Going country

We're busy releasing a series of country guides in the Android Market. New Zealand was uploaded last week. Yesterday we added Austria, Poland and Switzerland. Today seven new ones: Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, Ireland, The Netherlands, Spain and Thailand.
Some more will follow the next few days.

The country guides cover the most important destinations. For the major cities they have complete city guides, with all the sights, places to drink and to eat and of course an offline map. For small cities and national parks they have concise guides that focus on what's really important. We've also included phrasebooks for the languages spoken in the country. Spain is shipped with four language guides: Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician.

In order to keep the files size of our guides acceptable, we had to leave out stuff: in some cases we left out maps for cities of secondary importance, but sometimes we dropped an entire destination. And even after those tough calls our Netherlands guide is only just under 50 MB (the maximum for Android) and guides for countries like Germany and France are just too big. We'll come up with a solution for this issue, but meanwhile we will focussing on smaller countries. There are enough of those to keep us occupied for some time.

Douwe's Tryptych

On his blog one of our founders, Douwe wrote three great articles on why he left Google to found Triposo.

Part one: why not to leave Google
Part two: why to leave Google
Part three: why Triposo

It's good reading!

Last to be discovered, first in the Market

New Zealand was the last land mass on earth to be discovered, making New Zealand the youngest country on earth, but it's the first country guide we're launching in the Market!

I just uploaded New_Zealand.apk to the Android Market. It's our first country guide so it may still have a few rough edges. We'll be very busy polishing them the next few days. If you want to help us, download the guide and tell us about the things you didn't like!

The dive

Until now, Triposo has been just a project on the side for Douwe and me. But today we're taking the dive: Douwe is leaving Google, I'm leaving Oberon.

And we will not be alone at Triposo. Jon Tirsen is another Googler who thinks we're onto something great. And Vincent is another Oberoner joining us. That makes four guys now, committed full time. What can you expect from us?

We will focus on making a world wide travel guide for mobile devices. We aggregate open content from a number of sources and use a clever algorithm to decide what is relevant for you. Wherever you are Triposo will tell you where to go and what to do. We've made a bunch of city guides for iOS and Android based on this approach already and they work pretty well. One of the great things is that they store all the content including the maps on your phone.
We're busy now making complete country guides so we can basically cover the whole planet. Then we'll start adding new functionality to make them even better.

During all of this we'll try and use this blog to share what we're up to. So stay tuned.