We’re finally going into a private beta and are excited to show you what we’ve built so far!

I’m happy to say, “The Eagle has finally landed!” Over the next few days we’ll be sending out invites for all of you who signed up for the beta. Once you get your invite, you can sign up and get your profile location. (livemyjourney.com/username)

If you haven’t signed up yet, go to http://www.livemyjourney.com and sign up to get your invite now!

Here are some things you can do with Live My Journey:

 Discover your destination

• Explore cities by using our visual city guides and combining it with travel experiences that people have posted. In our guides, we provide you with what to see, what’s offbeat, things to do, where to drink, where to stay, local deals and side trips. Instead of sourcing data from other sites, our team of travel writers scour through the cities and write these guides to bring you only the best experiences for the city you’re visiting. We promise not to show you 1,000 things to do in a city… Just the best!

Plan a Trip

• Create your own free trip guides from all the content that we provide for your destination. You can add all the content we have on our website to a travel planner and create your own personalized and memorable trip.  Save your custom trip guide as a PDF file and bring it with you on phone, email or just print it out. If you’re traveling with friends, you can add them to your planner so that they can help you plan your trip.

Share your travel experiences

• When you share your travels with your friends and other travelers, we make your profile into a beautiful mosaic for you to showcase your travels to others. Also, other people can see your experiences and get inspiration for their own trips. We call them journeys and footprints. Footprints are your own photos of experiences in a city.  For anywhere you’ve been, you can create a “Journey,” which is a collection of your footprints for that place.

Travel on!

It’s been on the cards for a long time. Long overdue but in the last couple of years, we’ve seen dozens of travel startups popping up and trying to take the pain out of planning your trip. Some, like Hipmunk and Airbnb, have been a much needed breath of fresh air in the travel booking ecosystem. Sadly, most of them have not really added much value.

Let’s step back and see what caused this sudden surge and why it was long overdue. The the travel industry had been so stagnant for the past decade with no real innovation coming from within it. The major players had gotten too comfortable with providing their users with same old sugar-coated crap. All of them offered some sort of gimmick to get you to use their booking system but that’s all it was. Just a booking system. They didn’t really care what you did once you got to your destination, just how you got there and where you stayed because that’s where the money was.

In the last few years, travel has really taken on off… especially with the cultural “gaps” closing at such an exponential rate because of globalization. With the convergence of these factors, we’ve seen new innovative thinking coming through because that is the best way to knock on the established travel site’s doors and say “Watch Out! Things are going to change now”. Sadly, the travel GDS (Global Distribution System) is still extremely lame, slow and expensive because there are just a few dominant players and very few challengers.

The travel startups that have been sprouting in the last couple of years understand this, so most of them don’t touch tackling the booking ecosystem with a ten-foot pole. Most of them are trying to harness the power of “social”, which is the buzz-word these days. They been trying to build systems where you can get advice from your friends who have been where you’ve been or figuring in check-ins to somehow show you where your friends have been. There-in lies a gap. What if none or just a few of your friends have been to the place you’re planning to visit?

It might just be me but that does not seem like it would make anyone’s life easier. The probability that there would be more than a few people that have been to where you’re going is quite low, especially when you figure in international travel. Even if they have, why wouldn’t you ask them on Facebook yourself? After all, all these sites are using data from either Facebook, Foursquare etc.

Now, in the last couple of months, we’ve seen many of these travel startups pivot and head towards the Pinterest model. Pinterest has introduced the tech world to a lesson in great user interface. The biggest advantage of this interface is that it makes consumption of enormous amounts of content so easy. You could scroll through, literally, hundreds of photos within a minute and still be able to point out all the ones that interest you. That is something that could be very useful in travel and gets most travel entrepreneurs saying, “Ah! Why didn’t I think of this!”

While a lot of these travel startups are now using this data consumption interface, there are doing exactly what Pinterest does. The question then arises that why wouldn’t someone just stay on Pinterest, as they too have a travel category. They are not providing anything that is of additional value. How are they setting themselves apart and how is it they plan to be successful with their pivot this time around?

I’m not going to pretend and say that Live My Journey has not included the Pinterest interface, but we are going beyond it. Think Lonely Planet meets Pinterest. It’s not just a place to “collect and share travel photos”. We do encourage sharing so that other travelers can also get inspired by your experiences but we’re also making city guides that are more “today” and have an actual travel planner. Our guides don’t to have been written by a 60-year-old a few decades ago. We’re re-writing how to make travel guides and use current technology to make them better. We don’t have just a “board” to collect, it’s an actual travel planner. The type that will help you plan and organize your trip, alone or with your friends. Our team of travel writers have scoured through cities and found the best places to see, eat, drink… And even a lot of offbeat places and sidetrips you could take during your stay.

We’re doing something that’s hard but we’re focused on quality over quantity. We promise not to give you 100,000 things to see or do in a city but the ones we give you are the ones you will want to see or do. We promise to make it as easy as possible to plan and organize your trip and make the whole experience not a pain in the ass.

If you’d like to see what we’ve built so far, get in touch with us and we would love to give you a tour through our site and hear how we can make it even better!

Coming Soon….