We recently hosted our first two day hackathon, “The Amazing Hack” at TripIt HQ.  Fourteen teams made up with folks who came from every department of the company competed to build what ended up being some pretty amazing hacks – and clever ways of presenting them – spotlighting innovation across the organization.

As this was our first TripIt internal hackathon, I was a bit nervous as to what the results might be and how much people would get into it, and now that it’s over I must say that the TripIt team far surpassed any expectations I could have reasonably had!

I’m so absolutely proud of the teams that participated as they clearly poured their heart and soul into the competition.

But onto the winners. I’d like to congratulate the following folks for presenting revolutionary ideas that you will very likely see in the flesh:

    Third Place (Tie): Steven, Mike, Gina

Second Place: Thor 

Third Place (Tie): Alex and Yu….

The post The Amazing Hack – Summer 2011 appeared first on TripIt Blog.

I’ve written a little bit on Quora about how what we call the Datamapper works.  This is really only half the story though.  The other half is about the dedicated, intelligent, and tireless team of engineers and product folks I work with who have been doggedly attacking this problem and continuously innovating and improving our core technology over the last 4+ years.

They’ve been hard at work adding support for new document types such as Microsoft Word, RTF, PDF (the original version that I wrote back in 2006 only supported text and HTML emails).  They aggressively built out support for new travel suppliers and travel agencies that you often use.  They’ve also been highly responsive to feedback, requests and bug reports, often fixing issues before anyone (in some cases before you) even noticed there was a problem.

They found clever ways to build support for airport parking confirms and some foreign language support although neither of these features were officially prioritized.  Finally, they built out the ability to auto-magically scrape your GMail inbox and detect duplicate incoming reservations to create the truly set-it and forget-it experience that we dreamed of creating over 4 years ago.

When I look back and reflect on how far TripIt has come I can only think of a quote from one of the most complicated and important men in American history, Thomas Jefferson.  He said, on the topic of luck: “I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself. 

Looking forward, we’re continuing to stay focused on future innovation as well as keeping on top of the important fundamentals that make TripIt special, so in the words of Al Jolson, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

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To celebrate our milestone of supporting 3,000+ travel and hospitality sites worldwide today we are launching “Not Just a Plane” Promotion. Create a trip plan on TripIt and get a chance to win $500! Read more.

To view press release: Count the Ways: Organizing Travel Even Easier with TripIt

The post The Magic of the Itinerator appeared first on TripIt Blog.

Millions of you are using Plaxo to keep track of what your friends are doing online, all over the web. We’re excited to announce that TripIt is now integrated into Plaxo Pulse! Plaxo is the latest application to use the new TripIt API, so we’re particularly excited about it.

Because Plaxo is using the TripIt API, you can display more complex information in your Plaxo feed. As you can see in this sample screenshot, Plaxo can tell your Pulse connections that you’re planning a trip in TripIt, including the trip name, destination, dates, and even the trip image you’ve selected. Additionally, Plaxo lets you and your friends comment on the things that show up in the Pulse, so you can give and receive travel recommendations like great restaurants, cool sites to see, and the easiest way to get to and from the airport. We love it!

When you connect TripIt to Plaxo Pulse, you can also choose to have your TripIt itineraries added to your Plaxo calendar. This is a handy way to make sure all your travel items end up on the calendar you use. You can sync your Plaxo calendar with Outlook, Mac, Google or Yahoo, and your travel events will automatically update every place you sync.

We’d like to say thanks to Joseph, John and the team at Plaxo for a very cool integration. We’re already using it here at TripIt, and we think many other TripIt travelers will enjoy it, too.

Read more about this integration on the Plaxo blog. 

If you’re ready to hook up TripIt to your Plaxo Pulse, then get started here.

Enjoy!

The post New Plaxo Integration Using the TripIt API appeared first on TripIt Blog.

Over the past several
months we’ve been working hard to add new ways for you to share your travel
information with your existing network of friends and applications.  Most
recently we launched TripIt Traveler Profiles (see previous blog post or release email) in an effort to further this effort along.  As the resident geek, I wanted to share with you a little bit about what’s going on behind the scenes.

We
created TripIt Traveler Profiles by utilizing existing open standards that are enabling the open social web because TripIt is an open platform
and we believe the emerging open social web is a good thing for both TripIt and you.  In addition to fun
travel stats, a nice picture, and a list of your upcoming trips we’ve included microformat (hCard, geo, and XFN) markup that enables you to
tie your TripIt identity back to the larger identity you have built
across dozens of other sites on the web.  We have also made it
possible for you to publish both your location stream (iCalendar
format) and your activity stream (Atom) at your public profile URL so that you can
freely share your travel information with a variety of other services
that support open web standards (e.g., Google Calendar, Plaxo,
Friendfeed, etc.).

For
the geeks out there like myself, you can think of your TripIt profile URL as
your "travel identity end-point."  For those who don’t speak geek, just
think of your TripIt profile as a great place for your friends, as
well as other services you use online, to find out where you’re
traveling.

I’ve
been playing around with Google’s Social Graph API to see if Google
has been successful in knitting together my distributed online
identity, and the results have been pretty good, at least for the
sites that provide me the ability to link back. Here’s who “Andy
Denmark” is online:

http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/findyours.html?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tripit.com%2Fpeople%2Fdenmark

The
sites towards the top of the list have more “confirmed”
connections back to my TripIt profile since they allow me to link
back to my public TripIt profile. The sites towards the bottom either
don’t give me the ability to authenticate the connection by creating
a XFN marked-up link back or I just haven’t set it up yet.

You
can go and see what your distributed online identity looks like by
going to this page and providing some of your own public profile
URLs (e.g. your TripIt public profile):

http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/findyours.html

Once
you set up your public profiles and link them to each other it may
take Google a while (a week or more) to re-crawl those pages and
collect the data needed to surface your connections.

There’s
certainly a lot more to come from TripIt in regards to working with
social networks and open standards, but Travel Profiles are a step in
that direction. Let me know your thoughts.

The post TripIt, Open Standards, and the Social Web appeared first on TripIt Blog.

The presentation was well attended and I hope people got some value from hearing about the issues discovered and experience gained while building TripIt.  I’ve embedded my slides from the talk below for all to enjoy.

– Andy

| View | Upload your own

The post Web 2.0 Expo: Making Email a Useful Web App appeared first on TripIt Blog.

hCalendar microformat is a small chunk of HTML code that we put on
the itinerary page so that a microformat-enabled browser can
automatically extract information (e.g., calendar events, a
geographic location, or a person’s contact information) right off
the page and use that information with other applications on your
computer (e.g., your calendar application).

With
hCalendar microformat on every TripIt itinerary, you just need a
microformat-enabled reader and you can automatically copy your TripIt
itinerary to your desktop calendar and then sync that information to
your mobile device or another application.

While
most of you probably don’t yet have a microformat reader on your
desktop, they are freely available for most operating systems and for
most web browsers (unfortunately, not Internet Explorer yet). See
here for more information on microformats and
where to find a microformat reader.

This
can be a useful work-around for those of you that use a personal
calendar (e.g., Outlook 2003) that doesn’t support the iCalendar
standard.  Microformats won’t continually sync your latest
itinerary to your calendar, but at least you can get your trip data
into your calendar or mobile device.

Here’s
an example of what this process looks like while using Firefox on
Windows with the Operator microformat-reader plug-in and Outlook
2003.  The first screen shows me selecting my flight from San Francisco to Chicago.  The second screen shows me about to save that flight into my Outlook calendar.  So simple!

Please
post any comments or questions or contact us at support@tripit.com.

–
Andy

The post hCalendar Microformats and TripIt appeared first on TripIt Blog.

We understand that performance is a key
component of usability.  As as we’ve been building feature after
feature as fast as we possibly can, performance tuning has not been
something that we have had the luxury to spend much time doing.
Instead, we have done our best to ensure that we architected the
system for future tuning and scaling.  With a large and growing
user-base, it’s time to crank up the performance knob and scale the
application to meet the needs of our community.  This is extremely
exciting for my team because every engineer loves the opportunity to
squeeze performance out of a system.  To work on performance because
so many people are using what we’ve built is even better!

– Andy

The post The Need for Speed appeared first on TripIt Blog.

A bunch of you have written in asking about the tools and technologies
we use to make The Itinerator work and so Gregg asked me to give
everyone a quick overview. The Itinerator, like most of the large
scale websites on the Internet today, is built on top of a number of
high quality open source projects combined with some patent pending
proprietary technologies that we have built in-house.

Much of the application is built in PHP5
using a very nice web framework called Symfony. I would like to
extend my gratitude to the Symfony development team and community as
their work has enabled us to build a very efficient and clean code
base in a very short amount of time. If you’re about to start a
project and have decided on or are considering PHP5 as a development
language, you should take a look at Symfony!

Aside from PHP5 and Symfony, we make extensive use of Python, Lighttpd, MySQL, Postfix, and Linux. Companies like
TripIt would not be possible without the years of hard work and genius
that have been put into these open source projects. These tools are
not only superior to their commercial counterparts, but are a lot more
flexible and customizable as well.

Aside from the communities of open source developers responsible for
the projects we use, I would also like to give proper recognition to
my extraordinary development team that includes Thor Denmark, Jacques
Grove, Ringo Tsang, Tim Chon and a small group of contractors from
around the world. These people have worked really hard to make TripIt
and The Itinerator what they are.  I’m very proud of how much this
small group of exceptionally talented engineers has accomplished so
far and excited about the fun things still to come.

- Andy

The post TripIt Technology appeared first on TripIt Blog.