restaurant called Virtu that was opened in Feb 2007. It is a very good restaurant, located right on the Erie canal, with a gorgeous deck overlooking the water,,,,, and it was not mentioned in the Eat chapter. I wonder where they pulled their restaurant information from and why Virtu would be left off?
Ian,
Thanks for mentioning Virtu. I’ve just added to PlanetEye’s travel planning service - http://tinyurl.com/57tovj.
cheers, Mark
I’m surprised! We actually have a bunch of people from Rochester, I’m surprised at the oversight. I’ll have our folks look into it.
Dave
Congrats on the launch David - this is an excellent product. Much success.
Roy
Can’t believe no one has said anything about how it might be dangerous to read while driving…
haha. Love the sarcasm
Hmmm,,, I just tried it for Healdsburg, CA. It left off Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen at Hotel Healdsburg. I am now officially unimpressed.
I love this product, Dave! I’ve traveled the world several times over, and this would have been so helpful on those soujourns. Great stuff. (disclosure: Dave is the Chairman of my company)
tripwolf.com offers the same thing for FREE: DIY pdf travel guides. tripwolf guides contain professional editorial travel content, the stuff that you normally only find in books.
Disclosure: I’m the CEO of tripwolf.com, and we have a partnership with MairDumont, Europe’s biggest publisher of travel guides.
For a traveler like me, this is an awesome product. Simple to use and I love the fact it lists current events happening at a given destination. Congratulations!
I was fortunate to use one of these guides when I went on my trip to San Francisco in August. The detail and depth that was given in the book was amazing. The history and review of the city was a great read to prepare me for my trip while the sections on food/activities/events/etc was phenomenal while I was in the city. I could not have asked for anything more! My favorite part of the book had to be the personalization (of what I enjoy and of the time that I was visiting) could never have been given in a traditional travel guide.
Great job to Dave and the Offbeat crew!
I don’t exactly know how Dave thinks he can compete in this arena. As an experienced world traveller, I can tell you that Lonely Planet, Rough Guides and more dominate the travel book industry. If I wanted to purchase one of those, I could do so online, buy it on Amazon used, or just pick one up when I go to my destination. Any non-westernized country will also have knock-off editions of all these travel guides that are around $5 once I get there. In addition, there are so many user generated travel resources out there, that I can print out myself if I wanted and make it into a nice little book. Wiki Travel guides, Bootnall Travel Network, Travel Blogs, Lonely Planet’s UG section, TripAdvisor, and so many more can give me this info for free. Come on, $24.95 for a printed version or $9.95 for a PDF? Sounds like you should have talked to a few more travellers before launching this thing. I just don’t see the appeal here. Nice functionality and design, but I give it a 2 on execution. Sorry.
I’ve read about this service and would be interested in trying it out for a really cool country like Brazil. Disclosure: I run a website on why Brazil is really cool.
Although I haven’t checked out any competitor sites, it seems to be quite easy to use and helpful for the traveler. I found one tiny error in English while browsing the Language section of the São Paulo guide.
Stop staring (at) me this way!
Pare de olhar para mim desta maneira!
Someone forgot the ‘at’.
We launched a similar product called Fresh Guides in the early 00s. We created loads of custom, continually updated content that could be printed on demand into a book format (the world’s most up-to-date guidebook!). Unfortunately, the marketing costs were huge, far beyond our projections and we quickly pulled the plug. So my experience is that Jason is correct: the big brands dominate the bookstores, and the free and user-generated online content dominate the search engine(s), making a hybrid product like this a hugely difficult sale. Not impossible, but very very expensive to realize. On the other hand, being a travel publisher totally rocks, so enjoy the ride!
I setup Booktailor, i.e. this very same idea, with Bertelsmann funding in 1999 - the functionality, sources (we licensed fromLonely Planet to the Financial TImes travel section) and technical platform was awesome, our team was superb, but the market was slow to react (our plug was pulled when awareness needed to be created through marketing) . A bit of a niche field to start a concept, but a very fascinating one at the same time
I wish you a lot of success! Maybe now the time is right, and after iPod/iTunes has proven that a la carte wins…
Chiara Medioli
(CEO of Fabriano Boutique, former founder and CEO of Booktailor)
You know you can copy and paste the guide right?