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Travelomy is a next-generation travel guide that packs features based on rich content, geo-location and social media in a way that provides practical, useful information to a traveller.

Travelomy is product developed by Ciafo, which is a technology startup based out of Bangalore,  Co-founded by Gurjit Sidhu and Amarpreet Kalkat in April 2010. Both Sidhu and Kalkat have spent the last 10 years building internet products at some of the most admired companies, earlier having graduated from IIM Calcutta and IIM Kozhikode

Travelomy has rich content (currently delivered through 6000+ photos and videos) virtually brings places alive for the traveller even before getting there, geo-location coordinates for all places (currently ~5000) and the user himself ensure that he always knows what exactly is around him, and what is the best way to reach there.

The social media integration enables the traveller to seek and share latest information over the social streams, thereby making sure that he is never out of touch with his social graph.  For the more outdoorsy or adventurous traveller, Travelomy provides activities, where rich information like dynamic route maps, itinerary, gear, tools, expertise level is put together for things like trekking, biking, rock climbing, river rafting etc.

South Asia is the first step for Travelomy and an opportunity to validate its unique concept; it would gradually be expanding globally over the next few quarters.

How Travelomy is different:

While online travel guides have existed for long, Travelomy aims to challenge the status-quo by virtue of the way it leverages web 2.0 technologies to provide simlified travel information. It focuses on four key aspects – rich content, geo-location, social media and activities; and uses them effectively to build a truly valuable information source for the user.

Travelomy also differentiates itself in the way it collects and presents information. Almost all of the content on Travelomy is crowdsourced in a wiki format and can be updated by any user who is signed-in.

Travelomy competes with prominent players like MustseeIndia, TripAdvisor, WikiTravel, LonelyPlanet.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Rediff invests undisclosed amount in Imere,  Imere is a free software platform that bring location awareness to applications and provides a host of comprehensive geospatial features for cutting edge mobile and internet location based service.

Imere main features include -

Geo Location - Find user’s location on mobile without GPS devices. Imere technology translates cell and WiFi ID to geographic locations. Built with proprietary algorithms, it gives  higher accuracy than any other GPS alternates in the market today.

Push Ads - Imere can be integrated with leading Ad servers to push location relevant ads, Directly to the user’s mobile devices.

POI - Point of interest lookup is a feature that helps you get the nearest geographic points of interest based on categories.