We’re making our annual voyage to the PhoCusWright Travel Conference in LA, where we’ll be meeting up with our favorite partners, bloggers, and competitors, and announcing our latest investment round! Come stop by and visit our booth for a personal demonstration of our new Hotelier Suite!

The Hotelier Suite (still in beta) lets hotels add or edit their content directly on VibeAgent’s search engine, so you can take control of your message and distribute it to more people and places!

This was a treat. I had the privilege of being interviewed by NPR about how VibeAgent and other startups are handling the economic downturn.

I have such fond memories of listening to NPR as a child at the kitchen table with my mom preparing dinner and us chatting about the day at school.

We’re announcing today that we’ve raised $3 million in Series A investment capital to support our goal of becoming the world’s leading hotel search engine. You can find the full text of the news release here.

Today VibeAgent features real-time rates and availability for 140,000 hotels and content from over 30 travel sites.

Investors participating in this round consist of a small group of prominent executives in the software, travel, and private equity industries, along with a follow-on investment from our angel and board member, Trip Davis, the CEO of TRX.

I want to thank our investors for their vote of confidence, and our entire team for their hard work in helping make this happen.

We’re very excited about our future. We’ll be making a series of exciting announcements in the weeks and months to come. Until then, we appreciate your patronage and support, and we hope you’ll continue to use VibeAgent when researching and booking a hotel online!

Well, the season is upon us… that crazy time of chaos, traffic, stuffing ourselves to the gills and family gatherings that we wait with baited breath for each year. That’s right, it’s about to be Thanksgiving!

Let’s face it. No matter how much we love our family and the get togethers, holiday travel is often times a lot of stress. Below are some tips (and some fun facts) to help you get through this holiday season with a few less headaches and a lot more time to enjoy the festivities.

Happy Thanksgiving from the VibeAgent Team and make sure to have an extra piece of pumpkin pie for us!

Travel Tips to Ease the Stress
- While visiting with the family, take the opportunity to start making your December holiday plans while everyone is in one place.

- Instead of staying with the family, get a hotel room or even a mini suite, and make it a mini-vacation.  Hotels in most major cities, and especially the suburban areas, have incredible deals around the holidays due to the few people that consider this option. So, if beds are scarce, or you and your sweetie can’t fit on that twin bed from high school anymore, spend the extra couple of dollars to stay somewhere relaxing instead. Besides, then you wont have to listen to Uncle Ernie’s snoring all night!

- The busiest holiday travel days are Wednesday and Thursday, so if your schedule allows, consider leaving on Tuesday and returning on Friday to avoid the travel chaos.

- Allow plenty of time for check-in at the airport. The general rule is be there 2 hours ahead… for Thanksgiving travel, make it 10 (20 if you are leaving on Wednesday). Ok, 10 is an exaggeration, but 3 hours early would be an appropriate cushion to get through security with all the extra people and get to your gate without having a “Home Alone” dash to the gate moment.

- Pack as light as possible. With many airlines adding checked baggage fees to their flights, keeping yourself limited to one bag will save both time and money.

- Most airlines provide online check in before you even get to the airport. This will help you bypass the long lines at the check-in counter, especially if you are only taking carry-on luggage. Be careful though… they are getting a lot more strict about the number of carry-on items and their size, and this will only be tighter with the number of travelers around the holiday.

- If checking baggage is a must, make sure to pack a set of clothes in a carry-on bag. With record numbers of travelers comes record numbers of lost/delayed baggage. No one wants to be stuck on Thanksgiving without clean underwear & socks!

- If driving, take the time to have your car looked at before leaving to prevent avoidable breakdowns. Also, make sure to pack an emergency pack with an up-to-date map, water, non-perishable food items, blankets and emergency flares. You can never be too careful!

- Think about taking a train to your destination instead of driving. It will take about the same amount of time as driving would but will have a lot less hassle involved. Getting a passenger suite is especially ideal if you have little ones who could use a floor to play on or if you want some beauty rest before seeing the family.

- Last (but certainly not least), try and have Thanksgiving at your house. Yes, the cooking and cleaning may seem like a hassle, but it pales in comparison to rush hour traffic or crazy airport lines.

For your amusement… some fun Thanksgiving facts!
1) Americans feast on 535 million pounds of turkey on Thanksgiving.

2) Turkeys can drown if they look up when it’s raining, and have heart attacks from sudden shocks.

3) Contrary to popular belief, Pilgrims did not have big buckles on their clothing, shoes, or hats.

4) Benjamin Franklin wanted to have the Turkey as the national bird, saying the Bald Eagle was “cowardly.”

5) A turkey under 16 weeks is called a fryer. A 5 to 7 month old turkey is called a roaster.

6) President Thomas Jefferson scoffed at the idea of establishing a national “Thanksgiving Day.”

7) Congress did not declare Thanksgiving a national holiday until 1941.

8) Fossil evidence shows that turkeys roamed the Americas 10 million years ago.

9) 91% of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day.

10) 50% of Americans put stuffing inside the turkey.

11) More than 40 million green bean casseroles are served on Thanksgiving.

12) In the US, about 280 million turkeys are sold for the Thanksgiving celebrations.

13) Turkeys were one of the first animals in the Americas to be domesticated.

14) The ‘First Thanskgiving’ in 1621 lasted for 3 days.

15) Every year, one lucky turkey receives a Presidential pardon and escapes the dinner table.

Quick shout-out to the folks at LifeHacker for kindly featuring VibeAgent as a really really awesome travel site!

Thanks guys!

At the EyeforTravel European Travel Summit on Sales & Marketing tomorrow here in Munich, I’m going to be making a presentation focused on helping other travel businesses develop their social content strategy.

You can see a copy of my presentation here.

The trick here is, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Each and every one of your companies is different. So, taking a page from my management consultant playbook, I have come up with a social content strategy framework that I believe scales well to all travel businesses, and in fact, all businesses that are developing a content strategy of any sort.

Without going into too much detail (come to see me live at a travel conference!), here is a taste of the framework:

The organizing principle of this framework is that THE WEB IS THE PLATFORM. This becomes increasingly evident as you go through implementing the framework.

1. Within your site, a successful content strategy provides users with the
a) most relevant content from the
b) most trustworthy sources in the
c) most appropriate context.

2. Throughout the web, a successful content strategy delivers
a) the most relevant content to your
b) targeted customers through the
c) most appropriate channels.

3. When you’re developing your internal and web-wide strategies around the key areas above, think of how your site connects and collaborates with:
a) Search Engines
b) Communities, the
c) Blogosphere, and
d) Destinations

PART I:
The situation today is not that we don’t have enough social content out there - we have too much of it. The key is to determine which content is the most relevant to your users, and which best supports and strengthens your underlying value proposition.

Sometimes, the most trustworthy content isn’t social content at all - sometimes it is authoritarian content (provided by a brand or source known for providing an objective perspective, like a ratings agency), or even editorial content (commentary provided by a business editor that holds significant weight with readers, e.g. Lonely Planet).

And where we choose to make our content available to users is also critical to supporting our underlying mission. It’s no use providing hotel reviews to users after they’ve already purchased their hotel room, nor is it valuable to provide too much detail at the hotel level before the user has figured out which city they want to visit. Providing the right content at the right time in the user’s experience is an essential and often overlooked component to a successful content strategy.

PART II & III:
Let’s think about content, customers, and channels in the context of Search Engines first. Search engines, as we all know, are absolutely critical if we want users to find us. 85+% of online travel sessions start with a search engine. So we need to create landing pages that are relevant as far as Google is concerned, and that means we need to have a) key words that match the user query, b) fresh, unique content, and c) lots of inbound links that validate the value of our content. There are other search engines out there besides Google however, and there are other algorithms at work to measure relevance. A truly successful search engine content strategy takes all this into consideration.

What about Communities? Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, TripAdvisor, Virtual Tourist - where does it end? A successful content strategy takes a methodical look at each of these communities, evaluates their relative importance to the business, and prioritizes them as such. Remember, the Web is the Platform. Start with the communities most likely to be interested in your product or service. This might involve doing a cross-platform demographic analysis. What is the goal of your community strategy? Is it building brand awareness amongst an important or hard-to-reach constituency? Or is it to drive qualified traffic to your site? This will affect how you implement your community strategy.

How about the Blogosphere? This is a great platform for generating publicity about your company, products or services, but it’s a two-way street. Like any good relationship, the more you give, the more you get. If you can help bloggers do their jobs well, then you will be justly rewarded. How can you utilize the company blog for your benefit, while also helping other blogs be more successful? How can you build genuine, collaborative relationships with the right bloggers? There’s a whole presentation in each one of these paragraphs, but let’s at least acknowledge that developing a voice in the blogosphere and interacting with other voices is likely an essential part of any content strategy.

And finally, other Destination sites. What marketing partnerships make sense for your organization? What about booking and content widgets - pay-per-click campaigns, etc. Think about symbiotic businesses that might want to provide their users with access to your content. Is there a way to benefit from content syndication, which in turn helps SEO?

So, lots of stuff to talk about - and only about 10 minutes or so for the presentation. I’m looking forward to an engaging discussion tomorrow!

Hey folks!

I just wanted to let you know that I will be speaking at EyeforTravel’s upcoming Sales & Marketing in Travel Europe Summit 2008. The 2 day event will be held in Munich, 14-15 October and sees Europe’s leading travel marketers convene to discuss top tips to boost online sales. Now in its 8th successful year the event is a fantastic platform for networking and knowledge sharing.

This year the Summit will comprise of 2 conferences: - ‘Online Marketing Strategies for Travel’ and ‘Social Media Strategies for Travel’.

To see who has registered so far click here.

To view the full conference agendas click here and here.

As part of my speaker engagement I am able to offer you a €150 discount on the full conference fee.

I think you will agree it looks set to be a very interesting 2 days and I hope that you can join me at the event. To register simply email Gina Baillie at gina@eyefortravel.com with your name, title, company name, email address and telephone number. She will be happy to secure your discounted place at the event.

Cheers,

Adam

Yay! We love prizes - especially shiny (or edible) ones!!!!

VibeAgent has been awarded a Gold Medal by Travel Weekly for developing an industry leading travel site. VibeAgent won the top prize in the online travel services category.

We are very grateful for this recognition and hope to continue in our quest to create the best hotel search engine in the world!

Thank you to Travel Weekly and all the judges for this honor.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about how Charlottesville, Virginia (where VibeAgent is headquartered) has many of the essential ingredients to becoming a successful breeding ground for technology startups. We’re home to Mr. Jefferson’s University, and we have lovely weather, a robust live music scene, fancy art galleries, access to world-class parks, beautiful vineyards, free polo matches on Sundays, plenty of rich and famous people, and fantastic coffee and coffee shops; basically, we’ve just got an all-around high quality of life over here.

The only challenge of building a world-class technology business in this great place I alluded to in 2007 was the fact that we needed more nerds. Specifically at VibeAgent, we need more people who understand the web and can build, market and deploy great software. I referenced Paul Graham’s fantastic essay on why Silicon Valley is so good at producing successful technology startups. My post catalyzed an even more interesting discussion over on the OpenSource Connections blog, a talented software development shop also based in Charlottesville. And in personal conversations with Daniel Strickland over at Cloudbrain, Jeff Gunther at Intalgent, Eric Pugh at OpenSource, Otavio Freire at OpenQ, and others, we’ve developed a consensus on one thing - we all want more nerds!

Well, since that post, VibeAgent has grown to 14 people, moved to shiny new offices on the beautiful downtown mall, been covered twice each in TechCrunch, USA Today, and MSNBC, been named a top up-and-coming travel site in the Washington Post and on Forbes.com, and been featured just this last week in our own local paper, the Daily Progress. We’re about to make a major financing announcement, a major partner announcement, and roll out two major software releases. (/blatant self-promotion)

But…..our biggest challenge continues to be finding good technology people, and Charlottesville still needs more nerds. We would hire five talented developers tomorrow if we could find them locally, but so far, we haven’t. And this is forcing us to consider other options for our business, including opening up an office somewhere more nerdy.

So, with a little more experience under our belts, I’d like to put forth five concrete proposals on how technology firms in Charlottesville like VibeAgent can band together to gain some critical mass and solve the #1 challenge facing our business. We love this town, and we’d rather not have to go elsewhere to satisfy our nerd quotient.

How to Strengthen the Charlottesville Technology Community

1. Create an Active Charlottesville Technology Networking Club
Real world social networking is essential to creating strong bonds and gaining critical mass. I’ve set up a group using Cloudbrain’s blastogo to form an sms network for a monthly CvilleNerd meet & greet (if you want to join the sms network and be notified of the time and location of our first event, simply text “follow cvillenerd” to 32075). The idea here is to have a monthly social event to start making more connections and strengthening the Charlottesville technology ecosystem. I’m hoping the active members of Neon Guild and Chuug will join this list, along with all of us who work in the online world here in Charlottesville, and we can start to develop some critical mass.

As this club grows organically, we can create a web site and job board, form groups on existing social networks, and provide a way for Charlottesville technology companies and technology people to get to know each other better in an informal setting. But it takes that first step, so join CvilleNerd today.

2. Develop Stronger Ties to UVA’s Engineering & Applied Sciences Schools
There are a myriad of opportunities for strengthening relationships between the local technology business community and UVA’s leading technology and applied sciences programs. Career fairs, speaking engagements, case studies, internships, school projects, and other activities help build stronger bonds between the worlds of academia and business.

The need here is for a common touch point for Charlottesville technology businesses, and a desire by the University to support the local community. The City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County can also develop programs to stimulate mutually beneficial collaboration between UVA and Charlottesville’s business community. A strong local economy provides more job opportunities for families who relocate here, and increases demand for Charlottesville’s existing businesses. We can all do more to strengthen these ties, and with the development of CvilleNerd, we will.

3. Establish More Continuing Education Options in Applied Technologies
Charlottesville employees need more continuing education options to help them stay current on new technologies, starting with training courses in programming languages such as PHP, Java, C++, and Ruby, as well as in advanced project management methodologies and tools. UVA and Piedmont have practically no curriculum options for these types of classes. With a common organizing body to aggregate demand for and promote the desire for more technology education programs, our goal should be to attract better teaching resources to both of these institutions, and/or develop our own training programs and make them accessible and affordable for our community. Just as America needs to focus on re-training our work force for the new competitive global landscape, Charlottesville needs to invest in training programs for our technology community. The economic future of our city will be driven by our ability to attract, train, and retain the knowledge workers that are increasingly the driving force behind our continued economic prosperity.

4. Actively Market Charlottesville as a Great Home for Startups
Many of you are already familiar with the Aspen vs. Austin conversation. Will Charlottesville become a community with a strong university, arts programs, and a thriving middle class - like Austin - or will it go the direction of Aspen, another city known for its beautiful surroundings and high quality of life, but that has become too expensive to support a middle class and instead caters to retirees and the superrich? The choice, put in these terms, is clear. The outcome, however, is not.

Charlottesville needs to redouble its efforts to market itself as a great place for small businesses, especially in the technology fields, and to promote policies and investments that successfully support small businesses growth. The downtown mall is a vibrant place where lunch time means bumping into colleagues from other companies and strengthening the bonds that create community. I envision a time when the mall is littered with high-tech startups tackling exciting business challenges and simultaneously supporting the local economy. These things have a tipping point, a phenomenon well documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s book of the same name. We just need to give it a little push.

5. Share Charlottesville’s Technology Startup Success Stories
When you say the words “dot-com startup” to people who have lived in Charlottesville for over 10 years they immediately recall Value America. The company actually relocated from Nevada to Charlottesville in 1998 and went public in April 1999, gaining a valuation of $2.4 billion without a dime in profits. But a little over a year later, the firm had filed for bankruptcy and quickly became a “dot-bomb.”

Those days of irresponsible excess and greed are over. Businesses today have a much higher hurdle to reach before being showered with venture capital. The markets have also become wiser, and are valuing businesses based on their fundamentals once again. A lot of the entrepreneurs that are starting businesses today actually founded businesses and raised venture capital during the bubble days (myself included) and have learned a lot from the experience. There are also significant structural improvements in the web environment that make it far easier to get a startup successfully off the ground these days. They primarily relate to the ability today to a) tap into existing revenue streams in the form of advertising networks such as Google AdSense; b) tap into existing online communities and user bases such as Facebook and MySpace; and c) roll out software and hardware infrastructure at costs approaching zero by leveraging open source software and elastic computing clouds.

So, there are many new Internet success stories out there, and we hope to be one of them. Let’s share the good news, the best practices, the key takeaways that we discover in our collective startup experiences, through face-to-face networking and aggregating our online worlds.

We here at VibeAgent look forward to supporting the development of a more robust and cohesive technology community in Charlottesville. Because, together we can build something much greater than the sum of our individual efforts.

Together, we can create a little Silicon Valley of the south.

As you know, VibeAgent is a hotel search engine. In our efforts to bring you the best hotel search experience available anywhere online, period, we’re happy to announce today the addition of two fantastic new partners to our site - LateRooms and GTA Hotels. Every time you conduct a search on VibeAgent, we go out and search the sites of each of our partners, and starting today, you’ll now be able to view rates and availability for all of the hotels from LateRooms and GTA Hotels on VibeAgent.com.

LateRooms.com is the UK’s leading online accommodation specialist, offering late availability deals in over 16,000 properties across the UK and Europe. Accommodation ranges from budget to luxury five star hotels, and savings of up to 70% off the normal room rate are common for a variety of independent and branded hotels.

Gtahotels.com enables travel consumers to book significantly discounted accommodation at more than 35,000 hotels in over 128 countries and 3,800 cities across Europe, Asia, Americas, Africa, the Middle East, the USA & Canada. GTA has helped over 1 million customers get the lowest hotel rates since 2000.

We’re very happy to be working with both of these fine partners and bringing their inventory directly to you, our loyal customers!