not just random

At the end of last year, when the days around here were short, gray and wet, I brought home a copy of Where To Go When. The book describes vacation trips, sorted by month and contains sample itineraries, price ranges as well as lots and lots of beautiful photos. It’s a large-format, visually pleasing book that belongs on a coffee table and always invites browsing and daydreaming of future trips or possible adventures.

Major travel websites tend to work best when customers already have a pretty good idea what kind of trip they are looking for. It is a fairly active and probably increasingly crowded market though. More and more, companies are emerging that offer web services that aim to help customers discover trip or vacation ideas.

Intended date ranges along with desired weather are useful criteria for a vacation planning. Unfortunately, it turns out that those combinations are as of yet fairly underutilized among travel websites. I recently came across World Reviewer. They present weather data by month using an intuitive google maps mashup on their World weather page.

They do have other interesting features on their site, but the world weather visualization really stood out to me. I think, major travel websites will probably do well including similar features as additional travel planning tools.

I was recently in a similar predicament as Simon describes in No “Geodreieck” in the UK?, the ARISTO brand. I have not been able to find the mentioned tool locally, nor at the usual online locations here in the states.

Very surprising.

It actually wasn’t easy to find a German office supplies online store that ships worldwide either. Klammeraffe24.de appears to be the solution. Let’s see how long delivery will take.

Update: They arrived on July 25.

I applied and received an invite for startup school, but eventually decided against making the trip down to Palo Alto. There has just been too much going on lately.

This is very convenient though: There is a live video feed available. Very cool.

It is official now. Sphere has been acquired by AOL. There is additional coverage over on Techmeme.

This is great news and I am very happy about it.

Before I go any further, I want to specifically thank my wife Jenny for her support during the last two years. We’ve been busy. There were incidents, when work caused me to work long hours or affected evenings or weekends. She also had to (involuntary) witness a lot of ranting, brainstorming, problem solving as well as feature designing. More than once did she volunteer for late caffeine and snack runs. I know, she would categorically dismiss her role in this, but I am blown away by the amount of patience she is able to muster. So, seriously: Thank you, Jenny!

It has been a pretty exciting ride and it looks like it will continue to be that way. Yes, great people, lots of interesting problems to solve, fun things to learn, etc. - those who know me well have probably heard me talk similarly about Sphere before. There is real talent here, real energy and I don’t think this will change anytime soon.

I am looking forward to continue working with my colleagues and friends at Sphere and seeing our technology integrated at AOL.