A *big* update

Here’s a big update about what we’ve been up to lately.

When we started out we were doing travel hacks: getting together interesting travel related data and then see what interesting conclusions we could draw from that data. Which city is most popular on what day? What are the best Christmas markets in the world? What are the most romantic cities? It was a lot of fun to do, and with interesting results.
We are still doing travel hacks, we are still getting together interesting travel related data and mixing and mashing, but all for one purpose: we are trying to build the best free interactive travel app for travelers.

The Android App we’ve built, our Triposo Travel Guide, is currently at version 0.5. It has the following features:

• Background information based on most relevant parts of Wikipedia articles about the destination.
• A sights section highlighting the places where most photographs are taken.
• Most popular daytrips based on a travel hack where we rank nearby destinations based on the frequency of the term “daytrip” in blogs and other pages, as well as overall popularity,
• An eating out section based on recommended restaurants in Wikitravel.
• An offline map based on Open Streetmap with a bit of help from the people at Cloudmade.

We’ve launched city guides for about 20 destinations and we are getting good reviews from users, and see a very steady growth in the number of downloads.

What can you expect in the future?

• Step by step we’ll be adding new features to our app. Activities and to do lists are on our agenda.
• We’ll be adding more guides. More cities. We might even do requests. But in the end we are going to do a setup where we have just one App from which you can download exactly the info you want to have.
• We use Open Content travel information, so somewhere along the line you can expect to see us releasing parts of our setup under a creative commons license as well.
• And we plan to bring this blog back to life. Share interesting things we come across while building our guides and publish them as travel hacks.

Rome, sweet Rome

Just released our guide to Rome for Android.
Use the 2D barcode to download.

And some more guides

Get out your Android phones! Here are some more free travel guides for your phones:

Melbourne:

Paris:

Zurich:

Sydney:

Amsterdam:

It's been a while... but we have some new stuff

It's been quite a while... But we have been busy and today we can announce we have something new: we have made an Android travel guide based on the same principles we have discussed here before. The first guide is for Amsterdam and it's a 0.2 version, but that doesn't mean we aren't proud of it. We are. Very proud.

You can find it here.

Hacks pages

So far we have been posting a number of travel top10s on this blog. They are good top 10s, but they are never final. We work on them to improve them. So rather than posting a fixed top 10 our blog we decided to make dynamic overviews on hacks pages.

So far we have the following hacks page.

• Most romantic cities for travellers
• Most dangerous cities for travellers
• Most expensive cities for travellers
• Most culture cities for travellers
• Most walkable cities for travellers

You'll see that the top 5 for romantic cities is a bit different from the one posted on the blog. Better, we think...

The most romantic places: Venice, Kovalam and Santorini

In this week's hack we tried to find out how romantic a destination is for travelers. We compiled a list of destinations that are mentioned in online magazine top 10s as most romantic. Than we looked what data we had available in our database of these cities had a positive correlation with these cities. The assumption is that this data could be used to predict how romantic a given city is.

The mechanism was quite simple but proved very effective. Move the 'romantic' slide on www.triposo.com to the right and you get a top 5 of romantic places:

	Venice , Italy (Venezia in Italian) is still one of the most interesting and lovely places in the world. This sanctuary on a la...
	Kovalam is a beautiful beach in Kerala, India. Thirty years ago, Kovalam was a hippy idyll: a picture perfect tropical beach; a...
	Santorini is a volcanic island in the Cyclades group of the Greek islands. It is located between Ios and Anafi islands. It is famo...
	Florence (Italian: Firenze) is the capital of the region of Tuscany in Italy, with a population of some 366488. The city is consi...
	Manali is a city in the Kullu Valley. Manali, at the northern end of the Kullu Valley in Himachal Pradesh, is a hill station si...

It seems our mechanism has a bias towards the Indian subcontinent, or rather, Indians seem to like to describe their hill stations and beaches as romantic, a preference that finds its way into our database. I'm sure we can filter it out, but if the hack as a whole works well, who's to say that these Indian places aren't among the most romantic on the planet?

You can play with the slides and move the map around to get your own personal top 5 of romantic places. My list would be: Amalfi, Positano, Sorrento, Ravello and Naples.

New hacks, new interface!

So here it is: a new hacks and a new (and much improved) way of looking at the hacks. We've done a whopping six new hacks:

• popularity: which places are most popular?
  
• price level: what are cheap places, what are expensive places?
  
• safety: which places are relatively 
  
• romance: what are the most romantic destinations?
  
• culture: want to go to a museum? Here are your best bets!
  
• walkability: what places are best for a nice stroll

More importantly we have a new way of presenting the results of these hacks on www.triposo.com. You can use the slides to create any combination of th

e above 6 criteria and get the best results on the map. So if you want a place that is unsafe, yet romantic and dead cheap, we have a bunch of really romantic places in Afghanistan for you, like Bamian or Herat. If it's cheap and safe you want head for South-East Asia. Or you zoom into Southern Italy and look for the most romantic places (Amalfi!). It's great fun to play around with, we think.

The upcoming blog posts we'll shed some light the individual hacks. Meanwhile, we appreciate your feedback.