Wednesday night, we officially celebrated GetYourGuide’s launch at the Dozentenfoyer of ETH Zurich and announced the winners of this year’s Tour de Suisse competition. It was a very tight race, but in the end, Marina‘s “Urchiges Appenzellerland” won the price. Congratulations and have fun traveling ;-)

The complete final ranking can be found on the Tour de Suisse page. At this point we would also like to thank our sponsors Facebook, Orange, Local.ch, MySwitzerland and Travel.ch for helping to set up this unique contest. We had a great time watching these innovative contributions being submitted and really enjoyed this final evening, when we got to see the people behind the entries.

Here are some impressions of the award ceremony:

Introducing the 20 finalists, who won the popular vote

Michel receiving his prize “A Ski-Weekend at Bettmeralp” from MySwitzerland

Isabelle Banner from Local.ch (left) awards Barbara Odermatt (right) with an iPhone for her fourth place tour

Travel.ch CEO Roland Zeller awards the “Facebook Dream Holiday” to Marina

Acknowledging Tour de Suisse’s main sponsor: Facebook!

People gathering around Orange’s stand. Their slogan is our motto: Internet Everywhere ;-)

]]> http://blog.getyourguide.com/2008/11/tour-de-suisse-results/feed/ 2 http://blog.getyourguide.com/2008/09/tour-de-suisse-is-launched/ http://blog.getyourguide.com/2008/09/tour-de-suisse-is-launched/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:13:53 +0000 Johannes http://blog.getyourguide.com/?p=231 We are very proud to announce that we have launched “Tour de Suisse”, a contest seeking to find the best touristic tours and activities in Switzerland. You may find it here !

Tour de Suisse offers to everyone living in Switzerland to post innovative and original tours that allow visitors to experience the country from a different perspective than when traveling on the standard touristic paths. The contest runs until November 15th and everyone can vote on the tours through an application that we designed on Facebook.

Facebook is a terrific social community that allows users to integrate APIs on their platform and make use of the powerful social graph. In our case users may create tours and then invite their friends to vote for them using Facebook. Once a friend cast a vote, the friends’ frind will see this in his/her newsfeed and may also vote for the tour. Thus, within few cycles, a creative and convincing entry to the contest may rise to the top of the competition and win one of our amazing prizes.

On November 15th midnight, the top 20 (with most votes) will qualify for the final round. In the final round a pannel of experts decides, who will take home the prizes and who is going to win the “Tour de Suisse”.

The GetYourGuide team is very much looking forward a lot to the next 2 months and we hope that the users have as much fun participating in the contest, as we had creating it. We believe it is a great opportunity for everyone in Switzerland to cause some awareness for the beauty and the endless opportunities in the country.

Actually we’re experiencing web 2.0 globalization: a common event in Spain organized by young people found its way to Switzerland through facebook.

…next day:

the text above is really unique and cool, as Philipe wrote it on his iPhone, while having a beer in the other hand. As said above, it was extremely remarkable to see what social communities can do. Obviously many people will complain about this Facebook event and for sure there will be another “young people are much worse than 25 years ago” debate. However, to me it is more of a sign that people are actually eager to come together and celebrate, which is in itself a very positive purpose. Seeing the crowd dancing and having fun, I really couldn’t understand why so many respected officials called the attending people “brain sickos” (hahaha!). But I guess it is always fantastic, if you can complain about something in order to not have to deal with your own boring life.

In any case, we had lots of fun (and some beers) and got to talk to a bunch of different people. I would be ready for another Botellon next weekend and am definitely looking forward to see more community organized meetings in the future. Prost!

This one is for Esther:

watch?v=HJyEJtAg0ZY

Without a doubt, the highlight of this year’s famous developer conference f8 was the introduction of Facebook Connect, an API that allows third party websites to connect user accounts to Facebook and add social content to their site. One of the first well known partners to integrate Facebook Connect is Digg, a social community where users may rate news articles. In the German speaking environment Amiando, a platform where users may create events and outsource ticketing procedures. In both cases Facebook’s most important USP, the so called “social graph”, is exported to third party websites, allowing them to add rich user content to their sites. Facebook Connect goes even as far as allowing those third party websites to modify content within Facebook, such as postings at the marketplace. The obvious question then is, why should we bother as a third party website to play around with our user’s Facebook account?

In my opinion there are two key issues that are important, when evaluating whether Facebook Connect may improve a site’s user experience:

1) It is almost mandatory that the look & feel of the connected website resembles somewhat a social community. Large E-Commerce platforms are very unlikely to be affected much by Facebook Connect. As it was already the case with Facebook’s failed application beacon, people simply do not want to be too much involved in each other’s purchasing behavior, as long as it does not touch common interests. Emotional themes that many people share however, such as travel, cultural activities or news, may have stronger potential to be valuable for Connect applications. Most definitely, many companies will be very interested to lower their customer’s purchasing barrier by showing them that their friends already purchased a specific product.

2) The product that is sold should be marketable on Facebook. Although this might sound trivial, I believe that it is very important to know what products are interesting for the Facebook user base and which one’s are simply not. When you look at advertisement on Facebook today, many products are simply not well fit into the general concept on the site. As mentioned in point one, one should be very clear what form of social interaction is offered on the third party website and why integrating Facebook helps to compensate lacks of social interaction.

If you have figured out those two points however, Facebook is able to seriously add much content to your site and helps to make your users feel more at home. Facebook Connect might in the end be one of Facebook’s most important innovations, as it allows for the first time a social community to tear down the walls of isolation and integrate itself anywhere on the web.

after a longer break in the Blog, we are all back now. As you can see on the GYG website we have been coding and constructing quite a lot in the past. Currently we are recruiting guides to our plattform and try to improve our design and usability. Promotion in China has also come off the ground (you can see GetYourGuide is even translated into Chinese by now), so there is a lot of things going on.

But most important of all: Euro 2008 is only less than a week away and we are all SO excited. In fact we have programmed a little Facebook application that we think you will like. It is called Euro 2008 Your Bet and you can place bets on every game and compare your result with your friends. FUN! The golden rule is that everyone at GetYourGuide has to bet and the worst bet has to pay the beer for the next day :-)

In terms of who is going to win, I think this is all crystall clear by now. Even the Austrian railroad figured it out and they are usually quite late at getting things done…