Blog

Want to know about all the little features we’ve released lately?

• New Add Photo Page: It’s cleaner, easier to use, and lets you quickly rotate or add captions.
• Photo Rotation: If you upload your photos directly to Everlater, just click the little rotate icon. (For now, to rotate existing photos, you need to click into the Add Photo page)
• Private Trips: Password protect individual trips. You can do this when you create a trip, or afterwards by going into your trip settings.
• Ratings: Give star ratings to the Transportation, Restaurants, Activities, and Lodging items in your trip. A great way to help others quickly find your highlights.
• Full Screen Map: Want to see a GIANT map for any trip? Add /big_map to the end of the url, like this: http://www.everlater.com/erikmyhre/leaving-corporate/big_map

In other news, we’ve received a TON of feedback about our iPhone app, and have made some great changes as a result. Version 2 is currently in review in the App Store. A huge thanks to everyone who passed along their two cents (or in many cases, seven or eight cents)!

Finally, we welcome the newest member of Team Everlater, Tony, who joins us from Brightkite. Although the walls do seem a bit closer now, our code comes out faster and stronger!

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…)

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.

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?

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/