Interview: David Urmann founder Touristlink.com a Social Travel Start Up - WirelessDuniya | WirelessDuniya. I met David Urmann at a recently concluded start-up meet in Delhi and found him and his entrepreneurial journey in India quite exciting. David is the founder of a very interesting Social Travel start up in India called Touristlink . A Small brief about David Urmann After finishing his PhD, he shifted course and moved to India in 2006 where he founded GoTripIndia. He started working on Touristlink in 2011. It’s an exciting project and a completely new direction for them. One of the reasons he choose to pursue the Touristlink idea is his love for traveling and the feeling that traditional travel sites don’t fill a lot of the important gaps an avid traveler needs. David tell us about yourself and your Entrepreneurial journey so far ? I first landed in India in 2006. What is Touristlink.com all about? I first came up with the idea about 2 years ago when I went on a trek to Everest base camp.
We built Touristlink to bring travelers together with local travel providers. Tropical Cyclones and Ice Cores: Developing a Long Term Perspective. SAO/NASA ADS Physics Abstract Service · Reads History· · Translate This Page Abstract Accurate forecasts of seasonal typhoon activity in the northwestern Pacific are of critical importance to the people living in the densely populated coastal cities of east Asia.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key component of these forecasts as past observations indicate that El Niño (La Niña) events are associated with an increase (decrease) in the proportion of typhoons striking Japan, Korea and Taiwan (The Philippines and the South China Sea). The ice core-derived δ18O record from the Quelccaya ice cap (Peru) is strongly correlated (r=0.646, p<0.001, 1856-2003) with sea surface temperatures (SST) in NINO 4, a region of the western equatorial Pacific that is a sensitive recorder of ENSO.
Additionally, a direct relationship is observed between δ18O and both the mean longitude of typhoon development (r=0.59, p<.001, 1945-2003) and the number of typhoon days (r=0.59, p<.001, 1945-2003). ETD: Urmann, David. Ice Core Paleoclimatology Group Members. Travelers Social Network - Top Tourist Attractions. Travel goes Social with Touristlink. Be it the flamboyant nightlife at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, LA or a peaceful evening at Maria Luisa Park, Spain, your choices for exotic locations vary with the taste you develop over time. What if you get to connect with people who share your likings? What if you can connect with travellers from across the world, list your favourite destinations, share photos of your experiences, make recommendations, get advice from experts and also search profiles of local travel businesses for what they have on offer?
“Travelers have a very hard time booking services like tours and vacation packages online and in fact over 65% of these services are still booked on the telephone. This untapped market is just waiting for the right marketing platform to emerge,” says Dr. David Urmann, the Founder and CEO, Touristlink. Dr. The Touristlink team Touristlink offers two distribution paths for travel business to sell services. Get linked to Touristlink, here. . - Shyamal Dave and Meghna Chhabria. Touristlink brings lead-generation and social media into experiences booking platform. TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring US-based Touristlink, a web and mobile service giving travellers the chance to search and book travel experiences from agents and locals.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)? Touristlink provides a totally new way for travellers to find and book services online, especially those they have a hard time finding elsewhere on the web. Members can use our simple form to request whatever they want whether it is a “Taxi Pickup from an Airport” or a “Guided trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro”. Once a request is made it goes out to our network of travel agents and guides who can then make offers from which the member is free to choose one if he likes.
This functionality is seamlessly built into a content rich social platform where travellers can interact with each other and with local businesses. Touristlink is developed by GoTripIndia, a web development firm founded by David Urmann in 2005 which now employs over 70 IT professionals. A new breed of OTAs bet on social, can they fly? « Featured. The OTA (online travel agency) space is one of the first few e-commerce segments in India that has witnessed successful traction-building by a ‘paid’ consumer Internet business (surely there are job portals, entertainment and e-mail service providers, but then, they didn’t build their business models on getting consumers to pay online).
It is also one of the more mature segments of online business in the country with a handful of large players, such as NASDAQ-listed MakeMyTrip, as well as VC/PE-backed firms like Yatra, Cleartrip and Via. Logic would, therefore, say that it is a no-go for startups as they can’t possibly hope to innovate from the scratch what the established players have been doing for years (some of the global OTAs have also realised it after making a late entry here). But a slew of new-age entrepreneurs have germinated their startups with a tweaked business model, trying to tackle the pain points unmet by the incumbents.
TravelTriangle: Time to customise travel package. New Social Network Connects Travelers with Destinations, Experts. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Touristlink Quick Pitch: Touristlink is a social network for travelers. Genius Idea: Social platform allows travelers to meet others, discover new destinations and connect with experts. Many turn to friends and family for advice and recommendations when traveling to a new destination. But now you can find all the travel information you need through a new social network called Touristlink, which allows travelers to not only meet and connect with other travelers around the world but also get answers from experts.
By signing up for Touristlink through Facebook or on the site directly, members can create lists of their favorite destinations and share with friends, suggest new attractions for other travelers and post photos of cities they've traveled to in the past. TouristLink.com: A social travel platform. Planning a holiday online – right from looking up information about the destination you want to visit to making your hotel and travel arrangements – is quite a breeze.
While it’s no doubt easy, you still end up visiting multiple sites. TouristLink.com launched by GoTripIndia Pvt Ltd. plans to change this, by becoming a one stop destination catering to all your travel needs. The Journey US-based Dr. David Urmann and Nagpur-based Jayesh Bagde first got together in 2006 to set up a company that dealt with Internet publishing, as well as consulted in e-commerce, SEO and the travel domain. Their exposure to the travel domain made them aware of the untapped potential. Challenges While they didn’t have to struggle like other startups, with substantial funding and a team already in place, the challenge for them was to be able to create an intuitive platform to serve the needs of the people. Looking at the popularity of featured deals, they are now planning to enable real-time bookings. Trail Guide to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (0082552188542): David Urmann. 7 Ways Social Travel Sites are Engaging Users.
By David Urmann on May 22, 2012 It seems that everyday we are greeted by a host of new social networks vying to catch our attention. The travel industry is no exception and a host of sites have launched in the past several years all trying to capture the attention of the traveler and take a piece of the online travel market. Despite the dominance of the big players, such as Expedia and Priceline, several new social travel sites have been able to attract large audiences and significant outside investments in relatively quick time periods. Here is a quick look at the top 7 trends that the newest social travel sites are incorporating and a review of what the most successful sites are doing to engage users. 1. Most of the new sites launched in the past several years fall into this category and are based on the premise of trying to recommend places for you to go based on advice from your network of Facebook friends. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
How are you using social tools for travel? David Urmann. Dr. Urmann is the Founder and CEO of Salt Lake SMS India Pvt. Ltd. an outsourcing and web development firm which he started in 2005 and which now employs over 70 IT professionals. An avid traveler and a guide book writer Dr. Urmann is the founder of Touristlink.com which aims to bring travelers together with each other and with local businesses and tourism offices on the same destination oriented social platform. Prior to launching Touristlink we launched two successful travel sites; Travelaffiliatepro.com - An affiliate program for travel website owners and Hotelkhoj.com an online hotel booking portal developed exclusively for the Indian market which lists over 2000 hotels.
Prior to working on these projects I obtained a PhD in Paleoclimatolgy at Ohio State. Why We Pin It? Takeaway Lessons from Pinterest. Pinterest is now the third largest social network. It's ahead of both Linkedin and Google+, as measured by number of users, according to a new report from Experian. Its rapid success has led to a proliferation of clones. Will any of them come anywhere close to garnering the same attention? If they do, it won’t be because they just copycatted Pinterest, it will be because they understood and integrated the same formula for success. Let’s take a closer look at 6 key factors driving the success of one of today’s largest social networks: 1) Continuous Involvement – Most social networks have you create a profile and once you’re done filling out your basic sign-up data that’s literally the end of the engagement process. 2) Self Expression – On the surface Pinterest appears to be just about pining individual pictures to boards. 3) Social Feedback Loop – Pinterest creates a positive feedback loop where if you post something great it can easily go viral.
Connect: Authored by: David Urmann. David Urmann.