Startups

Verbalizeit’s crowd-sourced translators are paid for their time, ensuring that travelers and business relying on the service for affordable and accessible translations will have help whenever it’s needed.

NextGreatPlace hopes to be the next great vacation club, but as in other trendy endeavors, it will have to prove that the model works.

Trover's team realized early on that people were neither planning itineraries nor connecting with frieds, so it switched to a Pinterest-like model that trades on inspiration rather than organization.

It's tough going for any social site that wants to focus on connection users with friends or even friends of friends who are traveling.

Car sharing services face their biggest challenges from gaining legitimacy from wary consumers as well as major players, such as the insurance industry. Backing from a car manufacturer goes a long way towards improving the odds on both of those.

Good competition in the space from likes of ReviewPro, TrustYou & others and then generalist social media tools, this money will surely be needed to scale/compete. Rich Barton gold dust helps too.

WeTrip hopes its focus on travel activities will set it apart in the inundated social travel market, but it will need to learn lessons from all who've gone before (and already pivoted).

In the first big travel IPO of the year, Kayak's 3.5 million shares will begin trading on Friday morning on the NASDAQ under the symbol KYAK.

Real need to manage photo bloat, lots of startups trying that, see Techcrunch's own "photo" tag for the bloat in the startupland. Jetpac is a travel industry native, and trying something similar in the vertical.

You'd think Kayak might take a more conservative approach on pricing after the Facebook swoon, but a cork-popping $1 billion valuation maybe within Kayak's grasp and it has waited so long for this day.