Official Cosmotourist Blog

Over the last few weeks we have been running a Cosmostory competition and we are now happy to be able to announce the winners:
Kristen 5683 and AmberT!

They have both won airline vouchures which with any luck will inspire lots more Cosmostories! AmberT plans to put her prize towards a trip to Miami and Kristen5683 is considering a trip to Amsterdam! We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your fun, lively, personal and informative travel stories. Your Cosmostories are entertaining and provide interesting food for thought. A few examples are “Buenos Aires to lima, Peru…by Bus” by Soulchaser “My Blue Mountain Escape” by JamaicaJane, “My Puerto Galera Island Experience” by Orange Travel and “Costa Rica in the Rain” by Tamarin. Keep up the good work!

If you would like to see the entire catalogue of Cosmostories, simply go the homepage, then to the “Latest Cosmostories” and click on “more” at the bottom.

Have fun reading and adding more Cosmostories!

Your Cosmotourist Team

I’ve just met with one of the guys of the startup LAMP1701 here at the web 2.0 expo in berlin and they really have some exciting stuff going on, at least if you are interested in operating small to large web applications. Although I have agreed on not disclosing everything I have been shown, I think a few things should be OK … or?

Their main goal seems to be to increase end-to-end transparency and visibility of your web app(s) both on the operating level, ie. where are things going wrong in the software, but also on the business level.

I#ve been shown some large companies, you know them all, and their feedback on their first product mod_top is just impressive.

Now that I have also played around with mod_top a bit I can say that after only running it for about 5min we have already identified and fixed two performance bottle-necks on Cosmotourist!

Keep up the good work and let us know as soon as you have some more tools to play with!

See our press release:

In time for the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin the leisure and travel community Cosmotourist announces its valuable investors.

Cosmotourist has successfully completed its first round of financing and is now in the position to continue with the development of its internet presence www.cosmotourist.de and www.cosmotourist.com .

Among the investors are Jochen Meyer Managing Director of MediaBEAM, Dr. Ralph Werner former Managing Director of mobile.de and founder of Adshopping (www.adshopping.de ) and René Seifert media expert and owner of Level 360 in Bangalore (India).

“We are very excited by the fact that we have managed to get professionals from such diverse backgrounds on board. They will not only help us financially but will also contribute to the growth of Cosmotourist with their many years of experience and network contacts” states Fred Krauss, Managing Director of Cosmotourist at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.

The financial funds will be put towards further product development as well as increasing membership and marketing.

Web 2.0 Expo, presented by O’Reilly, is really keeping me busy these days. Having come to Berlin on Sunday night, the first day was spent having some workshops. Most interesting ones where definitely Cal Henderson’s (Flickr) Scalable Web Architectures and Kathey Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users talk. The presentation and entertainment by Kathy was better though

Today we had several quite interesting sessions. First of all Werner Vogel (CTO Amazon) announcing the availability of Amazon S3 Europe which should have quite a big impact on distributed storage for small to medium companies in Europe. Until now S3 with Amazon’s datacenters in the US was quite useless, due to latency, for us here.

Another interesting session was Google’s Patrick Chanezon presenting OpenSocial to a huge audience here in Berlin. Without having counted everyone, my feeling would be that this talk was one of the best visited ones. Unfortunately the talk didn’t really give any more insight into OpenSocial than what is already publicly known and can be seen in the Google code documentation.

If I find some time tomorrow I’ll try to write up some of the notes I have taken. There are just loads added to my notebook every day

During the early stage of our project we decided to outsource to companies outside of Europe. We just did not have enough money to finance German developers – we thought.

We were shocked when we did a benchmark mid this year against a German outsourcing company. Even though the cost per labour was much higher, the productivity, and the quality was so much better, that the overall development cost were equal.

Fred intensivley looked after our service provider and monitored also the quality of code and discussed the issues in detail. But our complaints were not taken seriously.

After the quality of our outsourcing company decreased even further and the code they delivered and which we reviewed was really messy (not scalable, difficult to maintain etc.), we decided to stop outsourcing outside the western hemisphere and to work entirely with the German Company. We looked on all topics, which did not work and proposed to the old company a decrease the still outstanding payment. We only transferred parts of the outstanding sum. We already had agreed on decreases for not delivered parts or quality issues several times before, but always without the consequence that the co-operation would stop.

Now, including the cease of our Partnership: Endless discussions with our old service provider and unfortunately without the will to compromise at all. We even were threatened: “…If by the end of this week I am not getting any feedback and finalization on payments then we are launching another methods for getting back the money and harming your business.”

We still fight for an agreement and hope that we will seperate in good faith without getting our business harmed.

Our advice for start-ups: Never outsource to companies outside your own country.
News on this will follow…

Hi Everyone!

once more we are very proud to anounce a major relaunch of both www.cosmotourist.com and www.cosmotourist.de!

Main new features:

- see connections between you, your friends and friends of your friends
- see if friends of yours have been to a specific place
- some major layout overhaul

more to come in the next days …

Hi Everyone,

we have just launched another release of cosmotourist in all languages and markets. Besides some minor bugfixes and improvements we have now added the ability to display, browse, add tags to all sorts of objects (like Hotels, cities, photos ….) on cosmotourist.

Again, as this is a first version of the tagging functionality, feedback is always welcome!

We are very proud and excited to announce our new Business Angel Dr. Christoph Röck, formerly Managing Directory at Pangora.

Dr. Röck will help us greatly through his massive experience in the online market and also financially.

As many of you might already have seen, we have now officially launched the new “myCosmos”.

Let me explain a bit what “myCosmos” is about:
We want to give you the ability to easily manage all your travel destinations, past and future, within one place. So once you have clicked on “I have been there” or “I want to go there” on a destination page, you will then see this destination nicely mapped onto a world map within your profile.Â

Hoping to get lots of feedback!

We proudly present our brand new user profile on Cosmotourist. This will allow you to manage your reviews, uploaded photos and personal settings from just one place.

You can now also see what status you have on Cosmotourist, which depends on your activity.

In the next week more features are going to follow. To give you a quick preview let me point out a few of them:

1. Messaging: Send messages to other Cosmotourists (and also receive them )
2. Friends: Get connected with your friends (or friends to come) on Cosmotourist ….

That’s all for today. I will keep you posted!