I’m proud to announce the launch of Offbeat Guides first product in public beta!

http://www.offbeatguides.com/

What’s Offbeat Guides?

Our first product is quite simple: On-demand, Personalized Travel Books. Travel books that are tuned just for you, only about the place that you’re going, with local information like festivals, events, and concerts that are going on during the dates of your stay. We put in local maps that are tuned to where you’ll be, and we even customize the guide based on what we learn about you, like the timezone differences from your hometown, electrical plug differences, embassies and consulates nearby, differences in tipping policies, exchange rates, local weather forecasts, and much more.

We provide guides for over 30,000 city destinations around the world - of course we cover New York, Paris, Rome, and Tokyo, but we also have guides to Newark, Paradise, Romeoville, and Tokorozawa, and many more places.

We’re trying to solve the problem that most of us have when we travel - you want to know where to go, what to do when you’re there, and what’s going on while you’re there.

We’re a company run by obsessive technologists who happen to travel a LOT. We don’t come out of the travel industry. We’re travelers, just like you. We value your time, so we focused on simplicity. To get started, we only ask you 5 questions:

• Where are you going: We currently cover over 30,000 city destinations
• When will you be there: So we can include information about local festivals, events, club meetings, sports teams, concerts, and other timely information
• Where are you coming from: With this information, we give you contextal information, like timezone differences, embassies and consulates for your home country, language guides, exchange rates, electrical adapters needed, and more.
• Where are you staying: So we can localize the maps that go into your guide, and put your hotel right at the center of things.
• The Traveler’s Name: Well, we need to know who you are, so we can put your name right on the book cover! Makes for great gifts, too.

From that, we show you a live preview of your guide, with sights, attractions, restaurants, and hotels - but we also pull in all the local and contextual information we can find, tuning your guide just for you, your preferences, and your trip details.

We also brought on a top-notch team of travel experts, who have gone through the top 1000 city destinations in the world, called the museums, checked on the hotel information, and chatted with the restaurateurs. We built an travel search engine to help us to locate the most interesting information about the other 29,000 destinations, using both freely available information as well as licensed information from partners like Wikitravel, Wikipedia, Flickr, Eventful, Upcoming, Meetup, the World Factbook, and many other local sources. As we continue to build out the site, we’ll be adding in many more validated sources as well as incorporating feedback from travelers and locals into the future guides.

Can I customize it?

Of course. You get full control over your guide - so if you already know where you’re staying, you can click to deselect all of the information about hotels, for example. You can add customized chapters and fill them with information that you gather from your friends, or from around the internet.

And when you’re done, you can get your guide in multiple formats:

• As a beautifully printed full-color book, shipped to your door (or your hotel!) right before you leave on your trip so it has the freshest information in it,
• As a PDF suitable for printing on your home printer, or downloading onto your mobile phone or reading device, or
• On the web so you can read through the book on-line, and update information before and during your trip.

Why only City Guides?

Well, we had to start somewhere. One of the most-requested features from our private beta testers has been to create regional or area guides, for example, for Maui, or for The Napa Valley. We’re working on this, it’s in the pipeline, but we wanted to open the doors to all of you, even if those country or regional guides aren’t ready yet. Another frequently requested feature is for multi-segment trips - where you are visiting multiple places on a single trip. Right now, you’ll have to get a guide for each place, but this is something that we’re definitely keeping an eye on as we continue to build out the product.

How much does it cost?

It’s USD $9.95 to buy the PDF version, so you can print it yourself and save money. It’s USD $24.95 + shipping to buy the book, and the PDF comes included - you can download updated PDFs as many times as you want before your trip ends, as well! That’s about the same or less than you’d pay to buy a guide in a bookstore, and you’d end up with information that’s 12-24 months old, that’s not customized to you.

Is there a Money-back Guarantee?

Yes! If you’re unhappy with your guide for any reason whatsoever, simply let us know, and we’ll refund your money. No questions asked. Even if it is after your trip, and you’ve used the book. We’re committed to making a really great experience for you, so if you’re unhappy with the guide at all, we will refund your money.

Where’s the catch? Why is it Beta?

This is a pretty ambitious product, and we’re really happy with what we’ve built so far - but there’s still so much more to do. We’ve been testing for 5 months in private beta with over 6,000 people helping us to get things right, but things still crop up, and we want to learn more from you. We’re opening up the doors to let anyone come and kick the tires and buy some guides, and we really want to get your thoughts and feedback so we can make the experience and the guide information as good as possible. There will be bugs. We promise to stay in touch both on our blog and on Get Satisfaction and keep you in the loop as we find and fix bugs and issues. We appreciate your willingness to work with us on this and to help us create a great product together.

For our Private Beta Testers

We love you. We really really do! Thanks so much for all the help and feedback, you are the best group of testers I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. The free book coupons that you got as a private beta tester are still valid until November 30th; after that they won’t work anymore, so don’t procrastinate! We’ll also be sending you a survey as we close up the private beta - please check for it in your mailbox soon. It should take 10-15 minutes to fill out, but it will really help us to get your thoughts and feedback and to continue to improve the product. Thanks!!!

How to get involved

Well, first off, come and kick the tires! Check out the guide preview for your hometown, or for a place you’re visiting soon. Drop us a line and let us know how things look. Are there errors? Problems with the information? Are we missing a great feature? Let us know!

Also, follow us on Twitter! We’re @offbeatguides. We love hearing from you.

And Thanks!

Thanks for all of your support. On a personal note, I want to thank the Offbeat Guides Team who have weorked their butts off getting this built. I’m really excited to be taking this next adventure with you!

We’ve been hard at work on the private beta of Offbeat Guides, and I thought it would be a good time to give y’all an update on our progress!

We’ve been making huge strides both in making the site simpler and easier to use, as well as cranking away on the hard tasks of building out a deep semantic search service that dynamically builds guides for over 30,000 different city destinations around the world. We’ve taken a lot of what I’ve learned building comprehensive real-time search engines at Technorati, and also what Marina and her team have learned in building and curating a narrative experience when she was with Lonely Planet. We want to give you more than just the facts - to also get you a flavor and some the romance of the place and of your trip. We’ve expanded the partners we’re working with to include even more local photographs, festivals, tickets, and events, and we’ve put in a lot of heuristic technology to help to make sure we weed out as much irrelevant information as possible. If you want to work with us, drop us a line.

Algorithms can’t provide everything though, especially for the top travel destinations of the world - humans mean a lot too. We’ve got a team of people who have been digging deep into the top 1000 city destinations of the world - calling the shops, restaurants, hotels, fact-checking, and pulling out the cruft, while focusing on bringing you the most interesting offbeat local perspectives, and we also take advantage of all of the great Creative Commons-licensed and Public Domain information thats out there on the internet to help to create a satisfying experience for anyone who is traveling. We’re also looking to get feedback from locals and travelers so the guides stay current and completely up-to-date, too!

There’s still a lot to do, but I thought I’d put up a screencast (it runs a total of about 13 minutes) that takes you through the main features of the site - a sneak peek of what our private beta testers have been playing with.

We’re actively adding more people to the beta, on a first-come, first served basis - so if you want to get involved in testing out our beta, helping us to identify and fix bugs, and get two printed guides shipped free-of-charge to you as part of the private beta, make sure to sign up at the site. This offer won’t last forever!

Technorati Tags:
offbeatguides, travel, travelguide, travelguides, book, guide, vacation, webservice, beta, privatebeta, sneakpeek

Jason Dowdell, who writes the excellent Marketing Shift blog, recounts his experiences with his guide for a recent family vacation. His take?

Once you’ve finished answering the 5 questions, which takes 2 - 4 minutes tops, then you’re presented with an outline of the customized travel guide created specifically for you. You can click on each of the chapters and get a preview of the information contained in it and now you can even add your own chapter… this is great if you’re planning a trip for your family and want to make some notes and would like to send everyone in the family an official “Dowdell Family 2008 Vacation Guide” complete with rules and prizes. I’m only partially joking but it is quite neat.

In the version I used back in June I did find that there were a few blank pages in the printed version of the guide that arrived at our house as well as the pdf version but the guide was quite nice.

Thanks, Jason! 

He did have some great recommendations for us as well:

One thing I wish it had was a listing of all of the grocery stores in the area. No matter where we go on vacation to as a family, the first place we hit is the local grocery store and if that information was automagically generated in the guide it would be superb. There are many other features I’d like to see in it such as iPhone integration for the “top 10 things we MUST do on vacation” in order to avoid arguments 2 days after being on vacation so that mama gets to do her top 2 items and papa gets to do his and the girls can do theirs. All in all, I think this is a solid product with some great features and I think Dave is doing the right thing by taking it slow and not rushing this baby out into full blown production just yet.

Well, color us tickled, I do believe that we’re blushing. Jason’s entire review is up on his site, and I must say, it was a very nice way to start the morning.

There’s lots more good stuff coming down the pipeline - if you haven’t signed up for the private beta yet, c’mon over and sign up. Testers are let in on a first-come, first-served basis, and with some of the big changes coming, we’re really going to be relying on our beta testers to help us to really get things right. 

The folks over at HyveUp did an interview with me last week, and we chatted about how Offbeat Guides got started and some of the features of the travel guides. Click below to see the video:

It was lots of fun to sit down and show off what we’re doing. We’re getting ready for a big push of lots of bug fixes and new features, so keep your eyes open, things are moving pretty quickly around here…

The Business Standard of India wrote up a really interesting review of Offbeat Guides today:

Recently, I had the chance to travel to Japan to speak and participate in an international conference. Ever heard of Sapporo? Quite honestly, I hadn’t. It’s Japan’s 5th largest city in the northern island of Hokkaido.

There’s a good chance I would never have bothered to find out where it is, if not for the conference. Now that I had to spend a week there, I figured that it would be a good idea to get a travel guide. And so, off I went looking for a travel guide to Japan.

I found two books, both very generously priced at around Rs 1,500 (ed. Note: That’s about USD $35). I probably wouldn’t have minded it that much if the book had enough material about Sapporo. Unfortunately, all it had was a measly chapter about the city where I was travelling to and I was left standing with a book where 95 per cent of the information had no practical use to me. It didn’t take me long to put the books back in the bookshelf.

It’s after this experience that I so much appreciate the value of OffBeat Guides, a make-it-yourself, personalised guide book service. The service understands that your main interest is the city you are travelling to. In this case, my only interest was Sapporo in Northern Japan. And in under 10 minutes, I had myself a personalised travel guide to Sapporo.

This sums up so succinctly why I started the company - I travel a lot, and I was disappointed with what more traditional guides gave me about the places I was going - especially if they were not the 50 most traveled places in the world. I wanted travel search that worked for me, rather than something that made me work hard to collect all the information on my own.  Here’s what Kiruba Shankar, the author of the article writes:

It then gives me the choice of menus of the different information about the city and I get to choose what I want and what I don’t want. For example, I did not want information about 5-star hotels. So, I unchecked them. But what I definitely wanted to know was the Subway train map and the local bus routes. Likewise, there’s a long laundry list of items I can choose.

Even though all the information is available on the Internet free of charge, there are two distinct advantages that the book provides. One, someone else does the searching for you, saving you time and two, all the information is neatly packaged into a small book making it easy for you to carry along. You can either choose to have the PDF version for about Rs 400 Ed. Note: USD $9.95) and read it off your laptop or choose to buy the printed book for about Rs 1,000 (Ed. Note: USD $24.95). I prefer choosing the PDF version and taking a printout on my printer. Works better this way.

The beauty of the book is it’s personalisation. Since it knows what dates you are in the city, it only lists important events that take place in the city when you are there. For example, I was told that there is a Beer Garden Festival happening which I made sure to attend.

Go read the entire article, and sign up for the private beta - there’s a waiting list right now, but we’re letting more folks in to the beta on a first-come, first-served basis. We believe, as does Kiruba, that personalized publishing is a tremendous opportunity in the publishing business - and that printed books have a lot of value, especially if you can personalize them to each individual reader.  I’m a big fan of customized product companies like Moo, Cafepress, Lulu, Spreadshirt, Threadless, and JPG Magazine. I think there’s a new sector forming around creating tangible representations of digital creations - and I like it…

Hi everybody! It’s been a while since we’ve posted to the blog, mostly because we’ve been cranking away getting things ready for our public beta this fall. We just pushed out some pretty big changes, and there’s lots more coming down the road.  Here’s some details on the major changes in this release:

• We heard from those of you who are trip planners who want to come back to your book over and over again before you leave on your trip. You told us that you want to add & edit information like itineraries and extra chapters on places to go, people to see, and things to do. Now you can do that - and still make sure to get your printed book a few days before you leave on your trip. This also gives you the additional benefit of getting the most up-to-date event listings, weather reports, currency exchange rates, festival information, and the like, printed up right before you depart.  And there’s a “print now” button for people who don’t want to wait. 
• You can rebuild guides up until the last day of your trip - so if you want to download the guide while you’re in your hotel room or on the go, you can take advantage of getting the latest and greatest information, right at your fingertips.
• Email reminders: You’ll now be emailed reminders about your trip every other week (or month, if its more than 6 weeks away) so that you can keep track of your trip, and make sure to add in any extra info you want into the book.

We made a bunch of usability improvements as well, based on your feedback:

• When you preview a section on the table of contents page, all sections inside of it show up in the preview (and are grayed out if it’s unchecked)
• We’ve moved the coupon code field to make it more obvious to you that if you’re using a coupon for a free book, a credit card isn’t necessary
• A/B tests are now also implemented, so we can now test different layouts and see how people respond to them

There’s lots more coming, and I promise that we’ll stay in touch as we roll out more fixes and changes…

This post aims to accomplish two things - let you guys know what the development team has been up to this week, and to prove that there is an xkcd comic for everything.

• Add/edit a chapter! You can add, edit, and delete custom chapters - add in your favorite information you’ve learned about where you’re going, your flight information, your emergency contact information, whatever - it will all get bound and printed in your book, and be ready for your trip! http://xkcd.com/404 (D’oh!)
• Better IE6 support: http://xkcd.com/198/
• Order history bug fix: Orders made more than a few weeks ago sometimes showed up in order history as from December 31, 1969 - that’s been fixed! http://xkcd.com/376/
• Softening guide failure: If a guide fails, you’ll get a PDF that contains the error, and a picture of a cute furry animal to look at while our techs are dispatched to figure out what went wrong and fix it. http://xkcd.com/231/
• Real preview and page counts! You can now see a real preview (meaning it looks like the books) and see the approximate page count for books on the table of contents page. http://xkcd.com/294/
• Blog fixes: Our blog now has dates and links to the main page http://xkcd.com/239/

So I guess we learned that there isn’t an xkcd for everything. It’s kinda like finding out there’s no Santa Claus. Oh well! The best part of all of this? It’s so much fun putting out features, learning, and getting all of your feedback. We sure do love you guys!

We’re pushing hard to get to public beta, and we’re adding people from the waitlist every week, so if you want to get in to the private beta, sign up early!

Hello travelers!

Did you know that … instead of parking tickets, police officers in Cancun, Mexico may remove your license plate, forcing you to come to the police station to retrieve them (and pay a fine)?

Neither did we, until our intrepid travel information team started relaying these trivia facts about the destinations they were working on.

So, what has the development team been doing lately?

• There’s 10% more love in the website.
• We’ve also incorporated an address manager, so you can now save, add, delete, and edit multiple shipping and billing addresses.
• In addition, there is an order tracker where you can view your order details and download previous guides.
• International billing addresses can also be used, as we’ve enabled the use of letters and numbers as zip codes. (It’s a European thing…)
• When you type in your destination, the suggestions we provide should show up faster and be more accurate. It’s still not perfect, so if you’re looking for a city and it doesn’t appear, let us know.
• The selector for inputting your destination has been improved and should be running a faster.

This month our focus is on content and features. We’re working hard to incorporate all your excellent feedback!

See? We’ve been busy!

Happy travels!

Ahoy Travelers!

Today we released a new version of the private beta site, with a ton of improvements!  The primary goal was stability and usability - however we did manage to sneak a few new features in.

One of the features that was added with this release is full previews.  There was a version of previews before, however it only included the first few lines of the chapter.  Now, you can view the full text of each section before you check out - click on the “preview” links to the right of each chapter and section item of the book when you view the table of contents.

Another new feature is the ability to see all your guides as they go into production- before, if you built more than one guide, it only showed one of them being built. We’re also including a first release of Order History so that you can see (and download again!) any books that you’ve built in the past.

Enjoy the new release, and as always, let us know if you have any problems!

Howdy travelers!

We’ve been hard at work on version 1.1 since our first beta was released on June 1st. We’ve been going through your excellet feedback, and hopefully have fixed many of the major bugs that were lurking on private beta launch!

Our main goal with this release was stability- hopefully, you’ll notice a big difference. We cleaned up some of the styling and site content, streamlined the guide creation even more than it already was, and squashed a whole bunch of bugs. As always, if you run into problems, be sure to let us know.

We’re also testing a few new features, including the most popular feature request: When building a guide, you’ll notice a new “preview” link next to each section and subsection when the table of contents is generated. This will let you preview the information in that section before you build the guide. Note that it’s not perfect- you’ll notice that the preview is often incomplete (or missing altogether) - it also doesn’t include images or maps yet. We’re working on it!

Be sure to let us know what you think- we want to hear about the good and (especially) the bad! We’re not just looking for bugs and errors - if you find anything that’s not completely clear or doesn’t work exactly like you think it should, please email us at product@offbeatguides.com!