PlanetEye

December 3rd, 2009

A Realtime Twitter Map

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

When we heard that Twitter was launching a geolocation API, we figured given the volume of people using Twitter every day, the total number of geolocated tweets would soon become unmanageable in a map interface. Precisely the kind of challenge that we like to take. I’ll share how we solved the problem and why this is important to us, but first take a look at our Live Twitter Map (hint: zoom out/in or move and you should see new markers appear every now and then)

Live Twitter Map

How to build a Live Twitter Map

While we don’t have a partnership with Twitter, we were able to use their Streaming API to get a good sample of tweets in realtime. They must have a way to pull all geolocated tweets as Bing Maps started using such a feed this week. Regardless, with our approach we are getting up to 400 Kbps of data consistently and we have to filter such stream to find tweets that are geolocated.

Once we have the geolocated tweets, we can run them through our clustering algorithm and store them temporarily (we keep up to seven days of data). As you can see, our approach to visualize large volumes of data on the map scales better than trying to put a marker for each data point. Also worth mentioning is the fact that the clusters refresh in realtime as new data is added to the system. Ironically, while testing the implementation of Twitter on Bing Maps I was consistently getting delays of up to 5 minutes for a given tweet to appear on the map, while it would show in our map within seconds.

Another advantage of our approach is that in any given region of the map our clusters will tell you how much data there is in total. It seems that other maps are cursed by the limitations of having too many markers on the map and they usually opt for displaying “the 50 most recent”. Certainly nobody will want to read every single data point (especially if they are tweets), but being able to see the areas where the majority of the tweets are generated is in itself useful information.

Why build a Live Twitter Map

Over the last couple of years we’ve learned to integrate all kinds of data into our system for the benefit of our clients. When we consider all hotels, restaurants, attractions, activities worldwide, we end up with a very large data set that needs to be managed efficiently if we are to make any meaningful recommendations. In every single instance the process to acquire the data consisted in negotiating some sort of XML feed or parsing a delimited file, which would always create a delay between when the data was updated on the source and when it would be available on our maps for consumption.

Now we know that it is possible to apply the same principles that we used to create a Live Twitter Map to continuously update data from our various partners and make it available to our subscribers. Imagine being able to see on a map when tickets to a given event become available so you can be the first in line to grab them. Or noticing a new promotion that would give you a great discount on a hotel you are planning to book. With our technology to acquire and process geolocated data along with our mapping techniques we have a killer solution for clients in the travel space and we are working hard to bring these solutions to the end users.

If you have an interesting data set that needs to be put on a map to enable easier discovery, we want to hear from you.

UPDATE: On December 9th, Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced that the firehose will become available to everyone. In principle this would allow applications like ours to become aware of every single tweet and use that information to build custom applications around them. In our case, the possibility of processing every single geolocated tweet would allow us to showcase the power of our mapping platform with the largest test case there is.

• Posted in  Development, GPS/Geotagging
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November 30th, 2009

PlanetEye Traveler: our online travel magazine

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

On the wire today:

PlanetEye is pleased to announce the launch of PlanetEye Traveler, a feature-rich online travel magazine that is packed with unique and advanced user-friendly functionality. Designed for consumers and travel industry professionals, this award-winning portal features eye-grabbing editorial and rich visual content which is provided by dozens of travel writers from around the world.

You can read the full press release, but I thought it would be interesting to recap how we got here:

Oct 2007: as par of our original launch, we invited a select number of local experts to write for PlanetEye covering their cities. At the time we knew their insight would help us provide much better recommendations. Because we wanted their writing to be cross-referenced against our city guides, we used our own tools that allowed them to map whatever they were writing about.

Oct 2008: after a year of great writing we realized that in order to scale this operation we had to embrace open standards and we took the first step by endorsing microformats. Our thinking at the time was that if we had a neutral approach to recognize location information in blog posts, we could extend our program to other bloggers beyond our own network. It didn’t take long before our own bloggers realized that the tools we created for others were in fact much easier to use than our proprietary system. And so the journey began.

Jan 2009: after rewriting our entire toolset we released all our archives into blogs running on Wordpress. Since then all our writers have been using nothing else but Wordpress with a custom plugin that does all the magic: every single time a writer tags a post with a location through our plugin, we embed a Google Map on the post making them more useful to the readers, but we also associate that post with our destination database so we are able to do a few more interesting things behind the scenes.

Oct 2009: With the launch of PlanetEye Traveler, not only we bring our entire team of writers under one site to create a very unique online travel magazine, but we also showcase what readers can expect in the future from ours and other similar magazines: travel articles used to be completed detached from context. With our technology it is now possible to bring relevant location information (such as the map) into the article and vice-versa. Really impressed with that Restaurant review in your city? You may soon be able to check the menu, read other reviews, see the latest buzz or even reserve a table.

Of course, the inspiring travel writing will continue to be the most important aspect of our travel magazine. Whether you are catching up on the latest events around a city or the highlights of the season at your next destination or finding incredible travel stories from abroad, we think we have a great source for you.

• Posted in  GPS/Geotagging, Travel
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November 13th, 2009

Geocoding with GeoAPI

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

Trying to keep up with the latest developments in the Geolocation space is though, specially when you get all those tweets from friends checking into a new bar every few minutes with Foursquare. Not surprisingly the integration of some forms of GPS into mobile phones has made us into full “blue-dot” converts. As with most technologies, the basic test case has to be fundamentally simple for the masses to adopt it and in the case of geolocation that test case is “Here I am”.

The geolocation game is a lot harder than it seems and this has nothing to do with displaying a dot on a map. Just ask any geocaching fans and you’ll understand how the map and the GPS are the easy part of the equation. Finding your way through terrain, cities, dealing with unexpected (unmapped) characteristics of the terrain is what makes it interesting and fun. For us dealing with geodata day after day, the challenges start with ethereal questions such as “who owns a coordinate” and branch into a number of data crunching issues.

One particularly interesting challenge that will likely continue to draw the attention of many players in the space is how to geocode information that wasn’t properly tracked. Our ability to do so will reveal a new way to correlate such information on a new geographical index, bringing another relevancy metric into search. Being able to do a reverse geocode, specially with a very robust database of place names is a great starting point. Already Yahoo had put together a very valuable set of tools to this effect. Now with the launch of GeoAPI from Mixer Labs, the game gets more interesting.

• Posted in  GPS/Geotagging
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November 5th, 2009

New in PlanetEye: Google Maps

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

We’ve had a love-hate relationship with Google Maps for a long time. Back in the early days when PlanetEye was still in stealth mode there was no Google Maps API and a lot of work had to be done to get some of the first prototypes to work properly. When the Maps API first appeared there was a quiet celebration within the team just planning all the cool things that would be possible, but this was mostly a temporary exhilaration as we soon bumped into the limitations of a great product still in the works.

In what could be a juvenile strategy we decided to build our own mapping stack using Flash. Those of you who have been around since the early days will likely remember our maps with animations, images popping up, and in general enhancing the browsing experience. For those of you who didn’t have the pleasure, I’ve put together a gallery with some screenshots of various maps that we did over the last couple of years.

The point is that we learned not to depend on any single API to accomplish what we wanted and that freedom let us create some very interesting maps.

I’ve always said that we are not a mapping company, but we like our maps. And after a long process of evaluation we’ve decided to come back full circle to Google Maps as we’re convinced that many of the limitations we had in the past have been resolved. But most importantly, by aligning ourselves with such a mature mapping product, we can focus all our energy in ideating ways to enhance the maps with useful information, visualizations and other artifacts that will make them ideal to showcase travel information.

We call them Travel Maps not only because they are great to showcase places visited during your travels, but because we’re always looking for ways to make them more useful to people in the travel industry. Whether enhanced visualizations with embedded photos, clusters to cleanly show large volumes of data points or easy features to bring these maps into your own site, we are focused into making these maps the perfect language to connect travellers with travel businesses.

We’ve changed a lot of things within the site to showcase our new maps and have made it possible for anyone to create a new map, even without an account. If you are in the hospitality business, you will love how our maps come bundled with a lot of useful data so you don’t have to go around creating mashups. We’ve done all the work for you.

One thing you can expect from us is to continue pushing the boundaries of what can be done with maps to make them even more useful for businesses in the travel space and their customers.

• Posted in  Development
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June 15th, 2009

Keep blogging about your city

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

We’ve been running our Local Expert program for almost two years. Thousands of articles about world-class cities are available to help you understand each destination before engaging in a new journey.

More recently we started to invite independent bloggers to post their articles within our city guides. Bloggers in Lima, Marrakech, Mexico City, Rome, Santiago and Singapore have already enlisted. If you write a blog about a city for which we don’t have a featured Local Expert, we want to know about it!

And for all of you moleskine die-hards or modern story-makers, we would love to get pointers to any bloggers who are sketching their cities. Encouraged by the sketches of artist Gabriel Campanario, we are hoping there are more people out there that make it a habit to bring their drawings to the online world after a prolific session with their notebooks. Hopefully you’ll remember to note the address of whatever you’re drawing, as we are all about location.

As we discover them, we’ll make an effort to link to them from our city guides and give travellers a new way to explore destinations.

We’ve also made it easy for any PlanetEye user to submit reviews attached to a location by virtue of blogging about it:

Within your profile, you will now see a check box labeled “Import my travel-related posts.” By entering a valid blog URL (it must have a valid RSS feed containing your content), checking this box, and then saving your profile - each time you write a post that links back to a PlanetEye city or place, an excerpt will appear and link back to your blog post.

For example, if you were to write a post about the Peninsula in Chicago, all you would need to do is include a link to http://www.planeteye.com/Place/The-Peninsula-Chicago+357902.aspx

This should be pretty useful if you have a blog but don’t write about your city all the time. Just make sure to include the proper PlanetEye link whenever you do have a post about a location and we’ll link to it.

• Posted in  Uncategorized
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June 9th, 2009

Didn’t we all cheer for Gilligan?

jonah

President, CEO & Counsel

Pardon the television reference, it’s in my blood. Every time the white hatted, orange shirted sidekick messed things up, didn’t we all even if quietly root for him? I know I did.

It was a cold blustery January morning nearly 17 months ago when I first met Butch Langlois to talk about PlanetEye and his vision for it. From my perspective at least, there was an instant connection. We shared many things right off the bat, a passion for travel and technology, interest in sports and coaching our kids, previous backgrounds in hockey, a love for good food, Seinfeld and a common belief in a travel market opportunity and the way to take advantage of it. I was looking for a new opportunity in general; one that would only come with the right person at the helm. I, needed my “Skipper”. Not being one to speak for others, but in retrospect, I believe that Butch was looking for his “Gilligan” (I refuse to say little buddy). That first meeting took place at Marche in what is now Broofield place on January 28, 2008 and my first day with PlanetEye would come on February 25th, less then one month later!

The easy line would be that the rest is history. Not exactly in this case, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Over the next several months the company would experience incredible growth. Planeteye hit remarkable milestones, each time surprising both Butch and my expectations. The primary reasons for that success was the great people behind the scenes working hard to fulfill our demands and the original piece of technology from which our company was founded, continuing to perform at the level we needed it to. Not everything has turned out exactly as we had planned, but the company has experienced growth we can all be very proud of and we have maintained a clear focus on our strengths and goals.

Throughout this period of time, I have been able to tackle things I never imagined possible before, and have focused on areas I didn’t have exposure to in my previous roles either. Working with Butch has been a tremendous period of personal growth for me. So you can imagine my reaction when he told me that he was leaving. Upon reflection, the right reaction is to thank Butch for working tirelessly to get PlanetEye on the right track, believing in a vision and having the conviction to stand behind it. He has built a team that is unlike any other I have experienced before and this a real tribute to his hard work, dedication and character. He has been an excellent boss, role model, teacher and friend. I think all of us are indebted to him for that.

The one thing that I think and hope every PlanetEye employee would tell you about Butch and I is that we have been completely in step with the vision for the company. My plan is to stay on that course and continue to share with the world all that PlanetEye has to offer from both a content and technology perspective. At the same time the PlanetEye.com site will continue to evolve, becoming the dominant online presence we all believe it can be. In the coming weeks and months we will be able to share with you some things that we have been working very hard on and are extremely proud of. We hope to be able to share that first major “B2B” partnership with you very soon.

All of us wish Butch and his family every success in the future. We will all be cheering loudly from the sidelines. I remain as excited in what is ahead for PlanetEye as I was on that first day back in January of 2008. Our future is bright, our path clear and our team strong. I am excited to take the reins as President and CEO and am grateful for those who have believed enough in me to entrust the reins with me.

One day, I think we all hoped that things would work out for Gilligan, and that when given the chance to shine he would make the Skipper proud and get the castaways off that Island. I am not planning on letting Butch or the entire PlanetEye team down either!

Jonah

• Posted in  PlanetEye
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June 4th, 2009

Leaving on a jet plane !

Butch Langlois

former President & CEO

Ok not an entirely applicable travel analogy in this case but saying three subway stops shorter a ride is not quite as dramatic.

It’s with some sadness that I am announcing my departure from Planeteye. I will be heading back to Roger’s, where I left almost 9 years ago to the day. Corporately I will be joining the Rogers New Ventures (RNV) team who as an early stage technology development group invests, develops and operates next generation broadband wireline and wireless technology companies. I will focus on both the assessment of new ventures as well as management performance for the existing portfolio companies. Operationally I will be heading up the first RNV portfolio company Zoocasa, who is focused on the consumer real estate market. It’s been an exciting and eventful nine years and three start-ups since that surprising Globe and Mail front page coverage of my Roger’s departure back in June, 2001 (and yes I know the hair and glasses are awful, though the hair less grey for sure) but I can honestly say that I am incredibly jazzed to go back and continue to build on the early Zoocasa successes and help other entrepreneurs navigate the start-up waters.

Butch (left) and the buybuddy.com team

Leaving PlanetEye and the folks here after two years at the helm was an incredibly difficult decision to make but it was made easier knowing the company is in good health and will be in great hands for the trek ahead. Jonah Sigel who has worked side by side with me in the trenches will take over as CEO. The company is well financed having raised money earlier this year and is about to announce its first major b2b client, a recognized leader in the travel industry. I’ll leave that official announcement and fanfare for Jonah.

The consumer travel market is a dynamic and competitive one and having Tourist Boards, Airlines and Hotel operators ringing your phones off the hook to get their own PlanetEye type experience bodes well for PlanetEye’s future. I want to personally thank the small but amazing team who built the PlanetEye experience over the last two years and as the many awards attest (check out the sidebar on the right) they have much to be proud of.

I’ll be heading to the departure lounge end of the month.

• Posted in  PlanetEye
• 1 Comment »

April 20th, 2009

Travel blogging with Wordpress

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

For over a year now we have been helping a small group of travel bloggers use the PlanetEye platform to write and publish travel articles with the proper location information (usually represented in the form of a mini-map included in the article).

Back in October I wrote a post endorsing Microformats as a way for bloggers to include location information within their posts. With this post we had hoped that other bloggers would follow our lead on how to structure a travel article to include the correct geographic data. A few did, but many others argued that the process to create the correct Microformat was cumbersome and distracted them from writing a good travel article.

And so we took on the challenge of finding better and easier ways to enable the same kind of advanced travel blogging tools we had been offering our writers to a much larger audience. As part of this project, we migrated every one of our travel bloggers to Wordpress and rebuilt the tools they were used to as a Wordpress Plugin that is capable of finding places of interest and writing down the proper microformat. At the same time, whenever such microformat is used and our Plugin is active, a Google Map identifying the correct place will be shown at the top of the post. What does it look like?

For the blogger, we’ve kept things very simple: enter the name (or address) of a place, and pick from a list of potential matches. All of this is powered by Google Maps, but we’ve kept our servers in the loop and whenever someone adds a place that we didn’t know about, it will automatically be added to our site. When the article is published, that particular microformat will look like a simple link to a PlanetEye page, but will have the proper location information encoded for the map to render.

All feedback from the first group of bloggers using the Plugin is fantastic and we hope to make it available to a larger group of bloggers soon. If you are interested in integrating this Plugin into your own Wordpress blog, please leave a comment and we’ll get in touch.

If you want to see the Plugin in action, here are a few blogs that are using it: The Sydney Traveler, The Amsterdam Guide, The Boston Guide, The Berlin Guide, The Barcelona Guide, The Edinburgh Guide

• Posted in  Development, PlanetEye
• 8 Comments »

March 19th, 2009

The World’s Most Expensive Hotels

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

Ever wonder what kind of hotel would cost US$1,000 per night? The price seems so steep that one could easily assume there are only a handful of these hotels around the world, but in a recent survey of our more than 100k hotels, we found almost one hundred of them, nicely distributed across all continents.

(use the zoom controls or click on any of the markers to get more details)

This exclusive group of hotels includes some of the most famous hotel properties, such as:

• Burj Al Arab in Dubai
• The Lodge at Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand
• The Regency Intercontinental in Bahrain
• One & Only Le Touessrok in Mauritius
• …and many more

Would you like to embed a map like this one into you blog? Read all about our Embedded Travel Packs.

• Posted in  Uncategorized
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March 11th, 2009

New Release - Notes, Blogs, and Maps

Adam Bullied

Director, Product Management

It’s been a while since we’ve posted! Rest assured, it’s because we’ve been hard at work on some great new things that will make PlanetEye even better, and easier, to use while planning your trips.

Travel Pack Notes / Journal

The first thing we’ve added is the ability to record a journal, in the format of notes, along with each photo and place you have added to your Travel Packs. You can check out a live example of notes in action within my Entourage Travel Pack.

You can use notes for a lot of different things - for example, recording your confirmation code for your hotel, or reminding yourself why you wanted to visit a certain place before you take your trip.

Once you return, they are a great way to provide some context around what you did while you were there for family and friends. Of course, you can always write a general review, but great to take it one step further and go in to a bit more detail.

That’s exactly what each note is there to capture. You may be asking, “how can I take these notes with me on my trip?” Well, you can now print out an entire Travel Pack in a very simple and clean format.

Printing Travel Packs

One of the biggest requests we’ve received since we introduced Travel Packs was to have an easy way to print out their contents to take them with you on your trip. This is now easy to do by using the “Print Travel Pack” link.

You can see an example of a print view for one of my Travel Packs to get an idea of how it looks.

Setting Travel Pack Dates

One of the most important aspects of planning a trip is actually identifying the dates you are going to be there. This comes a bit later in the planning process, but there is now a pretty simple way to do that for each location within a Travel Pack.

We’ve always thought of Travel Packs as part-itinerary, but also part idea catcher. This is why dates aren’t required when setting up a Travel Pack, and they aren’t needed to organize each thing by the day - trips are meant to be free-flowing - many times you think you are going one place a certain day, but end-up somewhere completely different.

Blogging Tools

OK, a quick break from Travel Pack enhancements for a sec. One of the great things we’ve added is the ability for anyone with a blog to easily geotag their content and have their posts appear on PlanetEye as user reviews.

Within your profile, you will now see a check box labeled “Import my travel-related posts.” By entering a valid blog URL (it must have a valid RSS feed containing your content), checking this box, and then saving your profile - each time you write a post that links back to a PlanetEye city or place, an excerpt will appear and link back to your blog post.

For example, if you were to write a post about the Peninsula in Chicago, all you would need to do is either:

• Link there using the URL for the place on PlanetEye
• Embed a Google Map in your blog post that points to that place

You can see the post where I geotagged a restaurant in Toronto called Takesushi, where I had dinner tonight - and how it has been pulled in and shows up on the Takesushi Resturant page on PlanetEye.com as a user review.

We have some more in-depth documentation going live later on in the week that will step through additional details. Always feel free to e-mail me with any questions or comments you have.

Embedded Travel Packs

Now, probably one of the coolest things we’ve put together is the ability to embed complete Travel Packs in to blog posts, websites, and the like. Check out a live example of the Entourage Travel Pack I mentioned above.

Simply visit the page for the Travel Pack you want to embed, and click the “Embed Travel Pack” link.

You will be presented with a pop-up that contains some HTML code that you can copy and paste and put anywhere you like.

That’s it! We’ll be posting detailed documentation later this week to step through adding this to posts on popular blogging platforms, and more information.

As always, if you have any comments, questons or feedback feel free to contact me directly.

• Posted in  PlanetEye
• 1 Comment »