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!

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…

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!

Today is a very big day for the team here at Offbeat Guides, the new company that we’ve been working on for the last 6 months is launching in private beta!

What does the company do?

Offbeat Guides’ first product is personalized, on-demand printed Travel Guides. Ever go through the experience of planning a trip using the web? I’ve always found it pretty painful - finding all the sights, the best places to stay, restaurants, walking tours, public bathrooms, wifi maps, and all that, not to mention finding out what bands are in town, or what interesting local meetings, book signings, museum and gallery openings are out there. I also end up getting maps for my hotels and meetings, too.

When I do end up having the time, I often become like a packrat, finding tidbits on the web, bookmarking, and then printing them on my home computer. Add in a big black clippy to keep all the pages together, and if I’m lucky, it’ll hold things tightly so I won’t be dropping papers everywhere as I’m running through airports, or searching through papers in taxis. The end result often gets stuck at the bottom of my bag, totally crumpled and ripped.

The problem with everything else out there

Here’s the other thing I noticed - when I’ve got time to do more extended planning, the travel guides that I get at the bookstore are really only about the “big” destinations - you know, the big cities and tourist spots. And I’m paying for lots of information that I really don’t need - I end up getting a book that’s mostly about the places where I’m NOT going, often hundreds of miles away. Of course, that’s all that the current publishers can do - the economics of the book publishing business demands that you focus all your energies on the lowest common denominator - and that you mass-produce the same out-of-date content to every bookstore on the planet that puts you on the shelf. It’s also pretty wasteful from an environmental standpoint - all those unnecessary pages means more dead trees.

That’s just not right, and in the age of the net, there’s got to be a better way. After five years of building a search engine that scoured the “live web” for new, fresh information from authoritative sources, I knew that there was an exciting opportunity to add in a new dimension - location - and maybe build something really neat: A constantly changing, up-to-the-minute set of travel guides that could also be personalized to your preferences; but also something that was easy to build and easy to read.

Oh, did I mention that these would be physical books, not just virtual? Of course, if you want to get the PDF, you can do that too, and print it yourself, or put it on your Kindle, for example. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the technology of paper still has some legs yet: When you do it right, paper is lightweight, extremely low power, flexible, you can even write on it! You can get it wet, no need to reboot it, and it fits easily in a knapsack or back pocket with no fear of breakage. You can also feel perfectly safe riding an elephant in the jungles above Chang Mai, Thailand even if you drop it in a muddy puddle, or if it gets stepped on by a following pachyderm. No 3-year warranty necessary!

Of course, when I head on a trip somewhere, I like to have my computer and mobile phone with me, and I love it if I can get internet access while I’m on my trip, but sometimes that’s just impractical or impossible - I don’t like leaving my computer or phone on a beach, or wait for a crappy net connection when I’m on the road. Those things are great at the end of the day, when I’m in my hotel room, but they’re terrible when I need to look up how to say “Where’s the bathroom?” in Italian, or “I’m staying at the Sheraton Hotel” in Thai. For that, we put a bunch of useful information on the back cover of each guide - just for the important facts that take too long to look up, like how much to tip your taxi driver!

Ideally, what I wanted to bring with me is a nicely bound personalized travel guide, that has information about just the destination of my trip, and includes more detailed information - not only the history and the like, but also gives me updated information on exchange rates, local events and festivals, and what’s actually going on in the city while I’m there. Who cares if there’s a great festival in December if I’m there in June? I wanted to add in information that is relevant to my preferences, too - If I’m traveling with my kids, I want to know what’s fun for them in that town, or if I’m on business, I want to know where to get free wifi. And of course, I want to know where to get a great meal; but if I already know where I’m staying I want to be able to pull all of the “where to stay” info out of my guide too! And it would be great to have this guide accessible to me when I’m in front of my computer or phone, as well.

Offbeat Guides was born from that personal itch.

There’s a lot of technology on the back-end: You could say that in a way, what we’ve done is flip the implementation of travel search on its head. We’re trying to actually give you more of what you want, and less of the unnecessary or irrelevant stuff. We’ve scoured the web for the best information about over 30,000 different travel destinations, using a combination of search technology, and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts (our travel content coodinator spent the last 4years at Lonely Planet!) But technology is only useful if you can make it simple - so we spent a lot of time boiling the user experience of building a guide to it’s essence: 5 simple steps that everyone should be able to answer easily:

1) What’s your name?
2) Where are you going?
3) Where are you coming from?
4) What are your travel dates?
5) (Optional) Where are you staying when you’re there?

With that information in hand, you can create a personalized guide. You can go in, customize your table of contents to add or remove sections depending on your interests.

And more is coming soon as we continue to build out the product: For example, you’ll soon be able to add your own chapters with any information that you cut-and-paste into the guide, and you’ll be able to tell us a bit more about yourself and have the guide tailored for you: If you’re travelling with kids, for example, or if you want WiFi maps, or food preferences.

We’re currently pulling information from some really great places on the internet - about two dozen sources so far, and more being added every day. We’re very cognizant of copyright issues, and try to work first with folks who put their information in the public domain, or use creative commons licenses that encourage commercial use. With some sites, we’ve worked out commercial relationships to be able to use their data, and we’re actively negotiating with lots more who want to make available their writing and data to our customers - and we’re looking at creative ways to build an ecosystem where everyone wins. We’re also working with some fantastic companies that are solving big pieces of the puzzle, like trip recommendations, flight reservations, and other travel scheduling tools. If you want to work with us, drop us a line!

It’s been a thrilling and exciting 6 months, and I’m so proud of the team that has gotten us here - it’s been such a blast to be able to work with such smart, motivated, and fun-loving folks!

If you’re interested in helping us to deliver a great experience, looking to help a young company produce just the kind of guide you want, and aren’t afraid of seeing a few bugs along the way, come to the site, and sign up for the beta! We’ll be adding folks to the beta as we continue to fix bugs and increase scalability, and we’ll be doing it largely on a first-come, first served basis.

More to come. Onwards and upwards!