I Am Adam Smith

SubDural Marketing: Or How 9 Inch Nails Ran a Kick Ass Alternate Reality Game

Wired has an amazing story on Alternate Reality Games. Basically a huge game played by hundreds of thousands of people to promote NINs new album. Involved hard drives left in bathrooms with coded messages, slightly offset typography on Tshirts revealing secret websites, that all culminated in a secret rooftop concert.

The clues are obscenely obscure, but people are so into it that they go to crazy lengths to play. And from a marketing perspective, theres the hook.

We're all getting very good at tuning out marketing BS. But making a fun, engaging game can get tons of people to not tune you out; but rather spend time and money to find you. The key is to engage people; dont treat them as if they're stupid; give them a challenge and something new to chew over. A bonus is letting them colloborate.

I highly recommend the wired article, not only is it a lot of fun, it will give you some things to mull over in promoting your idea/concept/product/image.

Local Girl: Blog in Cartoons

Cute, British girl blogs her life in cartoons. I love it.

Software Packaging

If your not offering your app as Software as a Service you might need a sharp looking packaging. Its debatable if people care anymore or not, but if you do... here's my research on packaging options. Please let me know if you've used any of these companies, or know of a better service. When I get price quotes, I'll update this post.

PackagingPrice has a basic option with no design on box. About a buck a box, minimum of 50 boxes.

Disk.com has a nice selection of packaging. Seems a bit expensive, and there sales team has been unresponsive to my questions. Didnt seem to excited to work with us.

FolderSolutions seems to have packaging that can be customized, but the website is hard to navigate.

   CactusContainers looks very professional. Am going to get a quote from them.

Vulcan Packaging also has retail packaing.

BoxCoop but their minimum order looks to be 1,250 boxes.

Magellan Packaging looks very nice, with some top end looking packages. Minimum order is $2500 though  

InstaBox they have printing and design services.

KoolPrint.com

Pricing Info.
Quantity	50	100	250	500
Base Price	$ 739	$ 855	$ 1450	$ 2010

Pricing for the overslip

Stock	50	100	250	500	1000
Full color CMYK Process
Card - 100 LB Cover Stock	$ 543	$ 658	$ 1039	$ 1617	$ 2194
Card - 80 LB Cover Stock	$ 531	$ 647	$ 1028	$ 1594	$ 2183
Card - Corrugated Stock	$ 808	$ 959	$ 1467	$ 2218	$ 4174

Tracking Flight Stats

Company called FlightStats.com offers web services that show the status of your flight. Google launched an implementation of this today. This would be very nice to have in the TripInvite flight itinerary.

UTest: Crowdsourced Quality Assurance Testing

Utest looks very cool. Company provides the platform for free. Has a community of software testers that bang away at your software. They charge per bug they find. Will likely give this a try for TripInvite when it launches, and will update how it goes.

Kango.com Announces $4m Venture Round

Techcrunch reports that travel search engine Kango.com closed a $4 million venture round led by Shasta Ventures.

Free Hosting for Facebook Apps

Facebook recently announced partnership with Joyent to offer free, scalable hosting for a year for their apps. If you go over the bandwidth of the free account, it still scales to serve your users, but you get charged.

Good list of Social Travel Sites

Good reference list of social travel sites from Startup Center blog.

TripHub
TripHub create a single "hub" for all trip information and discussions. Users can invite people and track who is coming, research and discuss travel plans and activities, collaborate on decisions and keep people informed, create a shared trip map and schedule of events, and share travel itineraries from any source or supplier.

TripIt
Tripit allows users to organize trip details into one master online itinerary -- even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites. It automatically include maps, directions and weather, and gives the option to book restaurants, theater tickets, activities and more right from within the online itinerary. Users can safely access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary.

WAYN
WAYN is the fastest growing travel and lifestyle social networking community website in the UK. WAYN helps you to keep track of all your contacts from around the world and make new friends based on where you are now, where you have been and where you are going!

TripWiser
TripWiser is an intuitive way to capture trip experiences by various profiles and social factors. Users can create, customize and print multiple itineraries, upload photos, write and share with close friends and the broader community.

Trip Tie
TripTie is an online community of travelers, all devoted to planning and sharing their trips. Members plan and store their itineraries, then you take the best pieces of them and create your own. Share your favorite places, travel tips, to-brings, photos, stories, and more.

yowtrip
YOWtrip allows single travelers to find others going on similar trips.

imin
I'm In! is a social media site for organizing travel with friends. It has unique trip ideas, private planning pages, and a place to share memories and trip details.

Trip Up (Side Step)
TripUp is an interactive travel community that connects people from all over the world through a social network with a travel twist.

Matador Travel
Matador is a meeting place. It’s a place for you to express yourself, tell others about your adventures, get meaningful travel advice, and take inspiration from the beautiful and remarkable things others like you have discovered all across the globe.

TripConnect
TripConnect is an online service that allows people to get travel advice from people they know, others who share similar interests, and also from established and relevant information sources. The company's mission is to help people with the process of choosing travel destinations and hotels by presenting them with the most useful sources of information: those that they trust and those that are most relevant to their tastes and interests.

Dopplr
Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you're planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.

Groople
Groople is a online group travel agency dedicated to simplifying the otherwise difficult task of planning travel for your group.

Kango
Kango is a travel information search engine - your first step to deciding where to go, where to stay or what to do. We're here to help you make informed decisions about what best fits your travel preferences.

Yahoo
Yahoo! Travel is a comprehensive online travel destination, where you can reserve cheap airline tickets, hotels, cars, cruises and vacation packages, all in one place. Research trips from a wealth of planning resources including destination and city guides, user and expert reviews, local weather and currency information, and much more.

Travnotes
TravNotes is a micro-blogging service that allows you to note your travels. Share short notes with friends and family, and quickly log your thoughts while traveling, plan an upcoming trip, or ask questions. Categorize your notes by detsination if you wish.

Mylifeoftravel
My Life of Travel is a free web-based travel journal and travel research tool that lets travellers record their journeys, map travel histories, share tips with fellow tourists and keep in touch with friends and family, without the need for mass email communication and photo sharing sites.

There are are a lot more out there that don't really fit into Social Travel, but might fit into Travel 2.0. They are:

farecast helps save money with flexible airfare. (I used it and recommend it.)
sidestep searches sites to find the Web's best travel bargains.
kayak is a travel search engine that searches hundreds of travel sites from all over the world.
Yapta enables customers to tag specific flights/itineraries and then monitors pricing and sends email updates when fares drop
hereorthere allows users to share travel experiences.
Charter Bus America is online charter bus service.
RedWeek is a service for timeshares for rent or sale.
SeatGuru is a source for airplane seating, in-flight amenities and airline information.
RealTravel is travel guide and trip planner powered by advice from real travelers
Home&Abroad is a travel planning and purchasing service
Site59 (now Lastminute.com) is a great getaway last minute travel site that specializes in last-minute, online travel deals.
world66 is an open content travel guide, where people from all over the planet can write about the places they love, the hotels they stayed in, the restaurants that have eaten.
Travellerspoint is focused on cultural travelers and provides a live meeting point for travelers to create more understanding for different cultures
IgoUgo is a community of travelers sharing reviews and photos
wikitravel.org is a wikipedia for travel.
TripAdvisor is just a big, big site with hotel reviews, photos and travel advice for hotels and vacations.

ChipIn: A successful Hawiian Online Startup

ChipIn is a paypal based service to help people share costs for things. They're based in Manoa valley on Oahu. Inspires me that you can do a successful startup in Hawaii! I'm proud to be starting TripInvite here, and want to help build the startup community here (as well as a world-class group travel site).

Hawaii Business Magazine had a good article about them and their startup experience.

Part 1 of the story

Part 2

Clinton Video on Non-Zero Games and Robert Wright

Great speech by Bill Clinton at the Daytona Peace Accord. Thesis of speech was based on Robert Wrights excellent book, Nonzero . Bill wasn't perfect, but damn does he put arguements on how to make our world a better place eloquently.

Couldn't agree with you more buddy.