TripIt, the online travel assistant that debuted at Techcrunch40 and is one of the sites Michael can’t live without, has received $5.1M in Series B funding.

The main contributions for this round come from Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and European Founders Fund. This addition brings the site’s total funding to $6.1M.

TripIt’s main goal is to simplify travel. Users need only forward email confirmations from airlines, hotels, and other travel services, and TripIt generates a simplified comprehensive list of travel plans. TripIt recently launched a mobile version of the site, and also features Closeness Matches, which notify users when they are in the same region as a friend.

O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which contributed to this round, was also responsible for TripIt’s $1M Series A funding round.

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TripIt, the service that creates master travel itineraries out of your confirmation emails, has become even more traveler-friendly with a new mobile site.

Users can access the site at m.tripit.com with their handheld devices. We’ve been told it works best with Blackberrys, iPhones, and Treos (the shot on the right is obviously how it looks on an iPhone).

The new site will support TripIt’s Closeness Matches, a feature that informs travelers when they’ll be in the same areas as their friends. It’s a feature that may very well have been inspired by Dopplr, another hot startup in the travel space.

Michael recently named TripIt as one of the Web 2.0 companies he couldn’t live without.

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Travel organization service Tripit, a TechCrunch 40 finalist that was recently named by Michael as one of the companies he couldn’t live with out, is getting more social with new location-based social ”Closeness” alerts.

“Who’s Close To Me?” automatically notifies users if their travel plans overlap with fellow travelers while on the road, and “Who’s Coming to my City?” automatically identifies colleagues who will be visiting the users hometown when they’re not traveling.

Tripit claims that the new features “offer a unique social network for travelers and their community of contacts.” The ability to connect with other travelers is a nice addition to what is already a good service.

CEO of Tripit Gregg Brockway said that the service provides a better way for Frequent travelers to keep up to date when they “don’t have the extra time to keep track of their travel as well as the travel schedules of their friends, family and associates.”

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This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Five products have been favorites all three years (Flickr, Netvibes, TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress). Five more were favorites last year and this year, but not in 2006 (1-800-Free-411, Amie Street, Digg, Gmail, YouTube). Two were off the list last year but are back now (Delicious, Technorati). And there are seven new products on the list (Amazon MP3 Store, Facebook, Firefox, Google Reader, TripIt, Twitter, Zoho). Some of my picks might be surprising, like Firefox just being added to the list this year (I used Flock previously and was unhappy with Firefox on the Mac, but the 3.0 beta is performing very well). Some of these are close calls (I love Pageflakes, but just not enough to fully switch from Netvibes, for example). And there are a bunch of startups that didn’t make the list to keep it short. I’ve put a few “almosts” at the end to round out the list, as well as a couple of favorite gadgets.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Online travel organization startup (and TechCrunch 40 finalist) TripIt will today release some new features that aim to further simplify booking travel online.

TripIt is a travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans. Travelers manage their travel itinerary with TripIt by forwarding their purchase confirmation emails to the service. TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. You can print or access your itinerary from anywhere including online, in print and on web-enabled mobile devices.

TripIt now syncs itineraries with any personal calendar that supports iCal, including Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, Plaxo, and others. What this means is that TripIt users no longer need to manually update their calenders with trip information; TripIt now does it all, adding details such as flights, hotels, rental cars, restaurant reservations to supported apps.

Other new features going live today include support for temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit and other international features, with international date support coming soon. TripIt also now supports travel confirmation emails from Aer Lingus, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, Tiger Airways, Virgin Blue and Avis Europe, as well as rail providers Amtrak, Eurostar, GNER, UK Trainline and VIA Rail.

See our previous review on how TripIt works here.

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Today’ Web 2.0 Summit ended with a Launch Pad session where six startups each got six minutes to pitch their companies to the crowd and a panel of venture capitalists. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of each with my initial impressions (For a more thorough take on these startups from a real venture capitalist, read Christine Herron’s post):

CleverSet—Best of Show went to CleverSet, a Seattle-based company that takes a sophisticated statistical approach to product recommendations and personalization. This is not exactly an unknown company. It’s technology already powers 85 sites, including Sephora’s, Wine Enthusiast, and part of Overstock (I also wrote about them last summer in Business 2.0). CleverSet is applying some advanced math to improving recommendations, and claims to increase revenues for Websites that implement its technology by 18 to 30 percent, on average. If that’s true, they deserve to win. But then I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve his movie recommendations, and he expressed some skepticism about how useful any statistical approach can be. Hastings has found that even within just the category of movies, knowing what horror films someone likes tells you nothing about what dramas they might like. So making statistical correlations across products would be even more difficult.

TripIt—A company that presented at TechCrunch40, TripIt builds a personalized itinerary starting from your airline confirmation. A useful travel organizer. See Mike’s previous post.

G.ho.st—All of our data and applications are moving online, why not the operating system? G.ho.st is a Web operating system of sorts that ties together all the data and applications you may be using across different Websites with one password and URL. Conceptually, I’m with them. But getting people to change their behavior and abandon everything on their desktops except for their browser is going to be tough. (G.ho.st was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit)

SpiceWorks—Ad-supported enterprise software. Already 160,000 IT professionals use SpiceWorks to help manage their computer networks. SpiceWorks then serves up news feeds and product deals targeted at the specific devices on the networks they manage. It’s a consumer approach to enterprise software. This will work—until the ad bubble pops.

ClickForensics—The CEO claims that the click fraud rate is nearly 16 percent (and over 25 percent on distributed advertising networks like AdSense or Yahoo Publishers Network). ClickForensics offers a neutral service to both advertisers and publishers that audits the quality of the click traffic generated by any given ad campaign. This is a community approach to solving a growing problem, although some argue that the click fraud rate is already priced into what advertisers are willing to pay per click, so it is already being taken care of by the markets.

Realius—Combine casual gaming and real estate porn and you get Realius. The fantasy real estate site, which will launch in beta in two weeks (and was also in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit), will take real listings and let people guess how much each house is worth (using a slider that shows where other people have voted). Revenues will supposedly come from advertising, referral fees, and service fees from brokers who can use the game for training purposes. The game is based on actual real estate data. The CEO lost me, though, when he said that you don’t find out if your guess was right until later when they send you an e-mail (which is designed to drive you back to the site). Any game that does not generate instant feedback on how you’ve done is dead in the water, IMHO. Check your e-mail to see if you’ve won! That’s going straight to the junk folder.

Other startups that didn’t quite make the short list include Castfire, Kango, Footnote, Lemonade, Search-to-Phone, WooMe (another TC40 company), Sprigley, and GoXDML.

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Tripit, one of the companies that launched at TechCrunch40 is an extremely useful application for frequent travelers.

It’s dead simple to use and it keeps you organized - all you have to do is forward confirmation emails to them when you purchase airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, etc. Tripit pulls the relevant information out of the emails and builds an organized itinerary for you. You can send emails in any order, for multiple trips, whatever. It just figures everything out and organizes it.

The best part is you don’t even need to register to start using it. Just take an email and forward it to plans@tripit.com. Within seconds you’ll get a confirmation email back and you go from there. If it doesn’t recognize the email format from the seventy travel companies they currently support (orbitz, united airlines, marriott, etc.), you can add the information in directly on the website.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit CEO Greg Brockway is launching a new feature that makes the service even more useful, particularly on a mobile device (what you have with you when you travel). You email a basic command to the service and it responds with relevant information. “Get Flight Today” will return today’s flight information, for example. Or just “Get Trip” to get full details of your most current trip. Or just email “Help” to get a list of possible commands and modifiers.

San Francisco-based TripIt has raised $1 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

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Session three as follows, including our live notes.

Story Blender

Story Blender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their content into a new multimedia show. StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community.

Session 3 starts. CEO is also the founder of Cyworld.

Online video mixing with friends, nice interface.Multi-level relationship model for contributions, friend of a friend sort of thing. Easy to use video mashing with lots of features

TripIt

TripIt is a travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans. Travelers manage their travel itinerary with TripIt by forwarding their purchase confirmation emails to the service. TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. You can print or access your itinerary from anywhere including online, in print and on their web-enabled mobile devices. They can also share itineraries and travel calendars and collaborate on planning trips with friends.

CEO and Founder is ex-Hotwire, along with most of the team.

TripIt wants to eliminate the vanilla travel folder, bringing the travel itinerary into the 21st century. Travel is an information management business, TripIt is not a booking service.

Users send their plans to plans@tripit.com, compiles online itinerary, a sort of travel plan aggregation.

TripIt supports export to iCal and other platforms, also looking at microformats

Friends can share travel calenders. TripIt believes a multi-functional travel planner with collaborative tools will be a much needed service.

Site is live today, out of beta. I’d like to see the site before I pass judgment, but in theory it’s a great idea.

Flock

Flock is a social web browser we have reported on extensively. With Flock, people can discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites. Flock is offering custom browser modifications as a revenue model. To date, Flock has shipped editions of its browser for Photobucket and Piczo.

Flock feels that the browser has not evolved over time, and that’s a market opportunity for them. So interesting new features, Facebook sidebar was something new to me. Drag and drop functionality has improved a lot since earlier versions.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not be a Flock fan previously, the new version demoed here (release in 2 weeks) really is something more than Firefox with plugins. I’ll be taking another look at Flock soon.

MusicShake

South Korean MusicShake is a online amateur music mixing service. The service lets users create their own professional quality music using various tools. They hope to provide personalized music for ringtones, and personal websites (blogs, profiles). The service is developed and distributed by SilentMusicBand Corp.

Korean company. Started with music and the speaker dancing on stage. Funny start, he danced worse than I do

Speaker asked whether it was a Britney Spears track…music was created by a 9 year old girl in Korea with no experience of real music…just like Britney Spears.

Demo of interface. Seems simple to us, based on mixing music tracks and sound effects. Tracks are recommended by “Nuba,” the robot behind Musicshake.

170,000 music tracks, 1 million by 1 million. Also a model for creators to make music and sell it on the 50/ 50 rev share.

One of the best presentations so far, big round of applause. Fun idea.

8020 Publishing

8020 Publishing is a media company that publishes user generated magazines. They currently have two magazines JPG and the yet-to-launch Everywhere. Members of the 8020 community can contribute and critique the content in the magazines. However, 8020 Publishing still fills normal publishing roles like choosing themes, putting the magazines together and providing the final vote on all published content. The community also gives them a built-in subscription base not to mention loyal online communities.

8020 is aiming to “make magazines better.” JPG Magazine is used as an example.

Launching “Everywhere” Magazine, the “insiders experience”…travel magazine that is submitted by the community.

All submissions are added to the website, best make the magazine. Geographic focused search.

Submissions 300-500 words to make it easy to participate.

Interesting model, you’ll like this if you like JPG Mag.

Expert panel: Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Rajeev Motwani, and Yossi Vardi

Jason Calacanis asks Yossi Vardi for his favorite, answers: two that appealed Music Shake, will appeal to young people, and Flock, presuming that the user interface isn’t too hard to use. He can see himself using TripIt.

Don Dodge favorites: Music Shake and Story Blender, reminded him of his days at Napster. Question to Story Blender: what about copyright on the videos. A: YouTube didn’t block the copyright material from day 1, they will block copyright content at the “community manager” level.

Michael Arrington asks Don Dodge about copyright, A: just because you haven’t been sued, doesn’t mean you wont end up being sued.

Rajeev Motwani loves Music Shake, wish he’d come up with himself. Also likes TripIt, “Useful and solving a real problem.”

Ron Conway: likes TripIt and Story Blender. TripIt simple idea with potential to grow virally + from an investor view point can be easy monetized. Story Blender is in video, biggest growth opportunity on the internet and a Story Blender is unique idea.

Discussion about 8020’s model, how they pay, copyright. Authors hand over their content when they submit.

Audience questions: is video the hottest market online: Ron Conway, yes, and it’s getting easier as the tech catches up in terms of copyright filtering.

Don Dodge to Flock: market is old, entrench, how do you overcome that, and what is the business model. Flock: partner business, we work with others to include functionality. Multi-site membership works for us by making management easier. In terms of choice, Firefox 1.0 launched less than 3 years ago, 100million + users, there is choice and people will switch. They also have a search relationship with Yahoo that is a main revenue stream.

Jason Calacanis: why not just do Flock as a Firefox extension. Flock: most people dont use Firefox extension, we are targeting the broader market.

Michael Arrington to Flock: you’ve taken far too long to release 1.0, over 2 years, given plenty of rope. Can you guarantee that you wont take users for granted in the future. Flock: yes, people love us…and it’s a great product. (didn’t respond directly to the 2 year comment).

Question to Music Shake: will it translate. MS: yes, music is universal and if I hadn’t told you the demo song was made by a Sth Korean girl you wouldn’t have known.

Conclusion: best panel yet, particularly in terms of the qaulity of the startups. Hard to pick a favorite, Music Shake was certainly the most original idea, TripIt for practical use. Flock impressed.

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