BOOT in USA Today thanks to VibeAgent

Thanks to a competition run by VibeAgent the BOOT has made it into the USA Today in the Sky blog. The VibeAgent Facebook application - JetSetter - is about (promoting VibeAgent and) letting people compete with friends on how many miles have been flown and destinations visited. I managed to win the Blogger Edition of the competition with 144,142 miles, winning out over big travellers such as Jens Thraenhart of Tourism Internet Marketing (113,828 miles) and Ben Mutzabaugh of the USA Today’s “Today in the Sky” (56,202 miles). Full results here. However as I'm based in Australia and work for a company with offices in Chicago and London this gives me a big advantage over North American competitors. As I said to VibeAgent's PR guy when they told me I had topped the poll "Thanks. But not sure my family thinks it is something worth celebrating." So public apologies to Madame BOOT for the travel.

Buzz and $$ around Yapta

I missed the early stories around the fund raising of Yapta (Your “Amazing” Personal Travel Agent). In July last year they announced the raising of $2.3M from First Round Capital, Voyager Capital, Swiftsure Capital and Bay Partners. This came shortly after their May 07 beta launch and news (from TechCrunch) that they had put the product together on the basis of $750k in angel funding and 5,000 private beta testers. I was traveling at the time of their raising and had little to add the blog reports such as that from HotelMarketing.com. But buzz and news is coming from other sources since the fund raising.

On the traffic level, the company is now claiming that 250,000 shoppers have used the engine to track flight spending. CEO Tom Romary (ex-Alaskan Airlines, ex- Real Networks) translates this into searches of flights of a value of more than $400mm. On the staffing level, the company has been boasting board numbers with the appointment of David Falter as a Director. Falter is a ex-Cendantite having served as President of Galileo Americas.

Yapta’s meta-search functionality twist is it operates on the site of the supplier rather than its own site. With old school meta-search like Kayak a customer enters in search terms and waits for the results on the Kayak site before being sent to the site of the supplier to book. With Yapta the consumer tags/bookmarks the search combination on the supplier’s site with the Yapta tag. If the price drops Yapta sends an alert to the consumer. Reminds me of recent chat with VibeAgent CEO Adam Healey where he described the web and social networks as “containers” with product based companies like VibeAgent and Yapta providing the applications that sit in the container. To work it requires and download and currently only works on major US carriers so there is still work to do to go global.

Here at the BOOT we will keep a watch on this buzz. Just (I am sure) like the Yapta execs are keeping a watch on the $115mm cheque that Microsoft signed to get their hands on Farecast.

VibeAgent Sessions: Interview with VibeAgent CEO Adam Healey - the Web is my container

In my continuing series of interviews with start-ups I had a chance to chat with VibeAgent founder and CEO Adam Healey.

VibeAgent is a combination of review site and meta-search - which I think in today's world is where every hotel focused meta-search player is pitching themselves. As I have discussed recently, content is now the number one tool that people are grabbing at to drive natural traffic to feed search. As PPC becomes more expensive it has become harder and harder for meta-search to make money the old fashioned way - traffic arbitrage. Now meta-search providers need content to generate traffic from natural search. Sidestep tried this through acquisition (though it seems that Kayak does not care for it very much as the new owners).

VibeAgent do things slightly differently from other met-search providers we have seen. They have matched content, maps, user reviews and activity tagging all in the same search. On its own none of this is revolutionary. It is "just" content, plus functionality plus supplier/inventory connections. It is not these choices and combinations that makes VibeAgent different it is the execution. The user interface and layout look good. Really good. This is a website designed with customers in the mind. It is easy to search - but more importantly it is easy to refine search by price, location, activity, requirement, category of activity and more. It is even fun to play with. Searching Paris and then refining by Historic, Nightlife and Gourmets and seeing what the hotel results makes hotel searching a game again.

It is not all roses - the load time is slow (though the interstitial manages it well). Also the mapping functionality appears to favour some supplier/inventory provider address formats. These thing can be fixed.

I don't think the VibeAgent idea is revolutionary (the revolution was meta-search itself) but the site is a winner. This led to my discussions with Adam about whether or not a fantastic site and product is enough. In my rules for content companies I said you need content and lots of it to get the traffic from Google. Healey says he will look to more than natural search fed by user generated content for traffic generation. The aim is to take the product and...well...productise it. In Healey's words the web and particularly networks life Facebook and MySpace are containers and VibeAgent is an application that sits in the container. This means that marketing efforts will be built around widgets & applications that can be imported into all of the "containers" sitting around on the Internet. First announcement - a Facebook application.

My Take

I see the rationale for this strategy. PPC is too expensive for a start up with just angle funding (from Trip Davis of TRX). Content acquisition takes a long time. But it is also risky as it takes a lot of developer time to build and there is a lot of noise in the containers (ie application spam).

In a lot of my start up interviews I reach a common conclusion around the enormous challenge of attracting traffic once the product is right. I see that same theme here with VibeAgent. In this case Healey and team (including founder Charles Seilheimer and marketing VP Dennis Ortiz) have a top class product, a clear strategy and (a little bit) of money. The container strategy is the new piece and an untested one. To make it work Healey and team have to keep the costs low and the product sharp.