Official Cosmotourist Blog

Following the phenomenal success of our Cosmotourist Scout competition in January we have decided to follow on with our next competition!

You may well have already noticed our new feature -Top Travel Tips on the homepage- this feature is in fact the core of our new competition. We are looking for the top travel tip for the month of February, in other words the tip that receives the most ratings from other users. 

The winner featuring on the ranking table of the homepage with the top travel tip at 0:00hrs (GMT+1) on the 1st of March will receive 400 US $!!

How to take part:

 1)  Add a travel tip by going to the Quick Links box on the left hand-side of the homepage and  selecting Add a Review.

2)  Make your travel tip as interesting and exciting as possible. Make sure that it is mapped as deeply into the hierarchy of the site as possible i.e.: not only to the relevant city or region but when possible also the hotel or attraction in question. Remember that content plays an important role in making a travel tip enjoyable. Watch your spelling and grammar to make sure that you produce as good a quality work as possible-this significantly improves the readability of your work for others.

3)   Then all you need to do is invite your friends to sign up at www.cosmotourist.com to rate your work. The more positive ratings your travel tip gets, the higher your status rises in the ranking table for the top travel tip in February. (Remember: a user can only rate your travel tip once! Any users who manipulate the rules will be disqualified from the competition.)

Have fun scaling the ranking table with your Top Travel Tip for February and who know perhaps you will be 400$’s richer by the end of the month!New Features on Cosmotourist: 1)  Add Object:  Once you reach the status of Tourist you can add your own objects to the site i.e.: attractions, hotels, youth hostels, restaurants etc. This means that you needn’t send editorial emails any longer asking for features to be added to the site when you can’t find them. This should save you a lot of time and bother.  To add a new object, simply go the city in question and click on the relevant tab Lodging, Eat & Drink or Attractions. At the bottom of the page you will find a link entitled, Didn’t find the attraction your where looking for? Please add it to Cosmotourist! Simply click here to add your new object. Before you add a new object please make sure that that it is definitely not already included on the site and be as precise as possible about the information you enter about the new object. If you don’t know the precise postcode or address you will be asked to plot the location on a map, please be as precise as you can here.

2) New Object Types: You will also see that we added new object types under the tab Lodging including: Hotels, Hostels, Camping Grounds, Condos, B&Bs, Vacation Homes and under the tab Eat & Drink including: Restaurants, Bars/Pubs, Clubs, Cafes. This again enables you to be more precise with your postings.

During Advent and the period leading up to Ephiphany we ran a competition looking for the top 3 Cosmotourist Scouts with the most subscribers to their postings. We now have our 3 King of Scouts who we would like to congratulate in celebratory fashion:

400$ go to Elizaoprisor (with 28 subscribers to her scout topic “Eastern Europe-the  good and the bad”)

250$ go to Jamaica Jane (with 33 subscribers to her scout topic”Jamaica in a Nutshell”)

80$ go to NOFXMike (with 23 subscribers to his scout topic “Exploring Germany from  a tour guide’s perspective”)

Our Scouts are an important part of the Cosmotourist concept. They make it possible for members to network with one another, sharing common interests, helpful tips and advice with one another. We are therefore thrilled with the more Scouts we get!

Many  people noticed that the ranking table changed just before the competition deadline. Unfortunately we discoverered that there were numerous fake registrations. We therefore had to sift out all false subscribers and this led to the ranking table changing to reflect only authentic sign ups.  

The Cosmotourist Team congratulates the winners and thanks all its Scouts for their interesting and exciting postings!

In der Vorweihnachtszeit bis zu Heilig drei Könige waren wir auf der Suche nach den populärsten Scouts mit den meisten Abonnenten. Nun hat die Community ihre Three Kings of the Scouts gefunden. Feierlich möchten wir daher die Krönung folgender Cosmotouristen bekanntgeben:

300 Euro gehen an Stefan („Burgen und Schlösser“)
150 Euro gehen an Morena („Kunst und Kultur in Berlin“)
50 Euro gehen an Conny N. ( „Mein London“)

Kurz vor Wettbewerbsschluss gab es eine Reihe von Mehrfachregistrierungen und Abonnements unter Fake-Profilen. Wie auch immer es im einzelnen Fall dazu kam - da es unfair und wettbewerbsverzerrend ist, haben wir unter den Top-Ten der Teilnehmer diese Eintragungen gelöscht. Dies als Erklärung zu Veränderungen in der Ranking-Liste!
Die Scouts sind ein wichtiger Bestandteil der Cosmotourist-Idee. Sie machen es möglich, sich innerhalb der Community über gemeinsame Interessen zu vernetzen und sich von befreundeten Usern gezielt mit Insidertipps versorgen zu lassen, die für das eigene Reise- und Freizeitverhalten relevant sind. Wir freuen uns daher über viele neue Scout-Aktivitäten!
Das Cosmotourist-Team gratuliert den Gewinnern und dankt allen Scouts für die interessanten und spannenden Themen!

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

In den letzten Wochen haben wir unter all denen, die unsere Seite mit Cosmostories bereichert haben, Fluggutscheine im Wert von 50 Euro verlost. Jetzt freuen wir uns, den beiden Gewinnern gratulieren zu können:

Gaiax und marcus77 !

Mit airberlin fliegen diese beiden neuen Abenteuern entgegen, von denen wir hoffentlich in vielen weiteren Cosmostories lesen werden. Gaiax: “Wo ich doch grundsätzlich NIE Glück habe!” Nie, Gaiax? Hier der Gegenbeweis! Viel Spaß auf Deinem Flug nach Helsinki, Kopenhagen, Rom oder Barcelona. Manche Entscheidungen fallen aber auch schwer…

Bei dieser Gelegenheit wollen wir der ganzen Community ganz herzlich für all die witzigen, lebhaften, persönlichen und informativen Reiseerinnerungen danken. Wir finden, die Cosmostories haben sich als Feature bestens bewährt, es macht Spaß sie zu lesen und sie scheinen zu guten Ideen anzuspornen.
Zum Beweis einige Beispiele: “Berliner Friedhöfe - deutsche Geschichte mal anders herum” von Morena, “Hamburg für Verliebte“, “Moin Quiddje” und “Entspannung für Freaks” von Amily (!), “Wintersportzirkus in Ruka/Kuusamo” von MinttuKaakao… nur immer weiter so!

Wer Lust hat, sich die gesammelten Werke anzusehen: Auf der Startseite auf “neueste Cosmostories” klicken und dann ganz unten auf “mehr“.

Viel Spaß beim Lesen wünscht

Euer 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.

Hier unsere Pressemitteilung aus Deutsch:

Zur Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin gibt die Freizeit- und Reisecommunits Cosmotourist den Einstieg erfahrener Businessangels bekannt

Cosmotourist schließt seine Erstrundenfinanzierung erfolgreich ab und sichert damit den weiteren Ausbau seines Internetangebots unter www.cosmotourist.de und www.cosmotourist.com .

Mit von der Partie sind u.a., Jochen Meyer, Geschäftsführer von MediaBEAM, Dr. Ralph Werner, ehemaliger Geschäftsführer von mobile.de und Gründer von Adshopping (www.adshopping.de) und René Seifert, Medienexperte und Eigentümer von Level 360 in Bangalore (Indien).

„Wir freuen uns sehr, dass wir Brancheninsider mit einem solchen Erfahrungsspektrum mit an Bord holen konnten. Sie werden uns nicht nur finanziell einen großen Schritt weiterbringen, sondern auch mit ihrer langjährigen Erfahrung und ihrem Brachennetzwerk zur Seite stehen”, so Fred Kraus, Geschäftsführer von Cosmotourist auf der Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.

Die Mittel dieser Finanzierungsrunde werden für eine verstärkte Produktentwicklung und für den Mitglieder- und Reichweitenaufbau eingesetzt.

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…