June is practically over and I decided to share some of YowTRIP’s web analytics here. Be able to track who visits your website, how they get to it and what they’re looking for is very important for improving its user experience and marketing effort. That’s why I started I-stats back in 2004 (actually, I started [...]

Guardian.co.uk had a article today listing the Top 10 hospitality travel sites and YowTRIP is one of them! Check out the other travel sites and their article at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/jun/27/travelwebsites.top10

As I spent a lot of time this week reviewing YowTRIP’s business plan and its goals, and I started thinking more about our competitors (or at least the big online travel social networks) and how we compare with them. I’m not sure yet who I’d say are our direct competitors, as I’m still compiling that [...]

When I launched YowTRIP, I paid for Google ads for certain keywords: “Travel Companion”, “Find travelers”, etc. In the past few months I started noticing that YowTRIP shows on the first page (sometimes one of the first links) on organic search results. So, I haven’t paid for ads for a long time… 17% of our visitors this [...]

I’m in the process of refocusing YowTRIP’s strategy and writing its business plan. I have posted an online survey to get data to back up my assumptions and to identify potential users’ personalities, travel habits and Internet usage. Please help me out by filling out our 3 minutes online survey at www.yowtrip.com/survey
Please forward it to [...]

The Guardian Online, a London-based newspaper, writes a weekly column in their travel section called “Going Local.”
Since March, freelancer journalist Vicky Baker has been traveling in Central and South America guided by local people she meets on social network sites.
This week she visited my hometown: Salvador. I gave her some tips of nice places to [...]

I just changed YowTRIP’s home page to include an integration with Google Maps and display our communications (blog posts, news coverage) more up-front on the site. You should expect many more google maps mashups throughout the site.
I have been meaning to do this for a long time now, but I needed a good amount of [...]

TechCrunch wrote an article about OurPlanet (I’m not going to link to these guys, because it’s a waste of time - trust me on this one!) on June 9. Too bad I didn’t see it until yesterday.
Well, basically they reviewed this new “travel site” that claims it will be “trip advisor, hostel world and lonely [...]

I’ve blogged about Kiva before on my old website, but since I deleted all of the old posts, I’m going to write about it again. And I’m also linking to my public profile from the “About” block on the left, so you can see the entrepreneurs I’m supporting…
So, Kiva is a SF-based non-profit organization that [...]

I got Aubie back from the vet on Sunday afternoon. So far he seems to be improving… although the vets were not that hopeful he’d make it. On Saturday I will take him back for some blood work to see if he’s really improving, but his attitude is definitely much better… and he’s only thrown [...]