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Tuesday, 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

Thursday, 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

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.

Monday, 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?

After reading microformats in the post, we generate a Google Map of the various places mentioned in the article.

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.

Using Google Maps, the PlanetEye Plugin allows the blogger to locate any place on a map and create a microformatted link to it.

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

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

PlanetEye among Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008

Juan Gonzalez
Vice President, Technology

For the last two weeks ReadWriteWeb has been running their Top 10 web products in a variety of categories. We are proud to be included in their most recent Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008 among an elite group of web applications that help users conduct various aspects of their “offline” lives, ranging from personal financial management and health care to travel. In the travel space the only other web application honoured with this distinction was yapta. In regards to the “Real World” Top 10 list Frederic Lardinois explains:

while a lot of these services make our life on the Internet a lot easier, another group of services on the web helps to keep our offline life organized. Here is our list of the top ‘real world’ apps that have made our offline lives easier in 2008.

Here at PlanetEye we spend a lot of time dealing with the complexities of managing a very large collection of geocoded data points and then finding ways to make this information accessible in the most relevant contexts, being maps, travel guides and articles just so you, the user, can plan a great trip. So yes, we think “Real World Web App” describes quite well what we are all about.

While brief, ReadWriteWeb’s editorials are precise thanks to the time they take to explore the web applications they review and understand what makes them unique. Beyond the great photography, useful travel planning features and cool maps they understand that part of the power behind PlanetEye is the quality of the content generated by our Local Experts around the world. Not only they are great travel writers but generate content that is geocoded making it more relevant to users exploring worldwide destinations. Take a look at our Unique Christmas Gifts edition for a perfect example of what is possible.

Note: ReadWriteWeb has recently taken a strong position to defend good reviews in an open war to PR firms declared by TechCrunch.

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Enter Our Best of Your City Contest

Mark Evans
Director, Community

This is just a friendly reminder that the entry deadline for PlanetEye’s Best of Your City contest is on the near horizon.

To enter, all you have to do is create a Travel Pack on PlanetEye, and then add all the best places (hotels, restaurants, attractions and activities) that you’d tell friends or family about if they were visiting.

It could be the hot restaurants, most intersting museum exhibits, the best places go shopping, a great cafe to read the New York Times on a Sunday morning, or a quaint hotel.

The top prize is a $1000 Amazon gift certificate. There’s also a $500 Amazon gift certificate for the person who shares their Best of the City Travel Pack with the most friends and family.

More details about the contest can be found here.

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Featured Travel Pack: Buying Unique Gifts in NYC

Mark Evans
Director, Community

With the holidays on the horizon (hard to believe it’s nearly December!), the hunt for the perfect gift will soon be underway.

USA Today provided shoppers in New York City with a “cheat-sheet” with a feature story looking at where to buy one-of-a-kind gifts. It puts the spotlight on places that you’re not going to find in the local malls.

We were so inspired, we created a Travel Pack to list all the places that USA Today featured.

Where you live, what are some of the places that carry one-of-a-kind gifts? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Fine Dining at Airport Restaurants

Mark Evans
Director, Community

As millions of people travel this week during the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, there is going to be a lot of time spent waiting at airports for flights.

Chances are you will probably get hungry but it can be a major challenge trying to figure out where to eat. Do you simply head to the closest food court or take a short walk to a little gem tucked away from the crowds?

To make your dining choices a lot of easier, PlanetEye asked its local experts to recommend the best places to eat at more than 40 airports around the world. These are clearly people who know their airports and the dining choices given the wealth of information they provided.

For more information about the best places to eat at more than 40 restaurants around the world, check out our Airport Restaurants page.

More: If you’re interested in checking out an airplane restaurant as opposed to an airport restaurant, Cranky Flier found one in Walnut Ridge, Ark. where the Parachute Inn has taken a Southwest 737-200 fuselage and converted into a restaurant.

As well, USA Today’s Today in the Sky column reports that about “80% of restaurants at the nation’s 15 busiest airports now offer at least one low-fat, high-fiber, cholesterol-free vegetarian option, according to an annual survey by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Parachute Inn

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Friday, November 21st, 2008

Welcome, Cultural Navigator!

Mark Evans
Director, Community

One of the key things that differentiates PlanetEye from other online travel services is the terrific organic content we generate about destinations around the world.

This content is created by a team of local experts located in 50 major destinations around the world, and our Global Nomad (Brendan Powell), who has been blogging about his travel adventures around the globe over the past 10 months.

We’re really excited to introduce a new member to our “content family”: Andrew Princz, who will be providing insight and information about on a new blog called the Cultural Navigator.

Andrew, who has been our local expert in Budapest, has an infectious enthusiasm for travel so when he proposed the Cultural Navigator concept, it was difficult to turn down. It also helped that Andrew’s travel schedule includes China, Egypt, Bermuda, Belize, Australia, Angola and Kazakhstan.

Right now, Andrew is travelling through China. You can read his latest post on having breakfast on The Bund in Shanghai.

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Vote for PlanetEye!

Mark Evans
Director, Community

With all the excitement about the recent U.S. presidential election, we’re hoping we can encourage people to vote again – this time for PlanetEye in Mashable’s Open Web Awards.

Over the past year, PlanetEye has evolved into a valuable and useful travel planning destination so it would be great if you could show your support by voting. It’s easy; all you have to do is click “Submit” in the box below.


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Friday, November 7th, 2008

A great GeoSocial evening

Juan Gonzalez
Vice President, Technology

The PlanetEye team was thrilled to host the first GeoSocial meet-up in Toronto last night. The sense of camaraderie among all the developers working one way or another in the geo space got us sharing great stories from the trenches. While some of the folks there are veterans in the space there were plenty of people curious to learn how they can get involved. Developers, bloggers, photographers, entrepreneurs…

Some of the organizations that attended: blogTO, Apisphere, dmti Spatial, 5 blocks out, infusion, the Accordion Guy, POIfriend, Homezilla, HomeStars, eat-local, [murmur]. Thanks for the great conversations.

Stay tuned for the next edition of GeoSocial.

PlanetEye

This is a blog about travel, photography, technology and their convergence online. Visit PlanetEye to learn more about our one-stop travel planning service.

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