Web 3.0 & Group Travel: Groople CEO Mike Stacy (Part 5)

SM: Please describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? It seems like you’ve had a founder transition, and the company has already burnt a lot of capital. These are indications of problems with the team, normally. MS: Yes, we’ve had some problems, but they were not with Founder transition.

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Web 3.0 & Group Travel: Groople CEO Mike Stacy (Part 4)

SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company? MS: The early stages of the company were funded by an Angel and subsequent capital has been raised through VC’s. The first 2 rounds (Angel and Series A) were raised by the Founder, a total of $8.2 Million. I raised 2 rounds. One within

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Web 3.0 & Group Travel: Groople CEO Mike Stacy (Part 3)

SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? MS: In 2007 the groups and meetings market is forecasted to be $170 B. The travel portion, $92B. (Source: Phocus Wright) SM: What are your top target segments? MS: Small to Medium size companies (we also get business from Fortune 500 companies), Sports Teams,

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Web 3.0 & Group Travel: Groople CEO Mike Stacy (Part 2)

SM: Where did you get the idea for Groople? Are you an avid traveler? Why group travel? MS: I did not come up with the idea of group travel. That distinction would go to our founder who is now off creating another start up combining culinary experiences and travel. What attracted me to this opportunity

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Heritage Hotels in India

Besides Real Estate, the Hotel industry is also booming in India. I have always felt, Heritage Hotels are a very good way to preserve and restore old architecture, as well as leverage them. India already has a heritage of doing this in Rajasthan and many other places. I would like to see this tradition continued

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Turn Logic into Magic (1)

By Dominique Trempont, Guest Author Do brand and design matter? What is a brand, after all? Why has brand become so important these days? Why is it so difficult to build? How does brand relate to design? Ryan Air was launched in Europe 6-7 years ago to reinvent the airline travel experience.

Monetizing Blogs via Ad Networks

We have spent a few weeks discussing online advertising and ad networks with the CEO of Adify. In this post, let’s take a look at how blogs would be able to leverage quality ad networks. Today, the notion of ‘A-List’ bloggers depends on 2 things: (a) Traffic (b) Content. Often, you find blogs with high

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Web 3.0 and Priceline

We have been discussing the online travel industry and have covered Yahoo! Travel, TripAdvisor, Travelocity, Orbitz and Expedia from a Web 3.0 perspective earlier. Here we will take a look at Priceline’s offering. Priceline founded in 1997 is an online travel agency headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut. The site provides a wide array of travel services

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