The new Triposo App: It's a self starter!

We're proud to announce that the new Triposo App for iOS is in the Appstore! It's better than ever before, and it’s quite different from other travel guide apps. The main distinguishing feature is that it’s a self starter: a travel guide that actively suggests travelers where to go next.

Traditionally, a travel guide just waits until you start looking up what to do. This one is different. Open the new Triposo app and it will actively suggest you where to go now. And they are clever suggestions. We look at your location, the time of day, the weather and opening hours to present you with some great options. So, yes, you can expect us to come up with a good coffee place nearby when you need a shot of caffeine.

We started experimenting with suggestions in December last year.
What's really exciting, is that the app also registers the direction you are looking in, so when you are going in the direction of an interesting place it will highlight that place. It may sound like one of those complicated Augmented Reality apps, but this one is easy to use, and doesn't require you to look through your phone.

We think that's the real magic: the new app manages to do clever things without making the app difficult to understand or hard to use - and without losing or hiding the great functionality that has made the app popular.

Here is a movie that shows how the new features work.



The movie also highlights some other new features, like the travel dashboard. Essential things like weather forecast, currency converter and useful phrasebook are just one tap away.

So there's a lot of new stuff in there and yes, we're pretty darn proud of it. So give it a spin and tell us how we can make it even better! We love to hear your feedback.

Get the app!

One year of Triposo Inc

It's been a year since we started Triposo. An amazing year, in which we laid the foundations of what we believe will be the best travel guide ever. In order to make the guide travelers need, we need to travel ourselves. 

So we have set up our company in a way that makes travel part of our process. For one, we don't all live in the same place. We're in three different countries most of the time. That gives us a different perspective. Secondly, we travel and work while we travel. Douwe coded in a beach house in Goa for a month, Jon worked from a bunch of places in Spain, Les was in Osaka for almost a month. Finally, we do Jamborees. We take the team to an exciting place where we design, drink, code, travel, code, travel and drink.

Here's a little around the world in five locations.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam was the location of our first Jamboree. We got together in a really nice house on a stately canal in Amsterdam and coded like it was 1999. And we got a lot of work done. We made vector maps work on iOS and Android and made our first version of the Triposo world guide: one app in which you can download travel guides for any destination in the world. Well two apps, actually. The world guide for iOS and for Android.

Goa

In November Douwe headed for Goa to code from there during one month. He was ahead of the team by 4.5 hours, so by the time we did our daily 11:00 AM Standup meeting using Google Hangouts, Douwe always had something new to demo us - and every day he would have more of a tan. Among the things developed in Goa are the way we show small cities in our guides, the way we show background information like history, art, culture and the phrasebooks. 

Marrakech

In January 2012 we had a Jamboree in Marrakech, a very inspiring city in Morocco, Africa. We were coding on the rooftop and as the sun set over the Red City and the Muezzin started singing we pressed the launch button for our Travel log website. 

Berlin

Then we rented a stately Jugendstil house in Prenzlauer Berg, with 12 foot high ceilings. We haven't launched what we built there, but soon, really soon now, it will hit the Appstore, and it will be just as awesome as Berlin.

Osaka

Our UX designer Les spent a part of March and most of April in Osaka. At the end of his working day he would present his designs and ideas in a Google Hangout to the rest of the team, who were just starting up. The results of Les' fantastic trip to Japan, will be available in the next next release. Because that's what happens when a designers gets inspired. They come up with loads of ideas that take quite a while to implement.

So how do we do it?

We believe that it is essential to keep on traveling. Because only when you are traveling with just your phone and our app you find out where we fall short of our own expectations - and where we exceed them. Only when you travel with just your phone and our app you get the inspiration needed to make a travel guide that is the better than anything that's out there.

And the great things is that in 2012 you can travel and be very productive at the same time - more productive than you would be if you were all in the same office all of the time. 

There is a bunch of amazing tools we use to pull this off. We mentioned the 11:00 AM Google Hangout already. It's amazingly efficient way of presenting what you've done in the past 24 hours. The screen sharing feature is awesome (even though you can't have two people sharing a screen at the same time).  Pivotal Tracker is also a great tool (it's pretty useful if you are in the same building too). We prefer it to Basecamp - even though we must admit this looks a bit better.

Even with all the great tools for team cooperation, we do miss Google Wave a bit... 

Catch of the day: Chester

We've been busy all day updating our algorithms. Just comparing scores of towns all over the world, we stumble upon many exciting destinations we'd love to visit. My catch of the day is Chester. Just 40 minutes from Liverpool, you find one of the best preserved walled cities of England. One of the highlights of the town are the Chester Rows:

Chester Rows consist of covered walkways at the first floor behind which are entrances to shops and other premises. At street level is another set of shops and other premises, many of which are entered by going down a few steps. The Rows, found in each of the four main streets of the city of Chester, Cheshire, England, are unique; nothing precisely similar exists anywhere else in the world.

 

That made me happy. Nothing quite like it in the world and just 40 minutes from Liverpool. 

The new travel log

We just changed the layout of the travel log site. We liked the old one, but we like the new one better.

So here it is, the new and improved layout of the travel log:

Want to see it in action? Have a look at my travel log.

What's new (beside the good looks):

• We magically divide all the check ins you do in the app into trips. So if you visit Marrakech, Casablanca and Rabat in one week, it will be a Morocco trip. If you visit just Marrakech (like me) it will be known as the Marrakech trip.
• You can decide wether you want to make your travel log public or only visible to friends.
• Click on the small image and see a light box with the fill size image.

More exciting things coming up, so stay tuned!

Hákarl and more exciting food!

Have you ever tried Hákarl, the rotten shark of Iceland? Chef Anthony Bourdain, who has travelled extensively throughout the world sampling local cuisine has described hákarl as "the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing" he has ever eaten.

Still, the people of Iceland think it's a delicacy and most travelers to Iceland like to try it out to see for themselves if it's really as bad as people say it is.

Image: Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons

Eating rotten shark in Iceland, drinking Snake Wine in Laos or having Balut eggs for breakfast in the Philippines is just one of those things that makes travel such a great experience.

We're busy adding exciting food experiences to our guides and we're taking the algorithmic approach, as you would expect from us. So for each country we automatically compile a list of dishes and we rank them algorithmically. We're still tweaking things a little, but things are looking pretty good already.

Currently, in Iceland Hákarl has the number two position in our ranking - number one is Þorramatur which includes half a head of a sheep so that seems just as exciting. The Balut eggs top the charts in Vietnam. And these delicious caterpillars have the top spot in Zimbabwe...

1.6 coming up!

During the Jamboree we spent a lot of time on making a new version of our App and we've just uploaded it to the Appstore. We'll launch the new version for Android soon as well, so in a week or so the whole world can enjoy Triposo 1.6. As always there are lots of small improvements, fresher content and better suggestions to name just two, but also a few bigger ones. Since you are probably most interested in those let's have a look at them.

A new button!
When you open up the guide of a destination you are actually in, you will find a new button. Whoa! Click it and you get an overview of all the places around you ordered by distance.

What's interesting to notice is that this list contains both points of interest we have detailed information on, as well as places that we don't know very well.

When you hit on a place we don't have a good description for, you can immediately add you own content to it. The next step in many cases will be to check in. Our checkin functionality works offline and check ins can be published to Facebook (but it's not necessary). Check ins also show up on your travel log.

Add places
Now that you can give your fellow travelers the low down on all the places around you, you probably want to add a few places no one has ever heard of as well. The good news is: you can! There is a plus button (another new button!) which opens a little wizard.

We review all the things you add, and where possible we try to feed them back into the appropriate sources to help out great open content projects like Wikitravel, OpenStreetMap or ChefMoz.

Your travel log
Finally, we've launched the travel log website. All the check ins you do in the app, end up here on our website - even the checkins you did with the old version. We present all your checkins on the map, and you can navigate them easily.

A Twisted World

When I was fourteen I got this book about Life after Man. It's about how 50 million years after humanity goes, life has evolved into all kinds of new wonderful forms. But what really got my interest were the maps. The continents had moved. So I tried to write a program to simulate the movement of continents. What I quickly realized, is that it can't be done. Not on a mercator projection.

The mercator projection is one of many attempts to get a globe on a map and a rather bad one when it comes to representing the actual size of continents. Africa seems just a tat bigger than Greenland, Spitsbergen seems about the size of Indonesia. You have to wonder whether on some level we think less of Africa because it seems smaller (or for that matter we think less of continents on the lower half).

Last summer we decided to replace our tile based mapping system with a vector based one. But for compatibility reasons we still are sticking with Mercator. The vector maps are great for our travel guides, but they also gave us the tools to show the world in Mercator projection with Europe and North America in the middle. It looks something like this:

Greenland in the middle - looks a lot smaller than Africa now

So during our recent Jamboree in Marrakech in this strange, exciting environment Vincent and me set out to create an interactive tool to make it possible to explore the universe of Mercator projected maps. As weird as they are, they're all equally correct in representing our planet as a bitmap. It took quite a bit of beer and math (we had to divide the work, Vincent doesn't drink), but here it is, powered by processing.js.

Some examples of the twisted maps you can make with our interactive tool:

Asia as the south pole

An ozzie centric world

Africa on the North Pole

I guess you are curious to try out to see if you can create even weirder looking maps. So go and check our labs section and see our twisted maps.