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Latest News from the Travelstormer HQ


Lss is mre

February 9th, 2010

betaWe’ve had a some interesting discoveries during the closed beta cycle. As well as the feedback we’ve received from other users, trying it out ourselves and observing other trip members use TS has been very exciting/scary. With that in mind I thought we could share a couple of things we’ve learnt.

Flow through a website is hard to understand without actually clicking through web pages. You can make a site with the best features in the world but without a user being guided through the relevant aspects of it, it’s useless. Either that or you write an instruction manual for your website, which I bet someone has actually done at some stage.

Even though it should be a given, and we designed TS with simplicity in mind, it’s the easiest thing in the world to add things you dont need. Particularly in Photoshop where the main mission is to add things to the page. Its only now that everything is alive, so to speak that we now want to kill a few things!

However, we’ve been lucky in a sense that most of these discoveries have been smaller issues, and since we are pretty lean right now these things are easy to change.

Harmonypark is doing a great job with the code, and we are excited about the Expensure integration coming soon along with a full public release.


Greetings from Sydney, Australia

December 17th, 2009

With both the co-founders of Travelstormer now residing in Sydney we can have board meetings in places like this:

beach

No really, Bondi beach is way too hot a place to do anything serious like run a business, so we will be working very hard indoors to bring you a beta version of TS very soon.


Meet Harmonypark & Expensure

December 17th, 2009

I’m going to take this chance to introduce a friend and partner of ours, Harmonypark.

This team of web app gurus are pushing their fantastic expense-management product Expensure into fruition with new features for new times. Most notably, Paypal support is going to mean you can pay back all those IOU’s with one click, right from within Expensure.

This functionality is hot off the Paypal press and makes use of a spanking new API allowing cool new things to be done with a well established product.

What’s exciting for us here at Travelstormer, is that we’re being fed Expensure’s coolness through integration with it’s API, so you can use Expensure’s tools right from within Travelstormer.

“Expensure looks at who you owe money to, who owes you money, and what money these other people owe to each other. Expensure then applies a Circular Debt Resolution™ algorithm to work out which debts cancel each other”

Its cool features like this that save you time by cutting back on transactions between your group, as well as handling that embarrassing task of telling your mates to pay you back!


How Travelstormer was born

October 12th, 2009

In keeping with staying on the level and open about what we’re doing here with Travelstormer, I thought I’d share this email from Colin the other co-founder to myself, on July 28, 2008.

“Inspiration for the idea came from the hassle we are going through trying to organise a skiing trip to Japan for 5-10 people….i.e several emails each day on what dates people are available, what accommodation people want to stay in, what resort to go to, what flights are the best etc etc, all with links attached. I now have a folder of dozens of emails and each time I want to find anything have to search through them to find which one has the link or information I am looking for.”

The powerpoint masterpiece that was attached caught my attention instantly, and soon after we were in a frenzy of ideas about where this idea could lead and how it would find its way in the vast ocean that is online travel.

After finding a direction we wanted to take, Triphub took a dive into the deadpool.
While we were barely wet at this stage, we new exactly how we were going to do it differently.


Our very first steps

August 26th, 2009

Hi there. I was thinking we’d like to look back on this post one day and get all nostalgic and teary-eyed, but for now its just a quick introduction to Travelstormer because the rest of our site is in production, and it’s the only platform we’ve got right now where I can write more than 140 characters.

In a few words, Travelstormer is a tool to aid in the decision-making and organisation of travel planning for groups. The idea is that people use Travelstormer from the earliest possible  stage of their trip, being the brainstorming or ‘Travelstorming’ phase as we call it in our camp.

From the initial decision of where your going, through to the specifics of dates, times and group expenses, Travelstormer will be there to do your dirty work.

(However – I have nothing to back this up with since we are currently in the middle of development, so believe what you will, and do come back if you’re the slightest bit interested because we’re really psyched about this)