LIM, MARYLYN GRACE C.

OOA

            TripAdvisor is an online travel site where users can get reviews of destinations, hotels and attractions. This startup was founded by Stephen Kaufer, Langley Steinert, Nick Shanny and Thomas Palka. TripAdvisor started because Stephen Kaufer was sick and tired of searching the internet for information regarding the destination they were going.

Stephen Kaufer and his wife, Caroline, were trying to find a vacation for themselves. A travel agent would recommend them to a place, and then Stephen Kaufer will then use the internet to find out more about the place. There were lots of website that would help then book a reservation but none of it tells them whether the place was good or not. This happened not just once but twice. That’s when his wife suggested that they could just build a better search engine to find what users are looking for in travel.

They had this idea of online travel site where there are unbiased opinions about a place or a location. They didn’t immediately work on the idea; instead they put it aside first because he was still employed by that time. Then the time came that he decided that it’s time to pursue his ideas. That’s when they started TripAdvisor.

People liked their product because TripAdvisor was not a bias travel site. They were posting opinions of people whether it is good for the place or not. Sometimes, some hotels wants to sue TripAdvisor because TripAdvisor were posting reviews wherein it would put a bad shape for their hotel and that forces them to hsape up their company and deliver better service to stay in business.

There are times that the owner of the company is the one making a review of their company so their company would be in a good shape. The owner would pretend that he/she was one of the customers. TripAdvisor was able to stop this so it didn’t become a big problem.

One unique thing about this startup was that even if it’s hard to collect information about places, they still did it even if it took them a long time before they were able to get all the information they need. Somebody already told them that they’re crazy because it’s an impossibly a large task. It took them few years to finish. Now, they have an easy time in keeping current records with all the travel publication and the net result was that they had a small yet highly relevant database of travel information.

One of the turning points they had was when they got the help of Expedia. TripAdvisor wants to have ads so that they would earn extra cash. They offered Expedia service. TripAdvisor would just deep link to a reservation page on the site of Expedia and take a cut of the booking. It would be an easy job for Expedia in finding customers to book to them because TripAdvisor is already doing the job for them. TripAdvisor asked Expedia how it was going. Expedia told them it was great, so TripAdvisor started to ask payments afterwards.

Before I read this case study, I don’t know that there was an online travel site. After readingthe case study, I learned that TripAdvisor is the largest online travel community in the world. Stephen Kaufer was able to achieve his goal of being the most popular travel site in the world because of his determination and he didn’t think of quitting even if he is already facing so many problems with the company.

LIM, MARYLYN GRACE C.

OOA

            Hot or Not is a website wherein you can post a photo and have other people vote whether they are hot or not on a scale of 1 to 10. James Hong and Jim Young started Hot or Not. Before they started Hot or Not, they were already working on a website called XMethods. XMethods was the first directory of publicy available web services.

            After XMethod, they started Hot or Not. This all happened when James Hong and Jim Young were hanging out drinking, and then Jim Young mentioned that he met a girl at a party and that she was a perfect 10. After that event, that’s when James Hong thought that what if they had a service where other people could post their pictures and let other people vote them from 1 to 10.

            So they worked on their idea, before they launched it, James Hong’s dad saw the Hot or Not website and then he got addicted with it. His dad started commenting things like, “She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.” So they thought that their website would somehow be a big hit.

            After launching it with their own pictures, James Hong started emailed it to his friends. After that, he got 40000 hits that same day. I think that was great for just a day and it was just the first day of the website. James Hong also tried to spread it to random guy outside. After a while, more and more hits are coming in from different people.

            One of the problems they encountered was getting rid of the huge bandwidth caused by the pictures. So they tried to use Yahoo Geocities to serve the images and reduce the bandwidth that cost them $150K/yr. Another problem they encountered was their interview with Salon.com. Jim Young needed a server for XMethods so they decided to grab a 400 MHz Celeron box, drove it back to Berkely and plugged it into a corner in Jim’s office concealing it under a pile of books. Around 5am, they already had the site back on and just in time to withstand the traffic from the Salon article.

            After those two problems, Hot or Not was still surviving, but the site was still slow. So they were searching for solutions for running it on a managed server. They were able to talked to Rackspace into a deal where Hot or Not would host it for free and use Hot or Not as a poster child to prove their ability to scale and handle load.

            One more problem they encountered was about the naked photos on their site. Hot or Not asked help from the founder of Double Click. Unfortunately, the first image that the Double Click guy saw was a picture of a naked woman. Double Click won’t help Hot or Notunless they are proven not guilty. So they build the moderation system in order to get advertising.

            The system they developed to prevent these naked pictures was the “Meet Me” system. This is also a double-match verification way of linking two people. Then they started charging $6/month for using the system and they discovered that people would pay for it as a dating service.

            For me, Hot or Not is a website that can be visited for people who are bored in the internet. They could use it for fun. I think it’s a cool website too because there are a lot of people posting photos in it and many people are rating it. One thing I learned is that, nothing goes according to plan. So there’s no use of planning because in the middle of the process, your plan might change.