Good real estate is all about the location and thanks to new interactive maps launched by hotelicopter.com, you can be sure your hotel is exactly where you want it to be.

Looking for a hotel near the city center? Need a hotel on the beach? No problem. You can be sure that when you book a hotel you’re getting a room in the exact location you’re seeking.

hotelicopter’s hotel search maps allow travelers to pinpoint hotels in specific locations. To find hotels near a certain address, simply type in the address and the new interactive hotel map will bring up hotels close to your search criteria. Want a Boston hotel in Back Bay so you’re close to shopping on Newbury Street? Need a Chicago hotel in Wrigleyville to ensure you’re only steps from the game at Wrigley Park?  Neighborhoods appear directly on the map, making it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for.

“This is another big step toward empowering travelers to find the perfect hotel deal,” said Adam Healey, hotelicopter`s Co-founder and CEO. “If you are like me and book hotels based on location, this map will be an invaluable tool
for you,” Healey continued. “I believe hotelicopter now has the best mapping functionality of any hotel booking site, and we`re just getting started.”

The interactive map allows you to see the hotel name, star and user rating, and average rates. Take control over your hotel search with the new interactive hotel map, and be confident you’re staying exactly where you want to be.

Are you paying too much for your hotel room? The short answer is, 100% absolutely, positively, unequivocally, most definitely yes. Need me to be more clear? If you are like most travelers and only shop at one of the leading online travel sites you are probably paying too much.

Yes, it’s true that Expedia or Travelocity may offer the best rate for a specific hotel in a specific destination. However, my point is, if you do not comparison shop, you won’t know if you are getting the best rate possible. Don’t get me wrong, I love Travelocity and Expedia and I often book travel through those sites, but if you were buying a car would you only go to one dealership? Let me answer that for you. No, you wouldn’t and that’s because you know you save money when you create competition. The same holds true for hotel rooms.

Don’t feel ripped off because visiting only one travel booking site before buying travel products is typical behavior. Folks become loyal to that one site or may not know that other options exist. However, recent data released by hotelicopter.com (yes, that’s us —  the leading hotel search engine) shows that if you book your Thanksgiving holiday hotels at one of those sites, you will pay on average 23% more than if you comparison shop through a hotel search engine (shameless plug for hotelicopter.com here).

Let me put it another way. If you are planning to spend 4 nights in a NYC hotel this Thanksgiving and only seek rates through one leading online travel booking site, you will pay on average $62 more per night ($248 for a 4 night stay) than what you would find by comparing rates across up to 30 different sites.

This example is but one of many cities we checked. Here are some other savings you could experience for Thanksgiving week:

- Los Angeles hotels: save $37 per night (30%)

- San Francisco hotels: save $32 per night (28%)

- New York hotels: save $62 per night (23%)

- Chicago hotels: save $39 per night (22%)

We at hotelicopter looked at hotel rates in dozens of different cities found on the leading booking sites and compared them to the rates found on hotelicopter. To be honest, I was a little surprised at what we found. I knew searching equals saving, I just never realized it was this pronounced.

The news gets better too. We found the same pattern holds true for Christmas break as well. In NYC alone, you could save, on average, a whopping $86 per night (36%!) off the rates found on one leading booking site. That’s almost a $350 savings for a four night stay. What’s the moral to this story? hotelicopter.com not only helps you find the perfect hotel for you for less, but we can also help you save money to help pay for all those holiday gifts.

Now keep in mind that hotel rates constantly fluctuate so you may find slightly different results. But the underlying principle remains the same. You will save money by comparison shopping for hotels. I’m talking about the 5-star see and be seen properties such as Le Parker Meridien in NYC, to the hip and cool properties like Hotel Indigo in Chicago, to budget properties such as the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco. No matter what you are looking for, you can find better rates if you shop around. Working with over 30 sites, hotelicopter lets you compare the rates for over 150,000 hotels across the world instantly so you can feel more confident that you are purchasing your hotel room from the site with the best price available.

Don’t settle for the first rate you see. Let sites like hotelicopter do the work for you. Search equals save. It’s a simple equation that can really add up for you. Safe travels.

- Carl Schwartz :: hotelicopter.com

The new hotelicopter review platform is now live! Our new system lets you:

- post your reviews to your facebook news feed
- review a hotel from any place hotels appear on our site
- see when your Facebook friends have reviewed hotels in your search results

If you want to start rating hotels on hotelicopter, simply conduct a search from our home page and click “Add Rating” on the hotel you wish to review.

We are the first major travel site to provide full integration with Facebook for sharing hotel reviews.

We believe our new hotel review platform will make it even easier to use hotelicopter to find the perfect hotel at the best available price!

If you’re one of our original users from the VibeAgent days, you’ll be receiving an email shortly with a link to your account where you’ll find all your old hotel reviews available in our new format!

You can read our official press release here: hotel ratings live on hotelicopter.

The following is the story of how hotelicopter punk’d the Internet for fame and profit.

I’ve just returned from the EyeforTravel Marketing Conference in Miami, where I presented The Anatomy of a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign (the story behind our new brand launch) to many of the leading marketers in our industry. I was pleased to see that the new brand for our hotel search engine, launched a month earlier for only $3,000, had about 70% brand recognition within the audience.

In case you missed it, we launched a viral marketing campaign on March 27th based on a fictional flying hotel. You can still view the April Fool’s Day web site here and the video here.

As many of you already know, we decided to change our name and our brand because VibeAgent (our previous name) did not accurately represent our new positioning as a hotel search engine. We were looking for a new brand that a) related to hotels; b) was fun and social; c) was memorable; and d) provided us some SEO lift for the word “hotel”.

So after much brainstorming, we decided on hotelicopter. The name clearly relates to hotels, is fun, memorable, and gives the Google bots some red meat to chew on.

Our newly rebranded and redesigned site is the first major travel site to utilize Facebook Connect as its user system. This means that users can create an account on hotelicopter simply using their Facebook account credentials and instantly have their Facebook and hotelicopter accounts linked to each other. No need to recreate your social network either - it travels with you from Facebook to hotelicopter. We’ve also integrated TripAdvisor hotel reviews and many improvements to the user flow and feature set on our new site.

As we were scheduled to launch hotelicopter.com April 8th, we found ourselves in the fortunate position of launching a new brand based on a fictional flying hotel right after April Fool’s Day. Our launch campaign practically created itself: we would bring a flying hotel to life as an April Fool’s Day prank to build pre-launch buzz and drive inbound links to our new domain name. The Hotelicopter was born.

Mil-V12

The largest helicopter in the world is the Mil-V12, a Russian-made vehicle created in the 1950’s of which only two were ever made. If we were going to create a plausible flying hotel it had to be big. The Mil-V12 provided the perfect inspiration. We simply added an extra floor to house the Hotelicopter’s 18 luxurious rooms, yoga studio, art gallery, and koi pond - and four GE turbo-thrusters to provide the power necessary to lift and transport the extra weight.

The Hotelicopter

Once we had an idea of what our flying hotel would look like, we turned to the talented designers at PerspectX to create a 3D model of the Hotelicopter and make it come to life, and the equally talented Aidan Keith-Hynes at Starlight Productions to do the post-production work on the raw footage. We called Yotel, the English-based airport hotel chain, and asked if we could have permission to publish photos of their hotel rooms on our site and credit them with designing the interior of the Hotelicopter, and they agreed. We put a web site together in-house using a free WordPress template, and created a press release of Hotelicopter’s launch that was downloadable from the site (we did not, however, push our fictitious press release out over the wires, as we felt that would be crossing an ethical boundary). With a web site, photos, video, and a press release, we were armed with the content we needed to launch our campaign.

The next step was to build out the distribution network. This consisted of setting up accounts with the usual suspects - YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter - and providing visitors to our April Fool’s Day web site easy links to watch our video, join our fan page, and follow us in the twittersphere. We complemented these three communities by posting our high resolution video on Vimeo and posting our Hotelicopter photos on Flickr.

With the content and distribution networks in place, it was time to strike the match. That’s when the social news and bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit came in. Each of these channels provided us access to unique audiences of early adopters, or to coin Malcolm Gladwell’s terms from The Tipping Point: Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople.

With this campaign, our hook was simple: “Wow, check out the world’s first flying hotel!” Within a few hours of posting a few hooks, we caught our first big fish.

Measuring Campaign Buzz

Gizmodo, the top ten blog focused on consumer technology, posted at 6:20pm on Friday, March 27th about the Hotelicopter after being tipped off by a loyal reader (Kyle Redinger, the owner of the media site Cvillain - thanks Kyle!), and mayhem ensued. We had decided to host our April Fool’s Day web site at GoDaddy under a basic account, and our site was quickly brought to its knees from the ensuing traffic. We quickly upgraded our account to handle the extra load, but for several hours people had a hard time reaching our web site to learn more about the world’s first flying hotel. In hindsight, this may simply have contributed to the buzz - 130 people posted comments to the Gizmodo blog entry, with the general gist of the conversation revolving around the questionable veracity of this new vehicle.

Once Gizmodo posted their story, hundreds of amateur bloggers had an interesting story to post about and the visual candy to support it, and inbound links to www.hotelicopter.com started piling up. This grassroots momentum kept site traffic and buzz going at a steady rate for the next three days, catalyzed by celebrity tweets from David Pogue of The New York Times and Guy Kawasaki of AllTop.com and the perennial Internet conference circuit. Gizmodo’s post was followed up three days later, on March 30th, by sister site Engadget, the third most heavily-trafficked blog online. Again, the post was fairly straightforward, discussing the Hotelicopter as if it were real, albeit somewhat aerodynamically ill-conceived.

But this time, only two days before April Fool’s Day, readers dug a little deeper into the story and started calling Engadget out in the comments section for getting “punk’d” by The Hotelicopter. In a surprising move, Engadget actually pulled the post completely from their web site that night, most likely prompted by Gizmodo’s retraction post earlier in the day entitled The Hotelicopter Outed as a Fake. And Wired magazine posted an uppity blog post entitled Hotelicopter Hoax Flies Over Bloggers’ Heads - ironically it turned out - about how lame the other big blogs were to get punk’d by The Hotelicopter, even though they themselves incorrectly credited the source of the hoax and botched their fact-checking about the actual Russian Mil-V12 helicopter (which they were quickly taken to task for by their readers in the comments section).

Web Site Page Views

However, the story was far from dead. While Gizmodo, Wired and Boing-Boing were declaring The Hotelicopter a sham and incorrectly crediting Yotel with a “brilliant hoax,” plenty of people - the vast majority in fact - still believed The Hotelicopter to be real, discovering it on our web site, an amateur blog, or YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, or one of the many social bookmarking and news sites that were helping spread the word about our flying hotel. During all this we were tickled pink, as you can probably imagine, as the goal of our campaign was to generate buzz and inbound links to our site, and the growing controversy about the veracity of our flying concoction was helping drive both beyond our wildest expectations.

Over this period of time, our YouTube video became the most popular video in the Travel category, and ultimately one of the 25 most-viewed videos for the week. Another thing that truly amazed us during this time was the geographic distribution of our site traffic. In the four days between our site launch and April Fool’s Day, the top five cities driving traffic to our site were New York, London, Moscow, Amsterdam, and Budapest. The Russians were eating it up! We weren’t sure if they were confused as hell or laughing their asses off.

Between Engadget’s post and April Fool’s Day we were averaging between 4,000 and 8,000 visits, and about 20 to 40 tweets, an hour. And except for a miniscule pay-per-click advertising campaign placed on Facebook, this was a completely viral campaign. It was being driven entirely by the online community.

Geographic Distribution of Web Traffic

On Wednesday, April 1st, our campaign reached its climax. We woke up that morning to a big article in The Telegraph, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK: Millions of web users fall for hotelicopter April Fool. The Huffington Post, the most heavily-trafficked blog online, featured us in their post about Best April Fool’s Day Pranks and linked to our video. Ryan Seacrest and Kanye West featured us on their personal blogs. We were featured on Daily Candy’s web site and in their popular email newsletter. We were even called by The Today Show the evening before and told we were going to be featured on their April Fool’s Day segment, but were ultimately bumped by the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s choice of a birthday gift to the Queen of England (an iPod, of course).

On April 1st, 300,000 people visited our site, and over 150,000 watched our video on YouTube. Countless more learned about The Hotelicopter from another site or a friend that had read about it online. As the day came to a close, we moved the April Fool’s Day site from www.hotelicopter.com into the subdirectory aprilfools.hotelicopter.com, and launched the hotelicopter splash screen in its place. We wanted to continue the sense of mystery surrounding hotelicopter, and leverage all the buzz towards the launch of our new hotel search engine on April 8th. So we created a countdown on the page, and directed people to sign up via Facebook, twitter, or email to be notified with the “real” hotelicopter went live.

hotelicopter splash screen

While traffic and buzz died down considerably after April 1st, there was still a low rumbling in the blogosphere and twitterverse about The Hotelicopter, and some discussion as to what it could be if it wasn’t a flying hotel. In retrospect, we might have been even better served if we had been able to launch our hotel search engine on April 2nd, but our technology team was working miracles as it was to accelerate our launch forward a week from our previous plans, and it simply wasn’t possible. That being said, we continued to attract those inbound links that are ever so important in building page rank on search engines, and we now had a secret we couldn’t wait to share with the world.

On April 8th, hotelicopter (the search engine) went live, and was immediately picked up by TechCrunch - One Brilliant Hoax Later, Hotelicopter Joins the Hotel Aggregation Fray and CNet - Hotelicopter is Real, Though Simply A Hotel Search Engine. Site traffic was comparable to that for April 1st. And when Google finally assigned us a Page Rank of 6 at the end of May (VibeAgent had been a 5), we knew our objective had been fulfilled. In the final accounting, our viral campaign generated 1.1 million page views, 500,000 video views, lots of great buzz and media coverage, a solid page rank for a brand new domain, new friends and followers, and perhaps most importantly of all, a great story to share with all of you that hopefully brings a smile to your face.

In a bit of a footnote to this story, the best reporting on our fictitious flying hotel was found on Snopes.com, the site that determines the veracity of all things. On April 23rd, they came out with the verdict on The Hotelicopter with this lead-in:

Some April Fool’s pranks are so good they continue to circulate and ensnare the unsuspecting long after April 1 has come and gone. The Hotelicopter hoax is another such example.

So with this blog post, I hope we can finally put this prank to bed. We continue to get emails from journalists and travel enthusiasts, primarily from the Middle East, Asia, and South America where they don’t celebrate April Fools Day, asking about The Hotelicopter and how they can book a flight or feature it in their luxury magazine. My answer to all of you out there still looking for a flying hotel is this: you might just find one if you search long and hard enough on www.hotelicopter.com, our hotel search engine…

Hello everyone! Chris Konizer here. I’m the Product Manager at VibeAgent.

The development team has been hard at work the past few weeks, and I’m excited to announce that we have released two brand spankin’ new features on the VibeAgent site - ThumbsUp/ThumbsDown and MetaRatings.

At VibeAgent, we are all about saving you time and money by taking the work out of researching where to stay for your next trip, and showing you where to book your hotel for the best available price. Our search engine features the biggest selection of hotel rooms in the world. So, in addition to offering our users the ability to compare prices and travel deals from over 30 partners, we figured, “why not give folks the ability to see aggregate rating information as well?” Then we thought, “how about if we let our users create their own short list of preferred hotels from their search results, so they can just compare the ones they like!” And then we thought, “let’s get a pizza!” And so we did. And then we got back to work, and came up with MetaRatings and ThumbsUp/ThumbsDown - which are all about providing valuable intelligence to hotel and travel information to help our users (that’s you!) make informed booking decisions.

ThumbsUp/ThumbsDown

When you do a search on VibeAgent.com, you’ll notice some new icons on the Hotel Summary Card. We affectionately refer to these icons as Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down (even though there are no thumbs to be seen). This feature provides our users with a quick and easy way to mark preferred (ThumbsUp) hotels for review, and remove unwanted (ThumbsDown) hotels from the search result listing. Here’s a quick walk through of the feature (although it’s much more exciting if you try it yourself).

Mark A Preferred Hotel ThumbsUp

Clicking the check-mark on the hotel card marks the hotel as preferred. This is an easy way to keep track of the hotels, resorts, and hotel deals in the list that appeal to you. Now, when you’re searching for that perfect cheap hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, you can narrow down your results to 6 or 7 for easier comparison.

Remove a hotel from the list ThumbsDown

Clicking the “X” will remove a hotel that doesn’t tickle your fancy from your search results. Don’t worry though, the new tabs at the top automagically update and keep track of the hotels you remove from the list. You can review, compare, and edit each list to help you find (and book) your perfect hotel.

MetaRatings

Meta WHAT? MetaRatings!

As you may have figured out, we’re kinda nutty for hotel information around here. So we get excited when we can pull together information to help people make informed decisions about their hotel choice. So in keeping with our model of going out and searching multiple partners for pricing and availability information (MetaSearch), we are going out and collecting hotel rating information from multiple sources.

See the orange boxes? These boxes represent the average user rating for the hotel. These are ratings from people who have stayed at the hotel, and shared their opinion with VibeAgent or with one of our partner sites. We are currently aggregating ratings for close to 60,000 hotels, and we’ll be adding more ratings sources very soon.

That’s all the news for now. Stay tuned though, we’ll be launching new features (and a few surprises) very soon!

Hello VibeAgents!

I’m Lauren. I’m VibeAgent’s newest, coolest, and only intern. When I’m not hitting the books in my final semester as a history major at UVA, I’m doing my best to work some social media magic here at VibeAgent. So go for the bold and friend me - everybody likes new friends.

I come bearing exciting news: VibeAgent has just entered into two new partnerships! I spent the afternoon scoping out the web sites of our most recent collaborators, Tablet Hotels and FastBooking.com. I really liked both sites - and I’m not just saying that because they’re our partners. Here’s the need-to-know for each site:

Tablet Hotels
Tablet is an industry leader for luxury and boutique hotels. When customers are described as global nomads and Anna Sui can be purchased directly from the web site, you know you’re dealing with a certain type of consumer. Tablet caters to an educated, upscale clientele, and it caters well. Here are a few of my favorite things about Tablet:

1. The site is clever, and really well-written. It gives its users credit. The copywriter seems like an interesting person to meet up with over a glass of Merlot. It’s fun to explore.

2. A number of appealing site features differentiate the site from its competition. Tablet offers a variety of search options: searches by destination, hotel name, child-friendly amenities, “I just want to get away” escapes, local getaways, groups, and hotel deals. “Tablet10″ lists outline the top ten user-rated hotels in categories ranging from “Best Service” to “Best Design”. “TabletPlus” members receive special privileges at some hotels, including complimentary upgrades, champagne, late check-out times, and spa vouchers. But, perhaps my favorite features are hotel reviews from guest experts, who include Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi (Cuba likes the Mondrian).

3. In addition to vacations, Tablet offers its users a variety of products for purchase - and they’re interesting. Books offer behind-the-scenes insight into the world’s top new hotels, replete with hotelier, architect, and designer interviews. Music compilations are provided a-la boutique hotels which offer guests complimentary CDs. Music compilations are provided by boutique hotels themselves, offering users suggested playlists. The TabletStyle designer list reads like a who’s who of fashion: Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Versace; the list goes on. Seasoned shopaholics will also find heaven in the site’s luggage, accessory, and beauty selection.

4. But you don’t need a Christian Dior wardrobe to afford the hotels and resorts featured on Tablet. Tablet offers an incredible diversity of hotel rooms with unique location, design, atmosphere, and landscape combinations. Want a hotel that is both “hip” and offers “horseback riding”? Tablet has it. Craving a jungle landscape which offers the luxury of fishing? You’ve got it. This broad scope also extends to price ranges. Tablet offers a budget section with rates beginning below $100/night, as well as featured discounts and vacation package.

The following experience epitomizes why I like Tablet: I clicked on the tongue-in-cheek “I just want to get away” search feature, and entered the parameters “unusual landscape”, “secluded atmosphere” and “romance”, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day. The computer immediately spit back a list of properties ranging in price, and in locales exotic as Tuscany, Maldives, India, and…. Keswick Hall, twenty minutes away from my apartment. To me, that was really cool.

Fastbooking.com
On to the next! Fastbooking.com is equally cool, but in an entirely different way. It’s a provider for a different demographic. The site emphasizes its assets right up front: no online prepayment required, no booking or cancellation fees, steep discounts, an expansive list of participating hotels and user comments, and direct links to hotel websites. This direct hotel contact translates into greater accessibility, and I love that users pay nothing until arriving at the hotel. The site is very straightforward, which makes it super easy to use, and it’s really easy to find a cheap hotel. An interactive map organizes customer searches by country, region, and state, with results narrowed down by travel criteria and city or city district. Fastbooking is based out of Paris, with hotel partners extend past Europe to such faraway destinations as Cuba and China.

Individual hotel-specific pages have high clarity and ease of use, as well. Hotel pages feature contact information, photographs, descriptions, local points of interest, distances from local airports and train stations, parking, and hours. Page sidebars offer a variety of helpful information about rooms, hotel facilities and services, hotel reservations, location, customer reviews, and key points of the hotel.

I have a few favorite Fastbooking features. The site highlights hotels with high customer ratings, and generates destination-specific travel deals. It’s video-enabled, which really helps to contextualize each hotel: how big is the reception area, what does the view from a room look like, is the bathroom counter really marble, etc. The key points section of the hotel page sidebar is also fun. It outlines perks ranging from flat screen and fitness center to bathrobes and wood-burning stoves. All of these capabilities serve to create a highly-specific user understanding of each hotel property.

It’s not only the site which appears accessible and user-friendly. The team looks friendly, as well. Management seems smart and capable. The marketing team looks outgoing. The customer relations team looks nice! It’s excellent to be able to look at the “About Us” section of a website and think, “Wow, these people seem cool.”

So, that’s the news! Tablet Hotels and Fastbooking.com are the two newest associates to join our lineup of 30+ partners. We’re excited to be able to work with them because they’re awesome companies, and because we know that these partnerships will allow us to better serve you, our users, and to help you find the best hotel deals at the best hotels for you!

Talk to you soon,

Lauren

We’re announcing today that we’ve raised $3 million in Series A investment capital to support our goal of becoming the world’s leading hotel search engine. You can find the full text of the news release here.

Today VibeAgent features real-time rates and availability for 140,000 hotels and content from over 30 travel sites.

Investors participating in this round consist of a small group of prominent executives in the software, travel, and private equity industries, along with a follow-on investment from our angel and board member, Trip Davis, the CEO of TRX.

I want to thank our investors for their vote of confidence, and our entire team for their hard work in helping make this happen.

We’re very excited about our future. We’ll be making a series of exciting announcements in the weeks and months to come. Until then, we appreciate your patronage and support, and we hope you’ll continue to use VibeAgent when researching and booking a hotel online!

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about how Charlottesville, Virginia (where VibeAgent is headquartered) has many of the essential ingredients to becoming a successful breeding ground for technology startups. We’re home to Mr. Jefferson’s University, and we have lovely weather, a robust live music scene, fancy art galleries, access to world-class parks, beautiful vineyards, free polo matches on Sundays, plenty of rich and famous people, and fantastic coffee and coffee shops; basically, we’ve just got an all-around high quality of life over here.

The only challenge of building a world-class technology business in this great place I alluded to in 2007 was the fact that we needed more nerds. Specifically at VibeAgent, we need more people who understand the web and can build, market and deploy great software. I referenced Paul Graham’s fantastic essay on why Silicon Valley is so good at producing successful technology startups. My post catalyzed an even more interesting discussion over on the OpenSource Connections blog, a talented software development shop also based in Charlottesville. And in personal conversations with Daniel Strickland over at Cloudbrain, Jeff Gunther at Intalgent, Eric Pugh at OpenSource, Otavio Freire at OpenQ, and others, we’ve developed a consensus on one thing - we all want more nerds!

Well, since that post, VibeAgent has grown to 14 people, moved to shiny new offices on the beautiful downtown mall, been covered twice each in TechCrunch, USA Today, and MSNBC, been named a top up-and-coming travel site in the Washington Post and on Forbes.com, and been featured just this last week in our own local paper, the Daily Progress. We’re about to make a major financing announcement, a major partner announcement, and roll out two major software releases. (/blatant self-promotion)

But…..our biggest challenge continues to be finding good technology people, and Charlottesville still needs more nerds. We would hire five talented developers tomorrow if we could find them locally, but so far, we haven’t. And this is forcing us to consider other options for our business, including opening up an office somewhere more nerdy.

So, with a little more experience under our belts, I’d like to put forth five concrete proposals on how technology firms in Charlottesville like VibeAgent can band together to gain some critical mass and solve the #1 challenge facing our business. We love this town, and we’d rather not have to go elsewhere to satisfy our nerd quotient.

How to Strengthen the Charlottesville Technology Community

1. Create an Active Charlottesville Technology Networking Club
Real world social networking is essential to creating strong bonds and gaining critical mass. I’ve set up a group using Cloudbrain’s blastogo to form an sms network for a monthly CvilleNerd meet & greet (if you want to join the sms network and be notified of the time and location of our first event, simply text “follow cvillenerd” to 32075). The idea here is to have a monthly social event to start making more connections and strengthening the Charlottesville technology ecosystem. I’m hoping the active members of Neon Guild and Chuug will join this list, along with all of us who work in the online world here in Charlottesville, and we can start to develop some critical mass.

As this club grows organically, we can create a web site and job board, form groups on existing social networks, and provide a way for Charlottesville technology companies and technology people to get to know each other better in an informal setting. But it takes that first step, so join CvilleNerd today.

2. Develop Stronger Ties to UVA’s Engineering & Applied Sciences Schools
There are a myriad of opportunities for strengthening relationships between the local technology business community and UVA’s leading technology and applied sciences programs. Career fairs, speaking engagements, case studies, internships, school projects, and other activities help build stronger bonds between the worlds of academia and business.

The need here is for a common touch point for Charlottesville technology businesses, and a desire by the University to support the local community. The City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County can also develop programs to stimulate mutually beneficial collaboration between UVA and Charlottesville’s business community. A strong local economy provides more job opportunities for families who relocate here, and increases demand for Charlottesville’s existing businesses. We can all do more to strengthen these ties, and with the development of CvilleNerd, we will.

3. Establish More Continuing Education Options in Applied Technologies
Charlottesville employees need more continuing education options to help them stay current on new technologies, starting with training courses in programming languages such as PHP, Java, C++, and Ruby, as well as in advanced project management methodologies and tools. UVA and Piedmont have practically no curriculum options for these types of classes. With a common organizing body to aggregate demand for and promote the desire for more technology education programs, our goal should be to attract better teaching resources to both of these institutions, and/or develop our own training programs and make them accessible and affordable for our community. Just as America needs to focus on re-training our work force for the new competitive global landscape, Charlottesville needs to invest in training programs for our technology community. The economic future of our city will be driven by our ability to attract, train, and retain the knowledge workers that are increasingly the driving force behind our continued economic prosperity.

4. Actively Market Charlottesville as a Great Home for Startups
Many of you are already familiar with the Aspen vs. Austin conversation. Will Charlottesville become a community with a strong university, arts programs, and a thriving middle class - like Austin - or will it go the direction of Aspen, another city known for its beautiful surroundings and high quality of life, but that has become too expensive to support a middle class and instead caters to retirees and the superrich? The choice, put in these terms, is clear. The outcome, however, is not.

Charlottesville needs to redouble its efforts to market itself as a great place for small businesses, especially in the technology fields, and to promote policies and investments that successfully support small businesses growth. The downtown mall is a vibrant place where lunch time means bumping into colleagues from other companies and strengthening the bonds that create community. I envision a time when the mall is littered with high-tech startups tackling exciting business challenges and simultaneously supporting the local economy. These things have a tipping point, a phenomenon well documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s book of the same name. We just need to give it a little push.

5. Share Charlottesville’s Technology Startup Success Stories
When you say the words “dot-com startup” to people who have lived in Charlottesville for over 10 years they immediately recall Value America. The company actually relocated from Nevada to Charlottesville in 1998 and went public in April 1999, gaining a valuation of $2.4 billion without a dime in profits. But a little over a year later, the firm had filed for bankruptcy and quickly became a “dot-bomb.”

Those days of irresponsible excess and greed are over. Businesses today have a much higher hurdle to reach before being showered with venture capital. The markets have also become wiser, and are valuing businesses based on their fundamentals once again. A lot of the entrepreneurs that are starting businesses today actually founded businesses and raised venture capital during the bubble days (myself included) and have learned a lot from the experience. There are also significant structural improvements in the web environment that make it far easier to get a startup successfully off the ground these days. They primarily relate to the ability today to a) tap into existing revenue streams in the form of advertising networks such as Google AdSense; b) tap into existing online communities and user bases such as Facebook and MySpace; and c) roll out software and hardware infrastructure at costs approaching zero by leveraging open source software and elastic computing clouds.

So, there are many new Internet success stories out there, and we hope to be one of them. Let’s share the good news, the best practices, the key takeaways that we discover in our collective startup experiences, through face-to-face networking and aggregating our online worlds.

We here at VibeAgent look forward to supporting the development of a more robust and cohesive technology community in Charlottesville. Because, together we can build something much greater than the sum of our individual efforts.

Together, we can create a little Silicon Valley of the south.

(VibeAgent is focused on providing you the biggest selection of hotels and the best travel deals.)

As you know, VibeAgent is a hotel search engine. In our efforts to bring you the best hotel search experience available anywhere online, period, we’re happy to announce today the addition of two fantastic new partners to our site - LateRooms and GTA Hotels. Every time you conduct a search on VibeAgent, we go out and search the sites of each of our partners, and starting today, you’ll now be able to view rates and availability for all of the hotels from LateRooms and GTA Hotels on VibeAgent.com.

LateRooms.com is the UK’s leading online accommodation specialist, offering late availability deals in over 16,000 properties across the UK and Europe. Accommodation ranges from budget to luxury five star hotels, and savings of up to 70% off the normal room rate are common for a variety of independent and branded hotels.

Gtahotels.com enables travel consumers to book significantly discounted accommodation at more than 35,000 hotels in over 128 countries and 3,800 cities across Europe, Asia, Americas, Africa, the Middle East, the USA & Canada. GTA has helped over 1 million customers get the lowest hotel rates since 2000.

We’re very happy to be working with both of these fine partners and bringing their inventory directly to you, our loyal customers!

Today VibeAgent is relaunching its site as a Hotel Search Engine.

Our relaunch today is focused on making VibeAgent.com the #1 destination online to help you research and book hotels.

You’ll find the entire process of searching for a hotel room on our site greatly streamlined. We hope you’ll try it out and share this discovery with all your friends!

Entering Your Initial Search

If you’re doing a non-dated search, simply enter your location and go! If you want to further refine your search results, you can enter dates, your desired vibe, rooms/guests, even the specific hotel you are looking for or the currency in which you’d like to see rates.

You’ll find the font size for the location field larger for your viewing pleasure, and we’ve also significantly sped up our autocomplete.

We believe our new and improved calendar is the best online, anywhere, period.

Our double month view means you don’t have to scroll from month to month. You can even click on your check-in date, and then slide your mouse to your check-out date, making the date selection process super smooth. The calendar automatically closes after you’ve selected your check-out date.

Adding Your Hotel Vibe

To help you find the perfect hotel for your needs, click the button “Add Tags” to select the ambience, activities, and the type of guests the hotel is known for. You can select as few or as many tags as you want - we’ll use your requests to help filter and order your search results.

Adding Your Desired Location

Location is one of the most important criteria people use when making a hotel booking decision. VibeAgent’s unique location filter is the best in the business. For larger cities, you can choose to whittle down your search results to specific neighborhoods. You can also create a customized location filter - moving the borders of your search area wherever you want. You can even do this after you’ve gotten your initial search results and the search results will update in real time. Use this feature to narrow down your Manhattan hotel search, for example, to a specific city block.

Filtering Your Search Results

VibeAgent provides robust filters to help you narrow down your hotel search results in real-time so you can be sure you’re looking at the best hotels for your needs. These include a price filter, a star rating filter, a loyalty program filter, and an amenity filter. Do you want to stay in a hotel between $150 and $180 that is in the Hilton chain and has a pool and free breakfast? No problem! Let VibeAgent’s filters help you narrow down your hotel options accordingly; simply use your mouse to adjust the slider bars or check the boxes and your results will update instantly.


Comparing Your Rate Options

VibeAgent now parses the different room types that you can book, and shows you on the hotel’s room rates page the best rate for each room type in a summary view. Of course, to see other room rate options, you can expand each box by clicking on the “See all rates for this room type” link and the page will instantly expand to show you all of your available options. You can also filter this page by specific provider (e.g. Priceline or Hotels.com) if you only want to see rates from your favorite booking channel.

Navigating the Community Features

Finally, we’ve streamlined the main navigation on VibeAgent so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for quickly. We hope you find the new and improved VibeAgent.com site makes it even easier to find great hotels at the best available rates, and we look forward to servicing all your future hotel searches!