Travolition - travel planning 2.0 1

Posted by marvin on July 14, 2009

Travel Planning 2.0 (Hmmm).

I can’t let the beans out now, but desperate I am. Truly. And, here it is…. spilling all over exactly as it shouldn’t. We have been working on this project for about 13 months, on and off and still only somewhat close to a beta. And that too a private one.

Simply speaking, we have worked out a cutting edge travel-planning tool to assist a traveler finding the best route, order, mode of travel, combination of modes, reviews given his choice of places, and dates of trip. We’d help the user finalize a trip.Not just that, we want one-shot simplified & safe bookings too.

On the other side, we wish to provide SAAS assistance to airlines as well. In these times of despair for the Airlines we believe that our product can give them an edge in lowering their distribution costs utilizing the economics of cloud-computing and SAAS model thereby beating the age of expensive GDS’s.

We believe that change is in the offing for the older distribution systems - all over the world.

Intriguing as this may seem, as to how the human brain works out through this mess of information, too often however, we fall prey to circumstantial or physical limitation of manually sifting/searching before finalizing a trip.

Finally, we end up phoning a human agent who takes all the pain (though he also faces the same problem, just with a little more practical exposure though).

We plan to introduce <strong>http://travolition - travel by choice </strong>which solves routing, re-routing, alternative modes, time or cost options, arrivals, departures, timings, providers, and finally the right combination of each compounded with opinions & web 2.0 based “communitized” information that together accounts for a “trip-plan”.

And typically for a multi-city, multi-modal global traveler the complexity & size of data and its crunching involved is mind-boggling. Even for the best of processors/machines available today.

Hey, and did we forget to mention that the travel industry has been running on a thirty year model anyways.

We decided to look at the processes ground up. Inspired by what Tata Nano did we started from scratch as well. And now, we are quite excited about our shiny new product.

The entire process of constructing a single trip for a single user gives us a fair understanding of how AWESOMELY humans are hard-wired to cut the crap and listen to other fellow travelers (word of mouth) and use their own experience if note-worthy.

In current face of industry, people involuntarily try to avoid the intermediaries (agent commissions) where-ever possible and also do not wish to undergo the torture of standing in a queue or surf between confusing offers online before booking a ticket (yet another optimization problem of our lives).

With Travolition, we intend to simplify or rather erase the pains of a traveler.

Our look out is to fetch the best combo of “comfort, price, duration and connectivity along with brand preference, budget and geography” which, needless to mention, are also linked to the user history & personal habits of a user.

Travolition - travel by choice - http://travolition.com - beta designed is to enable users find the most open, complete and economical solution and it helps the airliners, railways & also the wheels on the road to sell inventory with fuller control and watch the Analytics through their own dashboards.

Travolition - is a specialized planning tool to simplify complex search with really simple and responsive result.

And after taking everything into account, trust me, the entire computational power available to mankind off-date can be put to test before recommending a ‘good plan’ to a single traveler. We have come up with some seriously tricky search algorithms for the entire process and we believe they will benefit all the stakeholders a lot.

Rest in part - II of his blog. Keep in touch.

Cheers,

Marvin

Ruby on Rails training for the summer season 4

Posted by admin on May 08, 2009

Lattice Purple team has some new members now and we will be conducting training sessions on Ruby and Rails for them at our Noida office. The sessions will be conducted by people who have years of experience building webapps like YouSuggest, SlideShare and so on.

If you are a ruby enthusiast and would like to participate in the same, drop us a mail at info@latticepurple.com. The sessions will be quite intense and are sure to bring you up to speed in the world of Rails.

Visibility clues for a start-up! 3

Posted by marvin on April 09, 2009

Visibility is definitely very important. And with YouSuggest’s been covered on pluggd.in recently, I seriously feel how important media guys are…! (respect man, respect: nothing else will do)

We intend to promote YouSuggest as much as possible for the next few months. And at the same time I want to detail this process and be creative for other people too.

So here is the list of places, I being a start-up, am gonna write to (list based on help/WoM from my friends, contacts and others from the start-up world):

The check-list will be useful to you all.

1. Pluggd.in ( Ashish is the guy ) : ashish [at] pluggd [dot] in

2. TechCrunch : editor [at] techcrunch [dot] com

3. TheNextWeb: boris [at] thenextweb [dot] com

4. ReadWriteWeb: tips [at] readwriteweb [dot] com

5. CRENK : info [at] crenk [dot] com

6. GigaOM: press-leads [at] gigaom [dot] com

7. TechPluto: support [at] techpluto [dot] com

8. TechStartups: techstartups [at] gmail [dot] com

9. MoMB : saurierduval [at] gmail [dot] com

10. Mashable : news [at] mashable [dot] com

You can also list yourself at: tradevibes, listio, stumbleupon, dzone, reddit, digg, linkedin and many more <google!>…

Wish you all the best :)

cheers,

Marvin

YouSuggest - overview of features

Posted by admin on April 03, 2009

Here is a quick overview of features in the latest release of YouSuggest
As always, please give us your feedback at http://ideas.yousuggest.us . :-)

Traffic Surge & Bad Bad Server :( 2

Posted by admin on March 24, 2009

Hey reader…! This is truly truly not possible, but it is true…:-(

We saw a surge & traffic congestion today during 5:00 to 7:00 pm IST (New Delhi) time on YouSuggest. And the application response was really really slow then (No donut for anyone!!).

Now the surge has receded and our engineers are checking the logs!!

We expect to optimize & give YouSuggest its best shape in a few days time through these learnings…please do remember we are a start up :)

Thanks for your support:D

Cheers,

Ratan

Choosing colors for your portal! 1

Posted by admin on March 20, 2009

hey!

This post has one great value to it: A layman’s opinion on choosing the right colors for your website :-)

While, there are a million sites littered across the internet, only a few appeal and leave a mark on our minds. Some create a jaw-dropping appreciation for the interface, while others, mostly crap, make us run for our lives. To find something better.

Colors have a great bearing on this ‘feeling to associate’ with a website. A brightly lit-up website might as much become an offensive site as would a dull & morose color set.  Particularly if its a dynamic application.

When you sit on Adobe PhotoShop sometime, and let your creative juices flow, you gotta bear the following important things in your mind. (i) voluptious, (ii)curvaceaous and (iii) simplicity while designing your website. And then think about colors.

A monitor of any type (LCD, CRT, or probably even your own shiny new quantum computer screen) is comparable to the “day-sky”. We love the blue skies above, and by all means the sky is also ‘back-lit’ by the sun.

It is filled with seams of blue, white and grey and occasionally, though rarely,  has hues of yellow, pink or orange as well. Hey don’t look  straight at the sun! Focus on the sky.

A computer screen is similar: back-lit, needs to be vast, clear and representing natural colors. (Did you not hear this before: ‘blue’ is the safest bet on a website ? ). We humans are naturally comfortable with blue-blue sky or even white or greyish.

We are not used to “BLOOD RED” sky and therefore, would not want to associate with a ‘BLOOD RED’ screen for a prolonged measure of time. Not even green, yellow or pink. Whatever be the color you choose, it must represent some part or time of the sky, else your website would seem so synthetic.

Hope, you found my post sensible enough from art & reality point of view. Do let me know if you can educate me on this with your own valuable experiences. :)

Cheers,

Marvin Danig

YouSuggest 2.0 is now live !

Posted by admin on March 19, 2009

We have just pushed out the latest release of YouSuggest after listening to a lot of feedback. The release packs in the following goodies:

- Online billing & payments

- Flexible plans

- Single Sign on

- Idea tracking

- Private ideas

- Better hosting

and much more. We will be talking more about these in our upcoming posts. Stay tuned ! :)

YouSuggest is now running in the clouds

Posted by admin on October 17, 2008

We recently set up an instance of YouSuggest on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform for one of our clients and it was a breeze. All systems were up and running just after a couple of hours of work. Do let us know if you would like to move your account on EC2 too.

Appstarter is now on Github 2

Posted by admin on October 17, 2008

Appstarter, our skeleton rails application project, is now on Github. Go here.

Our fork of resource_controller is also available now at Github. This can be installed as “gem install nileshtrivedi-lp_resource_builder” from http://gems.github.com.

Charting statistics in YouSuggest 1

Posted by admin on September 16, 2008

YouSuggest currently uses the Open Flash Chart plugin for RoR for graphing in the dashboard. We will be moving to Bluff instead, which is a javascript library for graphing making use of the canvas tags. It is a javascript port of Gruff graphing library.

Here is how a multi-line chart would look like:

Let us know what you think.

cheers
nilesh