Ex-Yahoo’s Kango Raises $4 Million First Round For Semantic Travel Search
Palo Alto-based Kango, an aggregator of online travel info, has raised a $4 million first round from Shasta Ventures. The service uses semantic search technology to bring together travel reviews and recommendations from over 1000 sites, including blogs and community sites, allowing travelers to research their plans. Founder Yen Lee was previously GM at Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Travel. With the announcement, Kango is now entering beta status. Release.
Kango looks like a great product, and it's interesting to see that they have found a niche that's seemingly untapped in the world of travel.
Yen was one of the more brilliant managers at Yahoo that I worked with and he definitely had a grasp of real world tactics that help drive business. It'll be intersting to see what they do with their vision and if the product can live up to the release.
Now that community functionality has become accepted and common place throughout the web, how do users consume and interact with such large amounts of content. I think Kango represents a new breed of internet application in providing a means of aggregating a large pool of disparate data sources into a single, meaningful presentation. Add to that, Kango's unique understanding of the travel space and the ability to search against facets above and beyond what the initial sources provide, they may have a winner there. I've personally used it to plan trips to the Monterey area to great success.
As with all new sites though, there are a few rough edges … Even though the search algorithms they've created are amazing, the abstract presentation could use some work. And then there's the obvious limited area of coverage (I need them for my New York trip ;) ), but keep up the good work guys.
If you're looking for a site that is more than California, check out this one: http://www.professionaltravelguide.com
Found it the other day while searching for a place to stay in Connecticut and just started exploring from there. Lots of content. Rough around the edges, but oodles of content that I haven't seen anywhere else.