Category — About Everlater

In honor of the “reverse technology” (taking content offline) of our new Everlater Bookstore, we thought it would be appropriate to do an old-school press release. But if you only have time to read one more sentence, we can sum it up for you: We chose RPI because they are the best in the business, and they’ve been incredible to work with these past few months.

Exciting news in Everlater-land: last week we announced a round of Series A financing from Highway 12 Ventures.

We’ve really enjoyed getting to know Highway 12 over the last few months, and are thrilled to have their help, support, resources, and expertise in making Everlater the travel application of our dreams. Want to see why they’re excited to work with us?

What have we been up to lately?

• Improving the journaling functionality across the site
• Working hard on developing our partner program
• Getting the Everlater iPhone app submitted

What are we doing with the money?

• Adding new and exciting functionality to your travel journals on Everlater
• Developing tools to take your travel memories offline through scrapbooks, photo albums, and postcards
• Furthering our sales, partnership, and marketing efforts

Thank you to everyone for their continued support, particularly Techstars, Highway 12 Ventures, the Boulder startup community, and our amazing community of travelers who continue to amaze us with spectacular travel photos, compelling stories, and amazing insights & ideas about our product.

The future is looking bright for Everlater and we couldn’t be more excited about improving the world of travel! Please contact us with questions, concerns, and ideas at feedback@everlater.com.

The final episode of “The Founders”, a weekly webcast chronicling our amazing summer in Techstars, aired yesterday. And without giving anything away, let’s just say that we attempted a prank that had the potential to cause a lot of trouble. Did we get away with it? Watch and find out:

The Founders | Reunion | Episode 14 from Megan Leigh Sweeney on Vimeo.

We’re sad that the summer is over, and we’re so thankful to have had the opportunity to work closely with so many amazingly talented mentors and entrepreneurs. Lucky for us, we’ll have all 14 entertaining episodes of “The Founders” to help remember the most intense, crazy, fun, exhilarating, stressful, and inspiring time of our lives.

(Thank you so much to Megan Sweeney of Alpine Light Pictures who did an amazing job filming and editing the entire series. It’s just not the same without you following us around anymore…)

We’ve just created the very first Everlater Group - a mini-network of travelers using the JetBlue All You Can Jet Pass. The promotion, $599 for a month of unlimited flights, caused quite a stir amongst travel junkies - many of whom came to Everlater to record their trips.

The page highlights:

• Who is in the group
• Where those travelers are
• Their latest stories & photos
• The most popular destinations

Members of the group can also find other members with overlapping itineraries - in case they are looking for travel partners along the way. (For reference, my trip overlaps with others in the group 25 times!)

We’ve also launched a contest. The All You Can Jetter with the best online travel journal will win a bunch of great prizes (notably an exclusive Everlater Trophy and a custom badge for their trip). Details here. Voting begins October 12th.

This is the first time we’ve ever had Groups before, but it gives us some great ideas for the future. Take a look at the Everlater All You Can Jet Group. What else would you like to see added to groups? Can you think of some creative ways that travelers would want to utilize what we’ve built?

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.

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.