Posts from — October 2008

Another week is in the books here at Everlater and the team is eagerly awaiting the Halloween festivities tonight.  Most of the team will be in Denver for the night, Nate will be a mad scientist (makes us wonder where the costume is?), Ryan is going as a biker, I am a pirate, and Charlie has yet to decide.

This week, like all previous, was filled with a mix of intense programming and site design blended with important meetings and Boulder tech events.

• The whole Everlater team met on Saturday for a work and strategy session hosted by Charlie at the classy Metropolis Cafe.  Ryan and Charlie spent much of the time building out the site back-end and Nate and I pulled together a business strategy presentation for the upcoming weeks meetings.
• The week began with a meeting with Jim Collins, the best selling author and management consultant, where the team discussed startup strategy and presented Everlater’s early stage plans.  Many thanks to Jim for spending time with us and his incredibly valuable advice.
• Nate and I attended Boulder’s OpenCoffee at The Cup to schmooze with the Boulder tech community and also met with Facebook guru David Clements.  We continue to be impressed with breadth of the tech community.
• Throughout the week Boulder hosted the Boulder.me tech job fair aimed at growing the Boulder tech community by attracting some of the world’s top developers.  The event appeared to be a hit (even though most startups are in liquidity lock-down at the moment) and we fully support any and all efforts to grow the Colorado tech scene.
• On Wednesday night, Boulder hosted its first Ignite Boulder event.  Ignite is night of presentations with a twist, each presentation has 20 slides that automatically advance after 15 seconds.  Nate and I helped local startup aficionado Andrew Hyde organize the event and Ryan stepped up to the plate and pitched a great piece on food headlines over the past seventy years. The event was well attended and one of the most fun tech events we’ve attended.  You can see Ryan’s pitch below.  Great job Ryan!

…because it’s toooooo nice outside!  Natty and I just got back from cycling up Flagstaff mountain in Boulder, while Ryan has been on a well-deserved climbing adventure….and if Charlie weren’t stuck at his desk we know he’d be out there too.  Getting the endorphins flowing always makes working more productive, and this week has been absolutely sensational for experiencing the outdoors in Colorado.

Tonight, Ryan is giving a presentation at Ignite Boulder — if you are in the Boulder area, you should definitely think about coming down and hearing what Ryan has to say.

And now some glorious pictures from today’s ride, courtesy of Natty’s iPhone (which we discovered can survive a drop onto asphalt while biking).  If you live in the Boulder-Denver area and haven’t biked up Flagstaff and back….you should.  It is spectacular.  Also, if you’re ever interested in riding (while the weather is still nice), please shoot Natty and me an e-mail — the more the merrier.

Everlater is proud to announce we have doubled our team and would like to welcome web developer extraordinaires Ryan Wanger and Charlie O’Keefe to the family.

Both bring significant web development experience to everlater and will be vital team members responsible for much of the technical site development.

Charlie

A self described Software guy with a background in research and development at Northrop Grumman, Charlie is a proud native Coloradan and graduate from the prestigious Colorado School of Mines (Math and Computer Science).  An avid outdoor-ist and traveler, Charlie fits right in here at everlater, a big time skier, slackliner, cyclist and ultimate frisbee stud with travel experience backpacking Western Europe by train, scuba-diving in Egypt and touring much of the Mediterranean.  Charlie can be reached at charlie@everlater.com or on Twitter at @charlieok.

Ryan

A Software Designer/Engineer and prolific amateur blogger, Ryan has worked on everything from windows applications for a human resources company, to a small social network for rock climbers.  Ryan was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Kopps frozen custard and braaaaats, and graduated from Hamilton College (Computer Science). He has traveled extensively in Thailand, Indonesia, Peru, Bolivia, Austria, Spain and spent six months in Australia.  Ryan is an avid skier and climber who was tragically born in the wrong state, “but finally got (his) priorities straight and moved to Boulder.”  He lived in all four US time zones the year after graduating college, is a fearless rock climber, and an ultimate frisbee captain.  In his previous life, he was a video game tester and online poker pro.  Ryan can be reached at ryan@everlater.com or on Twitter at @ryanwanger.

Yesterday Natty and I presented at the Boulder BarCamp meeting regarding User Generated Content and Online Travel.  The presentation is below:

We are also looking for better data regarding travel guidebook sales over the past 10 years — if you have access to this data or have seen it, please let us know in the comments!

Natty and I have thoroughly combed through the internet and found several sites that we will be competing against, like these guys, them too, and perhaps these guys too. Each of these sites, to a varying degree, attempts to do at least a part of what everlater aims to do. While that did give us a slight pause, I have full confidence that everlater is a superior (or complementary) product to everything currently available.

Right now, the average global internet user spends roughly one hour per day online according to Nielsen Online. This is barely enough time for me to check my personal email (30 min — my friends can vouch that I’m a terrible correspondent), read a few articles on NYT (20 min) and quickly browse my news feed on Facebook (10 min — unless I have to de-tag questionable photos!).  On top of that, while no statistics exist on internet usage while traveling — from experience, when faced with the choice between sitting in a hot internet cafe or sunning yourself on the beach, my time on the internet drastically dropped. So, while cognizant of existing competitors, we are extremely focused on one competitor that is never mentioned in social networking business plans: apathy towards the internet in general (also know as “the beach!”).

Our greatest competitor

Traditional media companies have been wrestling with this concept for years. If I develop a new sitcom for Fox, not only do I have to be concerned with the competing shows on ABC, NBC and CBS — I have to think why people are going to watch my show over reading a book, playing with their kids, listening to the radio, etc. The current crème de la crème of social networking sites such as Twitter, Brightkite, and Digg are all extremely successful websites. However as the picture below indicates (and I believe that even Twitter and Digg get too much credit for their position in this diagram) they still have some distance to go before they are adopted into the mainstream. Brian Solis (responsible for the picture too) put it the most succinctly:

…where are Digg and Twitter in respect to the adoption cycle? They’re not as far along as you think judging by the buzz and permeation of your social graph. These companies still have oceans to swim until they become household brands…

The path to widespread acceptance

These companies have established products and clearly have a solid base of innovators and early adopters who are already very heavy internet users. The question remaining for these companies is whether they can beat the largest competitor: apathy towards internet in general. Can Digg convince people that having mass recommending of news sources is so much better than offline sources that they should spend incremental time online reading news? Can Twitter convince people that broadcasting their random thoughts is an integral part of life and worth spending incremental time online?

This is our paramount concern at everlater. While Digg, Twitter, and Brightkite have a natural base of innovators and early adopters (namely tech folks, PR people and teenage girls), we do not. Therefore we are already focusing our site design and features so they reduce the time it takes to do the existing travel-related social tasks online. Our goal for everlater is a site that is appealing across the adoption spectrum by making a compelling “value proposition” for travelers where we enhance rather than expand their online time.

Our early adopters (aka Natty): "Hmmmmmm...should I go to the internet cafe or shouldn't I?"

While backpacking across South and Central America from January to July 2008, Nate and I developed the idea for everlater. Three simple events highlighted traveler needs we felt were not currently being served by established websites and we realized it was our civil duty to the world (and could be quite a bit of fun) to improve the traveler experience.

Event 1) The missed meet up in Colombia:

After traveling up the West coast of South America, Nate and I arrived in Cartagena, Colombia, a spectacular colonial city on the Caribbean with rich history, sweltering heat, stunning beaches and bougainvillea filled balconies. Only after checking our email did we realize that our dear friend Sam, who we met in Buenos Aires Argentina, and spent nine days camping in Northern Patagonia with us, had also been in Cartagena just a few days before we arrived. It shocked us that we had not kept in touch well enough to know where she was, and were dismayed we had missed her by just a few days. There has to be a better way to keep in touch with people we met while traveling?

Event 2) The attempt to summit 21,000 foot Volcan Chimborazo:

Nate and I arrived in Ecuador after hiking through Patagonia and Peru and wanted to tackle some of the insanely tall mountains just outside of Quito. Lacking technical gear but not ambition we set out to find a guide. After finding a great guide we were dismayed by the flat fixed cost. Where could we find some people to join our summit attempt to reduce the cost and where could we find similar adventurers who we could ask whether or not we should get our hopes up of reaching the goal?

Event 3) The epic sail from South to Central America:

The Darien Gap separates South and Central America and remains one of the few truly remote and uninhabited (only terrorists, outlaws and jaguars - amazing combination, I know) places on the planet, travelers wishing to connect between the two continents must either fly (boring!), cross the Gap with a guide on foot (too risky?!) or sail the beautiful Caribbean waters while spearfishing and island hopping (duh!). After the obvious decision, we set sail for six days. While “at sea” and with time to ponder the situations which put us on this amazing little sailboat in the middle of the Caribbean, we realized we had been so intently exploring South America we had not kept up our faithful duty of telling our amazing adventure story to friends and family. We had to be better at sharing our experiences but were unsatisfied with simple blogs and mass emails, isn’t there a better way to share your travel experience?

We are developing everlater based on these unsatisfied traveler needs. Now, you may wonder how we ended up in South and Central America in the first place, well hold your horses, that story is soon to come.

Here at everlater we are excitedly working to improve the way travelers and explorers experience the world.  Thank you for stopping by, welcome, we hope you enjoy your stay and return often.

Being a life-long traveler and explorer myself, I passionately believe in the transformative power of travel to enrich peoples lives, broaden perspectives, and reduce the cultural barriers that exist in today’s world.  Simply traveling is not enough, it is important to connect with the places you visit; learn local traditions and beliefs, taste new food, explore new geographies, and communicate in different languages (or hand symbols when necessary!).

It is also important to share travel experiences with those around you (family, friends, acquaintances and other travelers) to help grow our global knowledge of other people and places and encourage others to step out of their comfort zone and experience all the amazing places the world has to offer.

Here at everlater we are building a social tool based around the transformative power of travel in hopes of making the experience easier and richer.  Please follow this blog while we develop our site to keep up with what we are doing and our progress.  We also plan to keep it fun and interesting, so subscribe, bookmark, or just remember the site name and make sure you check back often.