Uploaded by
Google on 22.07.2008
>> When we walked into the hotel it was very beautiful, very...
>> It more than lived up to the review it got on Tripadvisor.
Before booking...
>> I would recommend this hotel. The only drawback being we were on the third
floor, directly above the hotel restaurant, and our room smelled of food the whole time.
>> STEPHEN KAUFER: Tripadvisor started, you know, the idea probably came in 1999, when
I was going on vacation. I really wanted to know whether the place
I was going was any good. And, you know, my wife was the smart one in
the family and said, "You know, you can do a better job at building, literally, a better
search engine for travel."
[pause]
>> ANDY GELFOND: Tripadvisor is the largest online community to find information about
places you'd like to go. If you're planning a trip to any place, we
have not only hundreds of hotels in that place-- and we can tell you availability--
we also have thousands of reviews written by people who have actually been there.
>> CHRISTINE PETERSEN: One of the challenges we face as an online travel site is how to
display the incredible amount of data that we have to the millions of users that come
to the site every single month.
>> KAUFER: So many people in the company were fans of Google Maps already, because they
were just, sort of, clearly the best. When you looked out there, it was the fastest.
They were the most detailed. They had, even at the time, practically worldwide
coverage. Strategically, we knew we needed this sort
of top-tier map implementation.
>> GELFOND: Well, since the beginning we were always a social site, and it's been the last
few years people that people have been hooking up more with what people, you know, consider
the Facebook apps.
>> PETERSEN: Local Picks is a restaurant application, which allows you to go in and rate restaurants.
In fact, you can rate 15 of them in 60 seconds. And you can also sort, and you can see your
friends' favorites, the communities' favorites. We had 1.5 million restaurant ratings and
reviews in four months, which is four times as many as we received in seven years with
having restaurants on Tripadvisor.
>> KAUFER: The most popular application we have on the social networks is called "Cities
I Visited." The whole focus is around a map.
>> TONY SCELFO: Working with social networks in Google Maps is great, you know.
It's very easy to port. The way we've built "Cities I Visited" is
we sort of wrapped the Google Maps core functionality-- we've extended it, and just bringing into
new platforms is very, very easy.
>> GELFOND: So our first app with Google Maps went out, and we went from zero to about five
million downloads in a matter of a couple of months.
The second app went from zero to a couple of million downloads, also in a few months.
>> SCELFO: When Google Maps A.P.I. releases its new features, it's actually really nice
because backwards compatibility hasn't been an issue for us.
Taking advantage of new features has always been easy.
It's documented. There's good examples.
Y:ou can see what to use and how to use it.
>> PETERSEN: Four years ago, we were a couple of dozen people in the company building what
was to become this incredible site that we are today, with around 30 million users and
15 million reviews and opinions. So, by partnering with Google Maps it's just
allowed us to move that much more quickly, that we just simply couldn't do on our own.
>> KAUFER: Google Maps is just one of the best examples of how to take a product, make
it really easy for a developer-- or a whole company like ours-- to pull it in, not needing
back and forth phone calls with all the support developers, and the stuff that so many other
products kind of need to be successful. And it was up live on the site, actually in
production, in a couple of weeks. You can't really, as C.E.O., look for anything
better or simpler than that.
