Posts by arielcamus:

New version of Tourist Eye

August 8th, 2011

Today, we are glad to announce very important news. In the past months we have been working very hard on the new version of Tourist Eye, which is now available for you to enjoy it. Earlier this year we sent a survey to know your opinion about Tourist Eye and the trip planning process, and from all the answers, we plot the way we wanted to follow: create an amazing tool to prepare and enjoy a trip.



The new version includes three things that we believe are fundamental and that many of you asked us through the survey and through the emails you have sent to us:

• More content: during the first year we grew a lot thanks to the collaboration of all of you. Now we want to thank such a gesture offering a much broader database, with more than 60,000 destinations and places of interest from all around the world: attractions, parks, museums, temples, restaurants, clubs, etc. We hope this new content help you discover new destinations and live great adventures.
• Trip planner: it was the most asked functionality. You wanted a tool that allows you to plan your journey day by day, being able to create a guide with the content that really interest you. We present Tourist Eye trip planner, an incredibly, fun and visual way to plan your trip. All the itinerary will be available on your iPhone or Android ready to go.
• Personalized recommendations: we believe that every traveler is unique: some of you are seeking adventure, others peace and others a romantic destination, some prefer the beach and others mountains. The new version of Tourist Eye learns from your past trips to offer new content tailored to your profile: destinations, hotels, restaurants, etc. The more you interact with Tourist Eye, the better the recommendations will be. Remember to click “I’ve been here” every time you find a city or a place you’ve been, so the recommendation engine takes it into account to offer you exclusive tips. In addition, these recommendations appear in the trip planner, along with recommendations that your friends can make to you via Twitter and Facebook when you create a new trip and share it.

We have also completely redesigned the website to make it much more intuitive, fresh and fun. We want the experience of traveling to be a fun adventure from start to finish. In the coming weeks we will be adding new features to the Trip planner and to the mobile applications, and we will publish articles on the blog explaining how to get the most out of all the features. Discover all the news here.

Thanks for your support. Thanks for sharing this year with us.

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How users describe Tourist Eye?

January 13th, 2011

This week we sent a survey to our users asking for feedback about Tourist Eye. We have already read and summarized hundreds of responses and these are the tags that reflect how you describe Tourist Eye to your family and friends.



For you, Tourist Eye is a travel guide application that works offline and it’s very useful for the information, cities and maps. We are glad you like, and as we said, we are going to use those responses to prioritize features. 2011 is going to be a great year. Let’s travel together!

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Tourist Eye in the biggest Spanish Internet Event

December 4th, 2010

We were at Evento Blog España (the biggest Spanish-speaking Blog event) on November 19-21 where many of the attendees used our iPhone and Android travel guides with unique content.

EBE is an event organized annually in Seville (Spain) to gather during a weekend the entire Spanish speaking social web. This year was held at the Hotel Barceló Renacimiento and it was attended by over 1500 people.



In collaboration with the organizers we prepared a special tour called “Tapas Tour” so that all attendees had the information of the best bars and restaurants to go for tapas in the city. In addition, we organized a contest around the Tapas Tour in which participants could win free dinners in the city.



If you are organizing an event or you want to promote any tourism-related company, please write to info [at] touristeye.com to prepare together a sponsored tour. It is a perfect opportunity to reach thousands of users across the web and mobile apps, with special content for the occasion and adapted to your brand.

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New warrrior and a dojo for Tourist Eye

December 3rd, 2010

Some weeks ago we wrote an article publishing two job offers. A month later, after having read many curriculums and done several interviews, we can say we have filled one of our open positions with a great developer.

We have the honor to add Jesús Merino (@jm_merino, alias: “Mr. Mustache”) to the team, a road warrior with many years of experience in frontend web development. Jesus was already one of the most active Tourist Eye users, what made his incorporation even sweeter. Thanks to @wiseri, which sent this job offer to Jesus. Thanks Marina!

The Android/Blackberry position is still available, if you have experience working in Android and you want to be part of the startup that is going to change the tourism sector as we know, write us at jobs[at]touristeye.com.

We are really happy with our new dojo, our new office is in the Moncloa neighborhood, in Madrid. It gives us a stable and comfortable space, with a big kitchen and central heating. What more could we ask for?

If you go to Madrid or you live here, consider you invited to our office. We have lots of food and you will leave with a small gift :) 

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Travel, a social experience: Integration with Twitter and Facebook

November 2nd, 2010

Travelling is a unique experience for everyone. We all have dreams we want to realize when we travel: meet new people, explore nature, discover great restaurants, relax from our work… we all have one thing in common: we travel with other people and we like to share our experience with those who stay at home (and make them jealous).



Tourist Eye helps tourists to share their experience on the trip journal, the check-in’s of the places you are visiting, pictures and messages you send while traveling and the possibility of adding new places from your mobile (even where you are NOT connected to the Internet).

We also want to help you make your trip a truly social experience. You are now able to plan your trip with other people and to share what you discover every day of your trip on other social networks.

Because of that, we have added the possibility of inviting other people to your trips no matter where they are: Tourist Eye, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo, Windows Live and Tuenti.

Moreover, you can also invite other friends of these social networks to join and to start enjoying the great benefits of Tourist Eye: A web & mobile travel guide that lets you plan your trips, have offline information and maps and share every detail of your experience.



Finally, we have added the ability to sign up to Tourist Eye using your Twitter account (there was already the option to sign up using your Facebook account). You can share in real-time what you discover on your trips in these two social networks.

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Tourist Eye iPhone app updated: Add new places!

August 28th, 2010

The last version of the Tourist Eye iPhone app has just been published on the App Store. On this version we have added the possibility to add new places from the mobile, even if you are travelling and you don’t have Internet! We have improved our maps to be more useful and the app now supports fast-switching and multi-tasking.

Add places from the mobile

The content from Tourist Eye is made by you, and you are the ones who discover new places and restaurants. We know it’s much harder (and it’s lazier) to add a place when you are at home (you have forgotten some details, or the name, or where it was). So we are letting you do it at the moment. Are you having dinner on a nice restaurant in Tokyo? Take a photo, fill some basic data about the restaurant and done! All your friends and the Tourist Eye community will thank you for the discoverment. As always, you don’t need to have Internet or pay roaming to do this; we take care of it!

 

Better maps

We know our maps are one of the most important things about our apps, so we are constantly improving them. We have added two new features that you will like. First, we will show you the top 10-20 markers at once. Imagine that you are in Barcelona and there are more than 200 places, it was really unusable to view all of them! Now you only see the best ones. If you zoom, you will see more and more; and if you reach the street level zoom, you will see everything. So if you have a broad view of the map, you can see really easily where are the top tourist places in Barcelona, and where are you; so you can plan better your day.



The second one is changing the marker color for the places you have already been. By doing that we want you to easily see the places you have forgotten to visit. Of course, you have to check-in and rate the place!

Fast-switching and multitasking

We have added support for the new iOS4 features. On this app it’s specially useful, because when you are travelling you are constantly looking at tourist info, checking the map, using another apps or receiving calls; so you don’t want to lose your position on your Tourist Eye app. We have also fixed some bugs, and we have improved the performance (even for iOS3).

With all the feedback we are receiving from your summer trips, we are already planning the new updates. If you have feedback or something doesn’t work, please contact us. We are working on the Android version, and we hope it’s only a matter of days; so all of you with Android 2.2 can use it properly. 

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Welcome nextstop refugees!

August 24th, 2010

Some of you may know Nextstop, a travel web company that was bought by Facebook several weeks ago. The team joined Facebook Places, and they will close the web on September 1st.

We don’t want Nextstop content to be lost, their users have added near 100.000 recommendations and thousands of places and guides. We have been working hard these last weeks to add an easy migration page for all Nextstop users so you can keep your recommendations, guides, reputation and continue your involvement in an important and growing community.

We believe that there are so much to do on the travel industry in order to really be the perfect tool for tourists. Tourist Eye is a great web & mobile social travel guide. We want to help the tourist on all their phases: Get inspired, plan your trip, share it with your friends, and discover the best places and tours on the go. It doesn’t matter where you are, you will not need to pay roaming because everything works offline on your iPhone and Android.

We are working really hard on offering tourists the best experience both on the web and on the mobile; both when they are planning and when they are travelling. There are many things to improve and we are 120% on it. We can’t wait to hear your feedback for what it’s coming in the next months!

So, welcome nextstop refugees! We hope you feel at least like home. It would be really great if you can tweet/blog/share this special migration with all your friends and with all Nextstop users. We really love many of the guides you made!

Some questions and answers:

Are you migrating all the recommendations and guides?

We are trying to migrate everything, but because of the limitations of the Nextstop API; we can’t be sure to get everything. If you contact us before September 1st we will double check on your account to migrate all your recommendations and guides.

Why can’t I see all the recommendations on my profile?

It’s hard to match Nextstop places with Tourist Eye cities; so we are publishing most of the recommendations now; and we will publish the rest of them in a few weeks.

When will the guides be ready?

We are working on a complete new and much better interface for tours and guides (web and mobile), so you will have to wait some weeks to share your guides again.

What can I do to help migrate all the guides?

Each guide belongs to a user, and this person is who has to authorize the migration process, so the best way to keep all the recommendations and guides is to tell everyone about this initiative. Help us spread the word by tweeting, posting on Facebook, sending messages to your Nextstop friends, etc.

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Featured city: Seville

August 13th, 2010

Today we’d like to feature a Spanish city full of history, traditions and the most charming people: Seville and Sevillianos.



Seville is the fourth largest city in Spain and its historic center is one of the largest in Europe. In this area you can find some great monuments and points of interest like the Giralda, the bell tower of the Cathedral of Seville, also known as Cathedral of Saint Mary. It is one of the largest churches in the world and an outstanding example of the Gothic and Baroque architectural styles.

In the historic center, we can also find Royal Alcazars of Seville, a royal palace built by the Almohades. The palace is one of the best remaining examples of “mudéjar” architecture. The upper levels of the Alcázar are still used by the royal family as the official Seville residence.

Another essential place to visit is the Gold Tower (Torre del Oro in Spanish). It is a dodecagonal military watchtower built by the Berbers in order to control access to the city via the Guadalquivir river.



If you are planning to visit Seville, there are some other places you can not miss like the General Archive of the Indies, Spain Square, the Town Hall, Palace of San Telmo, Royal Tobacco Factory and the old City Walls.

As we said at the beginning, among the great attractions of Seville we can not forget Sevillian people, for their kindness and their love for their own land. Some examples of Sevillianos are legendario (Daniel) or desevillasoy (Óscar), two of the most active users of Tourist Eye. They have ensured that Seville is one of the most complete cities in Tourist Eye. Thank you both and thanks to each person who is helping making Tourist Eye something bigger every day.

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Tourist Eye is going to Ireland!

July 31st, 2010

As part of my summer trip, I’m going to discover Ireland for the next 12 days. As you can see on the page of my trip to Ireland, we start on Dublin and then we are going to the Cork region, Kerry, Clare County, Galway, and then all the way to the north to visit County Kerry and North Ireland. It’s going to be a deep trip where we will discover the best parts of this island.



You can follow my trip, suggest me new places, restaurants and towns. I will be testing the new versions of our iPhone and Android apps, so they get ready for all of you. We are adding quite amazing stuff.

Let’s see how the weather goes, if the showers let us visit and enjoy the sights and castles!

Javier Fernandez Escribano, Cofounder of Tourist Eye

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News on Tourist Eye: Countries and maps

July 23rd, 2010

It’s been more than 15 days since we launched Tourist Eye in public. We’ve received a lot of feedback about the work behind the web and mobile apps and we have got some great ideas (thanks to our community).

We’ve been working hard optimizing the web to make our server life easier. It is an iterative process: there is always something to improve or run faster.

We have uploaded new changes on the web: we have included some minor performance improvements and the most important thing is that we have focused our work on including some interesting changes on some user interface pages.

Countries and States page

When you are looking for inspiration for your next trip we have noticed you use the continent page to find countries, states and cities. We hadn’t work a lot on those screens so we decided to work hard to make them much better. We include now four featured cities, the top 30 country cities and the states list.




Cities and places information on maps

Continent, country and city maps are great tools to discover new places of your desired destination. They allow us to find places we’d like to visit and near points of interest in a faster way. Until now, when you clicked on a place in the map a bubble with an image was shown. We have improved it to show interesting information in a really cool and practical way.



We have fixed some minor problems when loading maps on Google Chrome, so, if you continue to experience problems with that please contact us. We will release new improvements and features every week. Read the blog daily or add it to your feed reader to keep informed.

More news next week!

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