How much is attending conferences worth?

It has been quiet an exciting time ever since we started our first iteration in February this year. We have been covered in global press, got selected into one of the most prestigious tech accelerators, moved our office to NY, launched a brand new service (both on the web and iOS) and connected with the leaders in technology to just name a few. Apart from that we have been attending many conferences, of which TheNextWeb Conference and Techcrunch Disrupt are the biggest names.

Conferences are expensive, far away, the outcomes are hard to predict and often you can follow everything live through a stream online.

Is it therefor really worth your time, and money, to attend these events? I am sure many people will feel like a couple of thousands of dollars is slightly over-prized for 3 days of partying and collecting swag with fellow tech entrepreneurs.

This May we attended Techcrunch Disrupt in NY, an event which traditionally is recognized as one of the most important anual tech events. As a co-sponsor our investors had the possibility to let us have a table for the entire three day event, right next to the entrance to the main speaker room. Convinced that this was a golden spot we started out by addressing everybody who was passing by. Even though the response from the people we actually spoke with was good we came to find out that there weren’t many people interested in a chat. There weren’t actually so many people moving around at all.

Techcrunch Disrupt was packed with vendors, and therefor the amount of attendees was limited. Vendors felt obliged to continue hosting their own table and therefor the event (in my eyes) was lacking the necessary amount of interaction. Without taking action this would influence the outcomes of this conference in a very bad way. So how do you make the best out of an event like this?

- First of all, depending on the available wifi, it allows you to get some work done.
- Second of all, if you are with more, it is a great opportunity to go and find out what else is happening in the industry. Wander around and start conversations with likeminded people.
- Attend relevant lectures and ask as much intelligent questions as possible while mentioning your company name clearly. As many people watch the live streams and the room is filled with journalists this is a great way to get their attention.
- Have open discussions with fellow vendors in order to find partnerships or introductions.
- Try to, somehow, get your hands on the attendee and press list of the event.
- Get feedback. Many of the people who are there know the industry and the problems you are facing, make them believe in your product and let them help you make it better. Many of the people we have met are still talking about us, these are valuable ambassadors of your brand. 

But not every event is like this, for a conference organizer the hard task is to find a perfect mix between vendors, attendees, press and investors to attend the event. TheNextWeb Conference in Amsterdam earlier this year really succeeded in that. We have been able to do all of the above and apart from that demo our product to many attendees, talk with investors who came to our table and as an additional bonus the press knew where to find us.

Attending conferences is good for many reasons, it allows you to stay up to date, get your name out there and if you can present or have a table it’ll help your enormously with building credibility and exposure. However make sure that you have done your homework, know who is coming and who you want to meet, who you want to listen to and what you will do when not many people will come to see you. Connect with people through Twitter before going and follow closely what is going on during the event.

In the end the success is often determined by how engaged, curious and interesting the crowd is!

And of course, after a long day of work, a beer is always a good idea …. we sure enjoyed it!

Welcome to The ACE Hotel in NYC!

For the past 3 months we have been working out of the Dreamit Ventures offices in Midtown New York, an organized chaos which perfectly shows the priority of all the companies involved in this year’s class. It literally screams “who cares about where you build, care about what you build!” And we love that, this place really embodies the true nature of the tech startup industry.

Nevertheless I need to get myself out of the day to day routines at Dreamit every once in a while and get my shot of fresh energy at different places, good thing there are plenty of those in NYC. 

It has been a while since I last was here but as I had been visiting my community colleagues at Tumblr, who are located right around the corner, I decided to spend some time in the lobby of the ACE Hotel again. Last time I was here me and Pete had been searching the place for two available seats after lunch; Mission Impossible 5!

We have been following this place ever since they first opened in 2010 and knew that this place would become the hotspot it currently is in no-time. For good reason, the trendy yet stylish decor in the lobby now houses young and starting entrepreneurs around the clock. Catered by live music, a raw oyster bar, curated DJ-sets and the in-house Stumptown coffee people here use every available spot they can possibly find to sit on as a place to have their meetings, throw around ideas and to get inspired. Since much has been happening in the past few months I almost forgot about how energetic this place is and was stoked to be back.

Unlike many other cities that I have visited and worked from, I have never experienced this much support and cooperation from likeminded people around me. This is one of the core reasons why places like the ACE Hotel lobby are so popular in this city, and very valuable to companies (like Tripl) who are building a product and are always after feedback. I naturally feels like you have a handful of consultants at your disposal.. for free! New York has a great tech community and mayor Bloomberg has done a great job in letting the local tech community flourish. He is a personal fan of places like this and therefor I will try to find as many of these places as possible before flying out to Europe again. 

Get here early if you can though, because a good spot in the lobby of the ACE Hotel is considered a valuable piece of real estate these days. Even if you are not an early bird (almost nobody is in the tech community) it is worth it, the energy which you’ll get will keep you going guaranteed …. that and the coffee of course. I am surely coming back here in the next few days to get inspired and meet likeminded people. 

What creates a good work environment for you? If you know a place similar to the ACE hotel in NYC we would love to hear about it. 

Yes, we are now @tripl on Twitter! Why is this important?

Have you ever read an article online and felt like you wanted to tweet about it? Since your time is limited you assume that the related companies Twitter handle is its actual name? I am sure we have all been there. But what happens when this is not the case? This can really effect the conversation around the topic of the company.  Companies miss out on your tweet and the chance respond to complaints or to connect with their followers, while major bugs can go unreported.

This is exactly what was happening to us. After our struggle for the tripl.com domain we were unfortunate to grab the sexy @Tripl Twitter handle. Instead we were forced to register @Triplapp. 

We have always been quiet happy with our @triplapp handle, people seemed to get it and knew where to find us. However, a month ago when it became very obvious (again) that we needed to take action into pursuing the @Tripl handle. 

One month ago Tripl pivoted into the service as you know it today. With media coverage worldwide we were flooded with tweets, Facebook likes and other social shares. For us the perfect opportunity to hear what people are saying about Tripl and hear how they are liking the new focus. We however found out pretty soon that, although our current users knew that we were @triplapp, our new users who were reading about us automatically started drafting tweets addressing @tripl…. #FAIL!  

Some articles generated close to 2000 tweets and at that point we decided to never miss out on an opportunity like that connect with our target audience again. If I want to tell the guys at Heineken how much I have enjoyed my cold beer last weekend I just want to assume that they are using @heineken as their Twitter address. It is very powerful when your handle is as frictionless to use as possible, ours obviously wasn’t. Since we were hitting a crucial phase in the growth of Tripl this was bad news.

To begin with, you should know that over the course of the last 12 months we have been attempting to reach out to the curator of @Tripl more than a dozen times. He was very inactive, had never send a single tweet in his life, had 8 followers (6 of which were Tripl team members) and wasn’t following more than 4 people himself. You can imagine the frustration knowing that all tweets addressed to you end up in someone’s inactive account. 

Thrilled to see that Twitter has there NY office three blocks from here, I created a report on the virality of the articles in which we were featured along with the details of the @Tripl account. After completing the report I went, armed with the well known Swedish cinnamon buns, to the Twitter offices in New York. It might have been a bit naive thinking I could just walk in and talk with someone who could help us out but it was at least worth a try. As it seemed, I was indeed naive. I even tried bribing the security crew with the freshly baked Swedish cinnamon buns but even that wouldn’t make them call up and ask if anyone would want to see me, not even if it would take 2 minutes tops. They were very well trained in their responses and I can only imagine how many people share my naiveté. 

Frustrated by this ‘defeat’, the cinnamon buns had done so well until now, I walked back to the office. In order to boost my self esteem I decided to blog about how much other companies in New York had meant to us during the summer. I also decided to return the favor by inviting anyone who was interested in the lessons we had learnt to come by and talk.

Somebody must have smelled our cinnamon buns high up in the Twitter offices because one of Twitter’s designers had been using Tripl for a little while and was a big fan of our design and simplicity. Not knowing we had a presence in New York she had read our post and was excited to come by and talk. After our meeting I couldn’t mind asking about who I should talk to at Twitter to get things sorted out regarding our Twitter handle. I handed over my report to her and she promised me to look into it. Not even 48 hours later Twitter had migrated our account to @tripl and we are now the proud curators of the only Twitter handle which suits us like a tailored suit.

We are very thankful that Twitter has been so cooperative in this situation. We sure have found that their policy is all about stimulating the correct use of Twitter and they have surely handled it like that. Throughout the course of the summer our relationships with companies like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare have surely helped us out a lot.. and if you guys are reading ‘Thanks so much’.

Entertainment vs Information? Measure media impact!

In the past few weeks Tripl has been featured on many different tech (and other media) platforms throughout the world wide web. What good has this done, and even more so; how important is it to be featured on the biggest tech blogs when you are trying to scale your business?

Last year we created an infographic which put us on the radar of a lot of tech blogs. With over 600.000 pageviews this was a success bigger than we would have ever hoped for. Why was this such a success? In this particular case it was the content which provided people a new view on ‘social travel’. Techcrunch headlined ‘More Americans are on Facebook than have a passport’, as this was a surprising fact too many people it got shared a lot. Unique content is important, and even more so the angle from which you present this content to your following. But is this the attention you want? It is great linking your name to new and interesting findings but how do you eventually define success in the media?

Two weeks ago we launched a second infographic, which was exclusively featured on Mashable at first hand. Within an hour we recorded over 1400 tweets, let alone the re-tweets. It sounds like a great success when you compare it with the amount of shares we recorded on all of the other media attention we got in the past month. But even though the infographics went viral it wasn’t our most important press, because it didn’t convert like the articles which specifically were targeting our new website and other developments.

We learned that over the course of a year we have had great benefits from all the different kinds of media attention, and we would recommend everybody to aim at creating different types of content and to share this with reporters. Data is everywhere around you, whether it is stats from your users, trends in behavior you record or the results of a survey which you conducted. Building a relationship with some of the bigger platforms is of the essence here, listen to what they want to write about, when a story becomes interesting and how you can deliver that story. They have a great reach and being featured on the big tech blogs is good for your credibility, apart from that many other blogs tend to follow them and use their content as inspiration.

If you are planning on releasing a new product, or are iterating, it always helps to back your story up with interesting facts and visuals but never forget that the story has to be about what you are providing and not only about the fun, humorous and interesting facts that you were able to provide in order to attract attention. Where the ‘press releases’ and ‘product updates’ bring us a lot of traffic when these articles get pushed the infographics remain to get attention throughout the entire year, it is visual, interesting, humorous, easy to share and pinable! Even though it seems that these articles reach more people it doesn’t necessarily have to be like that, just think about it; would you share a link after you have clicked on the link and got redirected to the website the article is about? No, most people will not go back and share it. But if people have a great data or an infographic in the article with the kind request to share this at the bottom of the page people will. 

Regardless of how you decide to approach the press make sure to measure the impact. Every time you’ll get to understand better what works for you and your company. As always I am very interested to hear your opinions on the matter. And if you want to chat about it feel free to drop me a line at wouter@tripl.com.

Mobile usage on the move by @triplapp

All the data we have gathered in the first 7 days after our most recent launch we have brought together in an infographic.

The infographic got featured on Mashable and was a direct hit amongst the website’s Twitter enthusiasts. With over 1300 Twitter mentions in the first two hours this infographic is hopefully well on its way to become just as popular as the first infographic we created, which received over 600.000 pageviews to date.

PS: Ladies, feel free to pin the *** out of it :-)!

The personal approach of @triplapp

This a blog post on how Tripl’s Community Manager Wouter Veenstra (@eddieveenstra) got to meet with the hottest startups in NYC.

Three months is not a long time, but we made it our goal to meet as much people in three months in New York as we would have otherwise met back in Sweden in a year. 

The good thing about New York is that for tech related startups literally everybody is around the corner, and even better.. everybody around the corner is willing to share his or her take on things in order to let you make progress (except for if you are a direct competitor that is).

The hard thing however is to convince these exact same people that it is you who deserves some time of them in their extremely packed agenda. In the elevators you often hear people speak about the 300+ emails they process every day, just imagine all the other time consuming communications they have going on. 

This being said you can probably figure out that all of our efforts through mail and Twitter got lost in the crowded inboxes of the impressive list of companies we tried to get in. 

We figured that in order to get the attention we needed to do something different than the mass, we needed to get more personal. We made a list of 6 companies that we would love to meet up with and learn from their way of doing things, each of these companies had done something really well and had already been an inspiration to us. We bought fresh cinnamon buns at a Swedish bakery in New York and wrote personalized cards for every single person we wanted to meet in which we explained why we were here and what the reason is for this gesture.

We hand delivered all the packages personally to everybody at the different companies, Foursquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Kickstarter, Charity: Water and Vaynermedia. The response was amazing, apart from one of the companies everybody got back to us within 24 hours and by now we have met almost all of these companies within the week.

I guess surviving in an Urban Jungle like New York really forces you to think in a different way, and if you are able to do just that this city is the perfect place for you to make things happen. 

The next challenge is on so check back again soon.

Instagram Junkies

Instagram Junkies, that is what we are. In our opinion a photo is not complete without a filter, a blur and at least 4 hashtags… we could make pictures of an abandoned pair of shoes on the streets or a month old piece of gum on the wall which proves we are well beyond saving.

Apart from us being junkies we enjoy it even more that many of our followers are Instagram fanatics as well. By now we are already following over 600 of you and still we feel like we want to see more. 

Now we are calling on all Instagram maniacs amongst you to start claiming all the landmarks surrounding you. We created the hashtag #tripllandmark for you to start capturing those images of tourist traps, statues of people from the past, parks, museums and extraordinary big buildings.. as long as it is interesting for visitors it is worth a #tripllandmark tag. As well don’t forget to tag the actual landmark in the picture ;-)!

We will create a special wall online with all of the tagged pictures and share your Instagram handle with the visitors, you might even find your new Instagram fans here. 

A few pointers:

Apart from the landmark would we love to see YOU in your Instagram.
Be creative, we know you can.
Tag the picture with #tripllandmark, #tripl and the name of the landmark you are   shooting. Apart from that tag it as much as you want ;-)!

Looking forward to see your Instagrams, and in case we are not following you yet leave us your handle and we will follow you asap! 

What is the difference between thinking and doing?


This is a question many are trying to answer. But how? Everybody with a great idea thinks it is as simple as hiring a great developer who can code the same great idea into a functional service to then eventually make boat loads of money, receive global recognition and end up on the cover of big publications. Unfortunately this is not the reality (please note that there are exceptions). Why, one might wonder! Probably because it is in fact hard understand what users are after in your service. Meaning that apart from the initial idea, which might be loved on huge scale, it only has chance to succeed when the idea’s actual execution is perfect as well. 

We know, by now, that people love the aspect of traveling more social. Since we decided to iterate in February we have spend a lot of time in delivering you the new Tripl. It is live now for already a few weeks and we would love to learn more from people’s, your, experience. I hear you thinking; ‘don’t you have incredible tools to measure this in this era of technology?’. Very true, but truth be told .. people’s online behavior doesn’t always reflect one’s actual needs or desires; the difference between thinking and doing!

The way people do and execute things is possibly an extra additional skill on top of the first genius idea one had. But this requires anticipation and cannot simply be based on assumptions. Remember the difference between the Winklevoss twins and Mark Zuckerberg, idea vs execution.

If you guys want to help us better understand how you use or would like to use Tripl you can answer these 5 multiple choice questions here. All the help is appreciated.

As well have a look at our Fan Page where we share the daily, hilarious, productive and from time to time shameful actions off the team!

Big data at Tripl

This post was written by Nicolas Grasset, CTO at Tripl, formerly creative technology director at the swedish digital agency RIVER and software engineer at Yahoo! Mobile. Follow him on Twitter: @fellowshipofone

Big data is a very hot area right now with new technical possibilities available to smaller companies and many industries that have yet to benefit from big data analysis or “smarter” products. More common with web analytics, finance and enterprise solutions, Tripl is building a product with Big Data for Travel. We are starting with a consumer product and evolving into an open platform for the industry to tap into. In this post, I describe how we came across these new big data problems in everyday life and the challenges involved.


Tripl, time geography and paths

The problem we are trying to solve is simple, we want to help people meet, whether they are traveling or being locals in their own city. And while the problem itself is fairly social already, we also want to leverage their social graph together with friends recommendations to make these meetings more meaningful in time. So in terms of data, we look at four main dimensions:

  • Location: where are you? We store it as geo-coordinates visualize it at a city level, and plan the UI so that Brooklyn and Manhattan are both different part New York City at different distances from Jersey City, NJ.

  • Time: when are you traveling, or when were you last spotted somewhere? Time helps us visualize future plans or recent check-ins.

  • Social: how are you related to these other person? Are you friends, do you know anyone in common, etc.

  • Interest: are there any passions or activities that could be reasons for you to meet someone? We use this information mostly for relevance sorting at the moment

As a result, we have can build a time-space path for each of our users, which illustrate the movement and limitations of individuals across time and space, and how these paths may overlap. So at first we want to gather enough data to accurately identify these overlaps in the context of travel, not just when two locals stay at home, and then highlight the most relevant of them.

Why now: active vs passive data

There are two ways we can compile information about time and location for users: we can ask them, this is the active data, or we can infer that they are traveling from data we gather on other services, most often the passive data.

There are different ways to collect future travel intent. Tripl has its own interface to store planned trips, and we have already integrated with Trip It to import planned trips made there. Going forward, we plan on connecting with different social media services, and most importantly with any actual travel agency, airlines or hotel websites which hold even more accurate plans.

But as we try to make our service useful immediately to any new users, waiting for a critical mass of users is not an option. In the past months, Facebook started geo-tagging every photo or status messages, and Foursquare and Instagram have been growing their user-base faster than ever. Much of this information such as geo-tagged photos or check-ins can give hints about unannounced trips or future plans, they represent the passive data which is becoming key to making Tripl more accurate already at signup while decreasing our need for a critical mass of users.


Juggling between different database solutions

Tripl is handling information of different types coming from different sources. We are looking for efficient storage and data processing: to be able to add more data while answering any query very fast with a maximum capacity of users per server and the possibility to scale as horizontally as possible. At first, our approach has been to serialize the content into relational databases (MySQL 5.1) to better understand the possibilities, the quantity of information we are dealing with and what type of node is updated or read the most often. But going forward, understand the data we are working with will help us scale more easily and efficiently.

A typical query is “Who will be in San Francisco next weekend, for how long, how do I know them?”.


User location in time: A way to look at it is to first solve the user-location problem in time “in San Francisco next weekend and for how long”; easily scalable, we can just store user locations with dates as layers. Each entry, home location or a trip, is rarely updated, but as we build up integrations, more entries are added all the time. And obviously the read-frequency is very high. Different NoSQL databases such as MongoDB offer perfect solutions for this problem.

Social: The second part of the question, “how do I know them”, is more typically a graph problem. As long as the amount of users remains reasonable, we can easily emulate a graph behavior with a relational database. The social graph is frequently updated with new nodes (users) during the early stages of the product, but as their friends join, the graph edges (relationships) are the elements more often updated. In the context of travel, the first degree of separation (friends) and second degree (friends of friends) are by far the most interesting ones, but two levels still mean a very large amount of nodes to update frequently which makes caching at the user level very inefficient and the use of relational database expensive. This is why we are exploring different scaling options such as dynamic caching with Redis or new projects on distributed graph databases based on Hadoop.

So one of the biggest challenges Tripl is setting out to solve is to combine both the time-geography queries with social-graph queries. There are several ways of doing it once data is stored on multiple data-store instead of a single relational database cluster:

  • if a user has a small network and travel to a busy city, it might be more efficient to first get a list of friends and friend of friends and then check them against the city travelers and locals at that time

  • if a user has a large social network and travel to a quiet city, it might be more efficient to first get a list of travelers and locals at that time in the city and then check them against the social network

  • and if no clear pattern emerges, we then need to handle more cases such as extending the radius around a city in case the number of users visiting is too little (think about back-packers in south-east Asia), or simply rely on a more appropriate database engine once the data-set gets too big

So…

In the end, much of the problem is about understanding the data, simplifying the queries and visualization to focus on what matters, rely on statistics and pre-computing depending on patterns (conferences, spring-break, summer vacation, holidays, …). We are just getting started, it will get more complex with much more data types, and this is an exciting area to be working on as new project emerge all the time. We hope to be able to contribute ourselves, and for that we are hiring, so feel free to contact us!

Feature Series: Episode 2. New Privacy Settings

We are back with our second episode of new features that we are enabling. Again, this series will talk about new rollouts to keep you guys up to date. We hope to have these updates easily available within the service so you can easily find them there as well. 

As you all know, Tripl is a social service built to help you interact with locals and travelers year round. Our hope is to leverage your social graph in order to set you up with introductions of friends of friends, so you feel more comfortable reaching out to those people to gather information, or meet up during you next trip. At the same time we have now enabled interest tags that will help us match you with people that share your interest, that may be completely outside your social graph. We feel this can super powerful in the future. 

A few of our users (and actually a very small percentage) have asked for additional privacy settings for their profiles. It was funny to see that the most requested information to hide was user’s age. So like a good startup should, we gave you what you asked for. We now have 2 privacy features enabled. 

By accessing the user settings tab (on the top right of your screen) you can scroll down until you reach the privacy settings. There you have the ability to remove your age from users to view. 

You can also enable your profile to only be show to friends.If you enable this you profile will look this to others. Not so fun :( 

Feature Series: Episode 1. Tripit Import!

Tripl is a product that continues to change as we listen to our users’ feedback and follow our vision of the product’s future. Sometimes we are moving so fast that we forget to tell our users about the new features we are building or the changes we have made to make your social travel experience more interactive, easy and fun.  ”

Feature Series” will be a continuous series that will explain some of these new roll outs and our thinking behind them.

 This episode thats a look at the idea of importing trips and our new roll out feature of allowing users to connect their Tripit account. For those of you who don’t know Tripit its a service that collect your confirmation emails to build a consolidated itinerary for you to travel with. We got tons of feedback requesting for this feature so we went ahead and built it. The idea of importing trips is something we really like since it reduces the friction needed to add future trips. We are looking at a number of different services that contain trip data, so this is just the start. We have some really cool things planned for the upcoming month. 

So how do you use Tripit import?

1) Click the “Add Trip” button on your left navigation

2) A pop up should appear that allows you to enter your trip data. 

3) Click the orange “import trip” button 

4) After clicking the import button, you will be redirect to our “User Setting > Trip import” tab 

5) There you can click the orange “Import From Trips”. Here is where we can continue to add services for you to connect to

6) You will be asked to sign in with your Tripit account and allow “Tripl” to import trips. 

7) Then you will be brought back to Tripl where you simply need to click the green “Add Trip” button.

8) The trip information will now appear in your 

Some Additional Notes:

  • after you’ve set up your Tripit connection, all you have to do is hit the refresh button and we will find any new trips you have on Tripit
  • If you ever need to find the “Import Trip” tab, simply click the “User Settings” tab at the top right of your screen

5) 

Extra, Extra, Read all about it….

Not sure if you have missed it, but Tripl has been getting some recent press after starting to unveil the product to the public. Although we aren’t ready to start a real press circuit until we get the product exactly where we want it, its a good start. Use the links below to find the articles from each of these well known publications:

“With a Little Help From Your Friends” - Wall Street Journal

“Startup Tripl Helps You Find Locals to Harass/Befriend” - Techcrunch 

“Why Social Travel Startup Had To Move From Europe To New York To Follow Their Vision” -  The Next Web

“Tripl Social Travel Launches Publicly” - Artic Startup


“What Else? Tripl, Ski-Hire-Europe and Expedia - WebJet” - Tnooz