We desperately need a new word for 'Trip' [Tripwolf]

So after two months of private beta testing (we had access here), Tripwolf has finally come out of the shadows to the wide - and scary - world of the discerning traveller.

The buzz surrounding the project will now need to be translated into usage and, most importantly, engagement.

There's no point in having a travel social guide if no-one gets involved in it.

So the public version has a few nifty tools:

• A printable PDF guide which can be created by dragging and dropping content into a widget.
• Content brought in automatically from Flickr, Wikipedia and Youtube.
• Facebook integration.

In addition, the start-up, which has attracted investment dollars (around $1.2 million) from i5invest, has pulled off a coup of sorts by persuading MairDumont to throw all its content into the site - for free.

MairDumont is "Europe’s largest publisher of travel guides" and produces titles under the Baedeker, Dumont and Marco Polo brands.

So while the site is pretty impressive on the whole, TechCrunch raises an interesting point when it says:

And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites - there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.

The name would've been a good place to start:

Tripmate, Tripwiser, Tripbase, Tripup, Tripology, Trippert, blah, blah, blah. After Tripadvisor, few stick in the memory. This is not a good thing...

Anyway, let's see how they get on.

They have a fancy video to demonstrate how some of the bits work:



[NB: I was interviewed for the Tripwolf blog a few weeks back]

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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