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If you’re like us at Everlater, your travel ideas and suggestions come primarily from the people you know. For years my family vacationed in Palm Springs, California (because we had a free place to stay) despite feeling as though we had exhausted most of the interesting things to do. We’d:

• Hung out by the pool
• Hiked the canyons
• Perused high societies retail options along El Paseo
• Hit up the enormous weekend street fair
• Kept cool at Oasis Water Park

My last two visits though have been with a new group of people - adventurous friends who had entirely new perspectives and ideas about what to see. I:

• Took the Palm Springs Arial Tramway to the top of the 11,000 foot Mt San Jacinto for some hiking and bouldering
• Finally visited Joshua Tree National Park. (Don’t be like my family and talk yourself out of visiting because it’s “just a desert”)
• Rode ATV’s on sand dunes
• Visited the Salton Sea. If you find beauty in decay - it’s a must.
• Saw the Imperial Sand Dunes (where scenes from Star Wars were filmed)
• Became strangely enamored with Salvation Mountain - a 50 foot desert monument, created by hand of paint, mud and straw by a truly dedicated man

My friend (and amazing photographer) Kip Gerenda documented our Salton Sea journey on Everlater.

In the end, this is just a long way of saying: don’t settle for thinking you know everything there is to do in a particular place. Sometimes all you need is to hook up with other travelers like you to find the hidden gems.

We can’t wait to start connecting people in the Everlater community to that type of information.

The internet travel world is on fire with people chattering about Jet Blue’s amazing promotion: Unlimited Flights for a month for $599. When I heard the news (via Twitter), I jumped out of my chair and started pacing around frantically while making hurried phone calls. I was sure they’d cancel the promotion in a day due to overwhelming response, and wanted to make sure my ducks were in a row before I bought it.

Then three hours later - I bought it.

Could this be the best flight deal the US has ever seen?

If you live in Boston or New York City (and to a lesser extent Long Beach or Orlando) - then the answer is yes. However, if you fly out of many other cities (like Denver), it’s somewhat less awesome because you must always fly through one of the hubs first, and then onwards from there. Well guess what? I’m doing it anyway. (And I know of at least 3 others also doing it from Denver).

Another great use case is if you want to do a clockwise or counter-clockwise loop around the country. (Use Jet Blue’s fantastic interactive map that shows where they fly to from each city)

Here is my proposed itinerary: http://www.everlater.com/ryanwanger/jetblue-all-you-can-jet-month

Other people have been documenting their proposed JetBlue itineraries on Everlater as well. Here are the best ones so far:
http://www.everlater.com/andrew/jet-blue-jetting-trip (Andrew Hyde)
http://www.everlater.com/audrey/all-you-can-jet-sept-oct-2009

If you are lucky enough to be able to take advantage of this deal (do read the terms first), use Everlater to document your JetBlue All You Can Jet experience. We’ll be compiling the info and sharing the experiences (and probably ending up on each others flights!)

This is an amazing chance for an action-packed month of traveling around the US (and lots of destinations in the Carribean, as well as Costa Rica, and Columbia…though for those flights you need to fork over additional taxes - which are most around $30-$100 per flight). Personally, I’m using it primarily to visit friends that I otherwise wouldn’t be flying to go see - and I’ll be doing a lot of work in airports and on planes!

Will I see you in the skies from Sept 8th - October 8th?

Today, all 10 companies in the Boulder Techstars program this summer presented in front of a few hundred investors, well wishers, family members, and others in the Boulder community. The energy was amazing, and the teams did a great job. We had the good fortune of presenting second, and Nate was for sure the most energetic person in the room. Pretty sure he didn’t need that mic!

The surprise twist in our presentation was the Everlater Makeover we did for Fred Wilson, who was in attendance (and didn’t know what we were up to). We took all of his content from blog posts, photo feeds, and tweets from his recent trip and combined it into a great travel experience to showcase Everlater.

Check out his trip to Europe: http://bit.ly/everlatermakeover

Within just a few hours, both TechCrunch and RockyRadar have posted coverage of the event.

Sadly, Twitter was down all morning and didn’t come back online till after our presentation. But, there has been some good chatter about Everlater since then.

We met a ton of great people after the event who are really excited about Everlater. Thanks to all for your support, advice, and encouragement. We owe a lot to Techstars and the Boulder community and can’t wait to show you all how far we can take this…

A few days ago, we quietly opened our doors and started allowing people to sign up for Everlater without needing a special code. What does this mean? Start using Everlater!

You can:

• Record travel experiences by writing stories, posting photos, mapping your trip and adding all the little details
• Share it with friends and family (your trip has a public url that you can post on your Facebook wall, Tweet, or email to whomever you’d like)

There are many things on the horizon including:

• A better way to follow the travels of your friends
• An iPhone app to make it even easier to record your travels
• Increasing ways to help get great travel ideas from your social network

Are we done yet? Hell no! Everlater is constantly changing (in the awesome kind of way, not the confusing kind of way) and we have lots of exciting things on the horizon. We are truly grateful for all of the amazing feedback we’ve received so far from the Everlater community - the more the better! And to prove we’re serious, there is a “Feedback” tab on every page. (In fact, so far you guys have reported exactly 99 problems, ideas, and praise. Whose will be #100?)

So if you haven’t already, go check out http://www.everlater.com

If you need extra inspiration, check out my trip to Chile and Argentina last December: The Great Tagalong.

There comes a time in the early life of every startup when they want to go big. For Everlater, that day was May 23rd. The Event: Iron Horse Classic. The hook: show off our startup, design skills, and cycling prowess in one fell swoop.

How? Brand spanking new custom kits straight from the long booty shores of Italy. The new outfits arrived roughly 48 hours before the event and like a group of greedy children at Christmas, we tore into the box and gazed upon our new outfits:

(Left to Right: Nathaniel, our friend Nathan, Nathaniel)

Lavender?!?

Secure enough in our masculinity to wear kits representing our future custom white-labeled site http://lady.everlater.com, we rode on with pride. Rumor has it that the group of riders who broke from the pack to stage a competitive push (in what is otherwise a friendly ride) were led by Natty himself. Not until the very last stretch did he graciously let others pass and share in his glory.

The corrected colors should be in our hands soon.

As for the misprints…anyone have any spare blue ink laying around?

If you haven’t been following along with “The Founders“, a weekly documentary about the Techstars experience, you should. These videos tell the story of our summer better than we ever could.

The latest episode, Skills & Persistence features the KKO Poker Night. Bonus: you get to see our man Charlie engaged in an epic arm wrestling match.

The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 4 “Skills & Persistence” from Andrew on Vimeo.

If you missed some of the other episodes, you find them all in one place:
http://www.techstars.org/thefounders/

Back in February, we wrote about a few types of travelers who could benefit from using Everlater (Bands, Families, Athletes, Professional Travelers). Today, the list goes on…

Students Traveling Abroad

Eager to explore the surrounding cities and countries of their new continent, students traveling abroad would benefit greatly from being able to easily organize and share their travel stories, photos, and videos. It’s all too easy to ignore the forest for the trees when sharing travel experiences, and friends and family members often need explicit context to fully appreciate the outlandish locales and situations.

Business Travelers

Frequent business travelers don’t have time to set up a blog and update it consistently. However, of all the types of people that might use Everlater, they have the easiest access to an internet connection and the tools (iPhone, Blackberries, etc.) to make quick updates. Business travelers are also often the ones most in need of connections to other travelers and quick recommendations about local events and must-sees.

Road Shows

We know a group here in Boulder planning to travel across the country in a biodiesel bus playing in frisbee tournaments, holding instructional clinics, and educating about the benefits of alternative fuels. How can they share the experience and generate advance fanfare for their arrival? Everlater.

What about a company touring around with their latest product? Not only can they plot out the trip in advance, but an online community can easily grow around the shared experience.

You

Our self-respect notwithstanding, treat us as you like:

• Map your travels
• Update your friends and families
• Share stories and photos
• Blog about the adventure, or just write quick updates

In the end, we aim to do only one thing: Help you share your travel experiences with friends and family.

We recently met with Dave Morin - Senior Platform Manager for Facebook. This was a fantastic opportunity for us at Everlater. We view Facebook as a complement (rather than a competitor) to what we are building, and have spent many a late night discussing their role in our future - then coding away to make it happen.

Always wary of becoming YASN (Yet Another Social Network), we want to leverage as much of your existing social network as possible without fragmenting your content and friends more than they already have been.

Dave ensured us that Facebook’s platform is moving in the direction of openness. This is great news for everyone, as it will hopefully reduce the number of YASN’s. Ideally (in our view) this tact will cement Facebook as the central point of content for the people you care about without becoming a “walled garden” that seals you off from other services that can add value to your social graph.

We’d like to thank Dave for his insights and suggestions as both a traveler and big player in the social networking space. Also, check out <a href=”http://davemorin.tumblr.com/post/113001941/a-day-at-techstars”>the Everlater mention in one of his recent blog posts</a>.

Techstars.tv just released the first of 13 episodes of a weekly webcast called “The Founders”. We’re honored to be one of the three teams from the Techstars 2009 Boulder class that will be highlighted each week as the summer progresses. To be honest, it took a little while to get comfortable with being followed around by a video camera (especially the time Megan followed us down the street and into a sandwich shop).

The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Week 1 “The Selected Few” from Andrew on Vimeo.

At least if this whole startup thing doesn’t work out - maybe there is a future for us in reality television? Real World: Startups anyone?

Every software company should have a good strategy for managing their code base.  At Everlater, we’re using git (a popular choice for open-source developers), and loving it.  The same things that make it a great tool for open-source development makes it a wonderful tool for a new startup as well.  We share lots of the same problems with open-source projects, including a decentralized workforce, no central office or server, etc. Git + Github has proved to be a great choice for our version control.

Initially we had a simple flow with no branching; simply basic remote repositories for each team member plus a master repo.  Since we’ve launched our live alpha version, we’ve introduced branching and a more complex workflow — our internal document for describing the workflow is below — we’re publishing this in hopes that it helps other new startups organize the way they develop code on a live web release.  Enjoy!