PSFK Talks to David L. Sifry, Offbeat Guides
Matthias Weber (PSFK Hamburg)
PSFK Germany recently had the chance to talk to David L. Sifry - whom many of you probably know as the founder and CEO of Technorati. His most recent venture is Offbeat Guides, an online service to easily produce customized travel guides. Offbeat Guides’ simple process for building your own travel guide is based on answering five quick questions about the excursion: destination city, your current city, your name, traveldates and where (e.g. in which hotel) you will be staying.
The site then renders an individual guide containing all the information based around your answers. Maps are custom-centered around the location of the hotel you are staying while recommended events, concerts and exhibitions are chosen based on the time frame of your stay.
Custom chapters can be appended easily, so you can include personal recommendations or notes as well. The guide comes as a digital PDF file and is available for optional printing on demand.
Currently the service sources its content from the public domain and freely available sites such as Wikitravel or eventful. David shared with us a few extensions and insights about his motivations behind creating Offbeat Guides:
How has it been going with the Offbeat Guides Beta so far?
Fantastically well! Well beyond my expectations. I think we were surprised- Number one, at how much interest there was from everyday people.
I’ll tell you a story: We launched the company into private Beta on June 1st this year and we had 1000 Beta invites to give away. We were still getting things going so we didn’t want to invite too many people in, we just wanted to get some feedback. And there were stories written about us in Techcrunch and Webware - we just went out to two journalists, and Sunday morning at Midnight was when one of the stories went out, and by 3 a.m. Sunday morning all 1,000 invites were gone. It was amazing. I couldn’t believe it. And we had over 6,000 people sign up just to be on the waiting list. We learned a heck of a lot from the private beta testers and we tuned and tweaked the site to really focus it on simplicity and making it really understandable for folks.
We went out to public beta on Monday and we haven’t really done a big announcement yet - just a blog post saying “Hey, you know the password’s off and people can come”. And now we already are having thousands of people who have been coming to Offbeat Guides to test it out and to build guides. So, I would say we’re really pleasantly surprised with the reception.
Today we’re all always plugged in; nearly everyone has a handset (or two), and we have devices like the iPhone that offer quick, easy mobile access to the internet. We’re curious: especially given your background as the founder of Technorati- the world’s largest blog search engine - why did you decide to provide guides that are based on a printable format?
It’s a good question. I think people get two things mixed up: Getting great information on any device that they want with thinking that it has to be using the highest technology possible. When I started to really think carefully about the problem and as we learned from our customers, of course iPhone and HTML based applications and PDFs and Blackberry apps were in the plan, all of these very high technology applications that solve the problem are important.
But what I learned is that there is really something special about holding a physical printed book in your hands. Especially when you are travelling. And you know, I travel with my Blackberry and my iPhone and my Laptop and all of that and if I am in the middle of a Siok in Jerusalem or I am lying on a beach in Phuket, Thailand I don’t really want to pull out my Blackberry or end up paying those enormous data rates via my iPhone just to be able to find a piece of information that I could easily find if it was sticking in my back pocket.
This is not about printed versus digital. That is the absolutely false argument from my perspective. I want both: I want my information when I want it, where I want it, how I want it. And even more importantly I want it personalized to me. I think there is something very, very useful when you are travelling regarding the technology of paper.
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© Matthias Weber (PSFK Hamburg) for PSFK, 2008. | Permalink | Comments | Add to del.icio.us
Posted on: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 12:35 pm
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