Stealth Startup Kango Working on Semantic Search For Travel

Does the world really need another travel site? With Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Farecast, TripHub, Yapta, and many more, prospective travelers already have more than enough to choose from. (With an estimated $87 billion in travel booked online, it’s no wonder why). Soon they will be able to add Kango to that list.

The startup, which has been in stealth-mode until now, does manage to add a new twist to search travel. It is indexing 18 million opinions and reviews across 1,000 travel-related sites to derive the best travel search results based on what type of trip you want to take. If you are planning a romantic getaway in Big Sur, you will get one set of results. If you specify that you are looking for a family outing instead, you will get another. Or you can look for pet-friendly hotels and activities. Of course, you can also search by price or amenity, like any other travel site. And you can see where each hotel or activity is located on a small Google Map.

picture-204.pngBut what’s promising about Kango is the way it slices up search subjectively. Kango is building a semantic search engine focussed narrowly on travel. It parses the language in all of those reviews and guides, and categorizes them by generating tags for them. “You cannot wait for users to add tags, you have to derive them,” says CEO Yen Lee. So hotels that have been reviewed across the Web (on sites like Yahoo Travel, TripAdvisor, or Yelp) with words such as “perfect,” “relaxing,” “couples,” “honeymoon,” or “spa” would rank higher in a search for romantic travel. Hotels associated with the words “kitchen,” “pool,” and “kids,” would rank higher in a search for family trips.

Whether this will be enough to draw people from other travel sites is hard to say at this point. But Kango’s executive team has an impressive pedigree. Lee is a former general manager of Yahoo Travel. His search architect, Huanjin Chen, used to be the search architect at eBay. His natural-language search scientist, Boris Galitsky, used to do work for the British government. And his head of marketing, Elliott Ng, headed up marketing for Intuit’s QuickBooks and is the founder of Netcentives.

Lee estimates there are 6 billion to 8 billion travel-related searches done every year, and he thinks Kango can help expose more of the hidden gems in travel that today don’t quite make it to the first page of most travel sites. He plans to make money on travel-specific search advertising, rather than on booking or listing fees.

Kango will be rolling out a limited beta in the next few weeks, and is reserving 100 spots for TechCrunch readers who sign up here.

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400 Million Downloads For Firefox In Less Than Three Years

Firefox has been downloaded 400 million times in the three years since v 1.0 launched. It’s been roughly doubling every year. After six months they had 50 million downloads. 100 million after a year, and 200 million after two years.

There are 120 million or so regular Firefox users.

About 50% of TechCrunch readers use Firefox, according to our Google Analytics account, and it is the most popular browser. Internet Explorer is second with 40% and Safari with 6.6%. I didn’t expect to see Playstation Portable on the list, at no. 10.

The Internet (Apparently) Isn’t Ready For IPTV

European ISPs are up in arms over the BBC’s new online TV player, iPlayer. Concerns from service providers such as Tiscali and companies like Carphone Warehouse center around, of all things, a fear of the BBC’s player being too successful and pounding their networks during peak hours.

Apparently the internet isn’t ready for IPTV. As the Financial Times reports Mary Turner, CEO of Tiscali UK says, “The internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite”. Add to this concerns over Joost’s ability to compete head to head on quality with other online video providers and it paints a poor picture for TV getting online.

However, this seems a thinly veiled return to the net neutrality debate that periodically pops up when ISPs start thinking of ways to increase revenue without increasing network capacity. As GigaOm cites, it could cost UK ISPs up to $2 billion to upgrade their capacity to match increasing demand.

We’re due for an upgrade in the U.S. The U.S.’s top broadband speeds actually lag behind other OECD countries. Japan’s surfers can connect to the internet on a 100 Mbps Ferrari compared to the U.S topping out at a 40 Mbps 1970’s hatchback. They also pay much less, $0.22/Mbps to our $3.10/Mbps. And to think companies brag about a $260/month 50 Mbps connection in Sacramento.

New IPTV startups are only a slice of internet traffic. According to a report by CacheLogic, more than 60 percent of Internet traffic is used by peer-to-peer swaps, and about 60 percent of those swaps involve video content. IPTV adds to demand, but has been singled out most likely because there are a few large content providers to point the finger at.

TwitKu: Single Interface For Twitter And Jaiku

TwitKu is a new site that is sort of a Meebo (web instant messaging) for the Twitter and Jaiku “presence blogging” services.

The site brings your Twitter and Jaiku accounts onto one screen and adds a posting interface that allows you to post just to one of the services, or to both. The benefit for many people that use both services religiously is obvious. Very simple and very useful for some people.

Both Twitter and Jaiku have APIs, making this possible (or at least manageable). Clones/similar products like Pownce and the new Yappd don’t have APIs. When and if those services release them, I’d expect TwitKu to quickly add those services as well. And that would save those of us who want to use all of the services but refuse to choose a lot of time.

And since Twitter and Jaiku are all about presence and status updates of friends, there’s no reason not to add Facebook status right away, too.

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Powers say partition may be an option for Kosovo

Kosovo's Prime Minister Agim Ceku (2nd L) welcomes EU envoy Wolfgang Ischinger (R), US envoy Frank Wisner (L), and Russia's envoy Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko in Pristina August 11, 2007.
Lack of clear solution for Kosovo Columbia Missourian
Kosovo partition 'on the table' BBC News
MSNBC - New York Times - Voice of America - CNN
all 252 news articles »

How to pay for US road and bridge repair?

Some lawmakers put a hike in the gas tax on the table, but Bush dismissed the idea on Thursday. By Ben Arnoldy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor The Minneapolis bridge collapse has put the nation's decaying roads and bridges front and ...
Higher Gas Tax Proposed to Fix Bridges KSTP.com
Bush resists raising gas tax for bridges San Francisco Chronicle
Los Angeles Times - Fort Worth Star Telegram - Centre Daily Times - WBOC TV 16
all 27 news articles »


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Acquisition for Clipmarks

New York based Clipmarks, a del.icio.us-like social bookmarking service, may have been acquired by Forbes. We have no information on the size of the transaction, but my guess is that it was on the very low side.

The service allows users to bookmark all or a portion of a web page and annotate it. It is then shared with the community and popular new bookmarks are “popped” to the top of the site. In some ways it is more competitive with Digg than Del.icio.us since popular stories are linked from the home page. See our post on Digg-like competitors from earlier this year where we talked about Clipmarks and others.

I never took much of a liking to Clipmarks - it wasn’t as interesting as Digg and was lost in the sea of social bookmarking competitors. But I congratulate them on the acquisition and look forward to seeing what Forbes does with it. I wonder if Condé Nast’s acquisition of Reddit last year prompted Forbes to take a look at some of the available competitors out there.

The Fascination With ToDo Lists Continues

The amount of energy web entrepreneurs put into creating the perfect online ToDo list is surprising. In May 2006 we ran through a boatload of them in a comparison post. After all that entrepreneurial effort, you’d think the online ToDo list would have been perfected.

Apparently not. Now DabbleDB, a beautiful little database-centric application builder based in Vancouver, Canada, has created a bit of buzz around its own ToDo list application, built on the Facebook platform.

The app, called Dabble Do, uses the DabbleDB back end to create a simple ToDo list on Facebook. There are some bells and whistles. For example, for dates you simply type in “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” and the app figures out what you mean. You can also set ToDo items for your Facebook friends and follow up by “cracking a whip.” It’s a good way to stay organized.

Will Facebook’ers use this to keep themselves organized? The email/messaging feature on Facebook is very popular (I wish I could just have it forward to my normal email, though). Perhaps adding other features of Outlook, like ToDo lists and calendars, will catch on, too. In my mind, though, social networking is very different from office-like organization applications. That’s why I wasn’t particularly excited when Zoho (an office suite) added their own Facebook application a few weeks ago. So I’m fairly tepid on Dabble Do.

The bloggers seem to like it, though, and I’ve been wrong more than once before. See Mathew Ingram, Read/Write Web, Paul Kedrosky (an investor), Donna Bogatin and others. Ah, I love the blogosphere.

Nokia Publishes Access Code For Mosh Private Beta

If you are going to have a private beta, it may be a good idea not to publish the access code to the site on your forums. But that is exactly what Nokia did with their new Mosh service.

If you want to see what Nokia Mosh is all about, just type “ALLACCESS” into the box on the landing page. You can then register for the service.

Mosh is actually a great idea, albeit not great enough to counter the iPhone tidal wave that is coming. It’s a portal that can be accessed from a normal computer or a Nokia mobile device where users upload and share content - applications, games, images, etc. These are then downloaded to the mobile device.

Coincidentally, Yahoo is also working on a new service with the working name “Mosh.”