We’re very excited to share with you all that VibeAgent has closed an angel round of financing, and are teaming up with Trip Davis, CEO of TRX (NASD: TRXI), who is joining our Board effective immediately to help Charles and I shape the future direction of the company along with the rest of our team.

This news was quickly picked up on TechCrunch, our favorite technology startup blog!

Trip is a fantastic guy, and we couldn’t have asked for a better match. He is currently running TRX, a publicly-traded travel technology company that he co-founded in 1999 and has since grown to 800 employees. His background, like mine, is in e-services - he founded Green Room Productions in San Francisco, which he sold to iXL in February 1998, where he was then named Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Travel Industry Practice Group. He left to start TRX in 1999.

Trip brings to VibeAgent the relationships, knowledge, and experience we were looking for in a partner to help take us to the next level.

Trip, welcome aboard, we’re extremely pumped to have you on the team!

I’ve pasted the copy of our official news release below. Enjoy:

Charlottesville, VA - July 19th, 2007 - VibeAgent Inc., a new travel 2.0 web site that combines user reviews, meta-search, and social networking to help people find the perfect hotel at the perfect price, today announced a seed round of financing and appointed Trip Davis, President and CEO of TRX Inc. (NASD: TRXI) to its Board of Directors.

VibeAgent.com helps people make better hotel booking decisions. Site members share hotel reviews and recommendations across their social network of friends, colleagues, and groups. The reviews and social connections on the site in turn drive VibeAgent’s proprietary social search algorithm, which serves up personalized hotel recommendations in the order they are likely to appeal to the user. VibeAgent’s meta-search engine gathers rates and availability for over 100,000 hotels worldwide from many of the leading hotel and travel web sites, so users can also book their chosen hotels at the best available prices.

Mr. Davis is CEO of TRX, a technology company that provides transaction processing and data integration services to the travel industry worldwide. TRX’s clients include travel agencies, corporations, travel suppliers, government agencies and credit card issuing banks, and employs more than 800 people in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Mr. Davis will join existing board members Adam Healey (co-founder and CEO) and Charles Seilheimer (co-founder, President and CFO) in shaping the future direction of the company. The investment round will be used to finance the growth of the business. The size of the round was not disclosed.

“I’m very excited about VibeAgent. I’m getting involved because of my confidence in the management team’s leadership and their ability to execute on the opportunity,” said Davis. “The business model is solid and addresses an obvious need in the market. It’s time for the next generation of web 2.0 hotel review and booking. It’s all about ease-of-use, user-generated content, social networking, and access to the best prices. Adam and Charles have put together a special combination of search technology and a very compelling user experience.”

“Trip is a perfect fit for VibeAgent,” said Healey. “His experience in building successful companies from the ground up, working closely with the leading players in the online travel industry, and leveraging the significant technological changes that are shaping our market are the exact qualities we were looking for in a board member and investor.”

About Trip Davis
Trip Davis is recognized as a travel technology industry leader and has received numerous honors and awards. In 2007, Business Travel News recognized him for the second time as one of the Top 25 most influential executives in the travel industry. Travel Agent Magazine has listed him three times as one of the 100 Rising Stars in the travel industry. Davis is the four-time Chairman of The Masters Program, the premier executive forum for corporate travel industry leaders.

Prior to co-founding TRX in December 1999, Davis was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Travel Industry Practice Group at iXL, a major strategic Internet services firm. Prior to joining iXL, he was the co-founder and CEO of Green Room Productions, a San Francisco-based leader in web development and technology integration for the travel industry, which he sold to iXL in February 1998.

About VibeAgent Inc.
VibeAgent is a new travel 2.0 web site that combines user reviews, meta-search, and social networking to help people find the perfect hotel at the perfect price. VibeAgent’s meta-search engine gathers rates and availability for over 100,000 hotels worldwide from leading sites and providers such as Priceline, InterContinental Hotel Group, Reserve Travel, Booking.com, and Venere. VibeAgent.com is currently in private beta and accessible by invitation only. VibeAgent Inc. was founded in early 2006 and is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

For an invitation to the private beta or other media inquiries: media@vibeagent.com

After weeks of growing anticipation, yes, they are finally here - Forums!

We hope that you enjoy our shiny new forums. We created forums to enable you to ask questions and discuss topics not directly related to hotels. Curious about things to do or sites to see in the places you’re going to visit? Ask questions, answer questions, help your fellow travelers - get involved! Make new friends! Find a soul mate! Just DO!

Also, each group has their own private forum - only members of a group can post to threads in that group’s forum. Open groups will have their posts and threads visible to all, while forums for closed and private groups will not be visible by non-members.

A few neat things about forums: a) your profile travels with you, so you can quickly see who you’re chatting with; b) you can filter forums using Subject, Destination, and Group filters in real-time - making it super easy and quick to hone in on the content you’re looking for; and c) you can track posts to threads you subscribe to in your alert panel with just one mouse click!

As always, please don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us - we’re listening!

It’s really great to have the support of the industry pros that write some of the leading travel blogs online. I’d like to give a few shout outs to these folks now, and share with you some of the positive reviews we’ve been getting from the blogosphere over the last few weeks:

Guillaume Thevenot, author of Hotel Blogs 2.0, gave us a wonderful and detailed review, citing the simplicity and ease of use of our site. Thanks Guillaume for this great introduction to your readers!

Marketing consultant and author Bill Geist declared on his blog, ZeitGeist, “If TripAdvisor is an example of Web 2.0, VibeAgent is Web 2.1….very, very smart.”

Business 2.0 travel blogger Lindsay Blakely on Terminal Enthusiam likes our innovating experiential search tool and invited her readers to try out our private beta site to see for themselves.

Prolific hotel blogger Guido, over at the Happy Hotelier, theorized that VibeAgent could be the “ultimate web 2.0 hotel site” - we certainly think so!

Leading French travel 2.0 writer Claude Benard on his blog Les Explorers called us the “new Tripadvisor!”

If you haven’t already signed up for an invitation to VibeAgent, let me encourage you to do so now. We’re moving towards inviting some more members into our private beta community. Feedback so far has been great, keep it coming, and do let us know what you think. We’re listening!

IPhone doesn’t need a pronoun or a particle. IPhone isn’t a regular, run of the mill thing, so it doesn’t associate with regular, run of the mill figures of speech. That would be a total drag. IPhone is an essence, a religion, a way of life…nerd nirvana. And yes, I admit it - I’m a nerd.

Ok, I’ve had iPhone for three days now. When I finished convincing myself that it was important to participate in such a world-changing event (this took me all of about 30 seconds), I threw myself into the frenzy full force - visiting 5 different stores in three different New York counties, only to be rebuffed each time…see, if I was going to get iPhone, I wanted the 8GB version, and each store was sold out. This, of course, only made me want iPhone more. Well, this Thursday, my wishes were finally fulfilled, and I secured 8GB iPhone. My life hasn’t been the same since.

As my friend Jack said succinctly, “this is perhaps the first device i’ve bought that’s actually exceeded my expectations.” Well said. If you haven’t already done so, go for it - go get yourself iPhone. It’s even better than you think it is. Apple is forecasting selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. I think they’ll beat it.

IPhone will change the world. Lots of applications will be developed for this platform. What’s neat is, no API necessary! Just create a simple web app that’s optimized for the Safari browser, and viola! - you’re in business. iPhone-optimized apps will also be tapping into a great demographic, one with disposable income to spend on things like a $600 phone.

The fact that I and most of our team work on Macs and have optimized VibeAgent first and foremost for the Safari browser, despite its small overall market share, has finally paid a dividend - VibeAgent looks great on iPhone, and works like a charm.

I won’t bore you with my particular take on all of iPhone’s features - I think you can get the best sense of that from here and here. The one down side to iPhone, and I think everyone agrees, is not actually related to iPhone at all - it’s the connectivity speeds on AT&T’s EDGE network. Quite disappointing. But of course, when you’re in a wi-fi spot, the phone seamlessly joins an available network, and speeds increase dramatically. Don’t let this stop you however from enjoying all the other fantastic aspects of iPhone’s experience. Trust me - you’ll be glad you did.

Did you know that you can communicate directly with us from any page on the site? Simply click on the “Feedback” link that appears at the bottom of every page. Your feedback is so important to us that we respond to every message we receive personally within 24 hours. Don’t be shy - we want to hear from you! Share your ideas, suggestions, whatever it is you want to chat about…we want to hear from you!

Did you know that the groups you join on VibeAgent actually affect your hotel search results? When you’re sorting search results by VibeIndex (the default setting), the way your fellow group members rate and tag hotels feeds into your personalized recommendations. The assumption, of course, is that you’re more likely to share tastes and preferences with your fellow group members than you are the public at large. We’ll be testing this assumption over time with our learning algorithm, and strengthening or weakening this correlation accordingly.

Did you know you can change your privacy settings on VibeAgent? Simply go to Manage Account / My Privacy Settings. From here you can:

1) Set your profile to private, so only your friends can see it
2) Disable the messaging feature so non-friends can’t message you
3) Make your age public (it defaults to private when you sign up)

Your full name never appears on VibeAgent (only your first name and last initial), nor does your email address.

We’ll continue to add more privacy features to VibeAgent as you request them. We respect and value your privacy, and will never share your personal information with any third party - ever.

VibeAgents now have a cool new way to meet the newest members on the site! On the Agents tab, the scrolling column on the left-hand side cycles through the newest Agents - a simple click on an Agent’s photo takes you to his or her profile page where you can interact with them to your heart’s content!

We hope you enjoy this fun new way to meet our newest Agents - enjoy!