We have been getting some nice press attention lately - from the NY Times, Der Spiegel, wired, and mashable. So people have asked me - “Hey Ron, where are the links to these cool press mentions?”. At first I tried to ignore, but no longer - we now have a press page. Hopefully we’ll have more and more good stuff coming our way!
Well! We have crossed over the 4,000 destinations (4,146 is the current count). It’s good to see that we’re doing this more and more quickly. Good on you Eva!
The other day, we saw (while walking to lunch) what has to be the world’s smallest dog. It turns out that he’s a puppy, but he won’t grow anymore. And I thought it was a mouse at first, check out these photos: (click on them to enlarge - otherwise the dog is too small to see!)
We got a mention in the NY Times - in an technology article about mashups - TripTouch is mentioned as an example for mashups. It’s nice - and we got quite a bit of traffic and users from this link!
We’re proud to offer our very own “2008 Valentine special”. We’ve gathered our 10 most romantic places, and wrote a nice article (well, Eva wrote it, really)
If you’re looking for a honeymoon destination or a romantic getaway - look no further-
We have a cool little storm here in Israel, and a couple of days ago we experienced some strong winds - they said it reached 100Km/h, which is a lot here in Israel (where the weather is usually calm).
They claimed that we’re gonna have 8m high waves - so we decided to go and have lunch by the sea to check it out. So we went to Tel-Aviv’s new port, which is a great place, and saw the waves first hand, splashing on the deck. I’m not sure about the 8m stuff but it was impressive and fun. Guy was a bit disappointed, to tell the truth.
But here are a few photos from that exciting event…
We have just uploaded a new version to TripTouch. The major changes are -
People are starting to get notice of TripTouch. We’re getting several nice links from all sorts of blogs and website.
Today we got a nice mention in the Speigel - our own 10 seconds of fame in German. Click here to view the video, you can jump to 1:55 to view the part about TripTouch. Nice!
One of the bad effects of travel is on the environment - the carbon loads are high for planes and cars. In an interesting post, EcoGeek shows the difference in carbon loads for a plane, car and train ride from Toulouse to Paris (data from the French Rail System) -
Obviously the Train is better, interestingly riding a Car is actually worse than an Airplane (I always assumed the opposite).
More and more companies allow you to offset your carbon loads, and hopefully as people get more aware the travel industry will get better at this. We in TripTouch encourage you to take less trips, but longer ones - it’s the short ones that are the worst in this regard (getting there is half the fun, but it’s also releases heaps of CO2…).
I just found out about the “Gap-Year”. It seems that the Britons (and other Europeans, actually) sometimes take a year off during their university studies, or after the end of their studies, before starting working.
We Israelis have it a different way - in age 18 we go to the army for 3 years (boys) or 2 years (girls). Then usually we take our gap between army and studies - and spend a little time traveling (usually to south america, SE Asia, India or AU/NZ).
But anyway I think it’s great to take some time off and spend a few months traveling. It really opens your mind up to new ideas and people. And it’s fun of course. I had my own gap-half-year in NZ and Samoa.
Anyway the web is offering some specialized places for people to hang out before their gap year with information. Obviously TripTouch is a good place to find information. Some sites go even further and give information about volunteering in some places, placements and jobs. One cool site is Gap Year World Wide which is worth a look if you’re thinking about a gap year yourself. I like the teaching and charitable projects bit. Good on them!