Tripit

I don’t get caught up in every cool new business idea as I often did during the dot com hey day which is a shame as there are probably more good ideas now than there were then. Still, several good ideas make it through and Tripit is one that recently caught my attention. As someone used to traveling extensively for business and pleasure I’ve had the fortune of randomly running into people I know in locations from from home but the idea of knowing when you are going to be close to someone due to travel schedules can make the process of traveling a bit more of a pleasure knowing you can take in dinner or catch lunch with a friend.

Enter Tripit. The service works by simply setting up your account and then when you book travel, such as with an airlines, you just send the same confirmation e-mail to Tripit that you receive and their system will parse the information and add it to your Tripit calendar which can also be syndicated to another application such as to your Google Calendar. The first time I sent an itinirary in I was surprised at how quickly and accurately everything showed up. Next, Tripit will compare your travel itinirary to people with whom you choose to share your information and let you know when you will be in close proximity to someone else, either because they live there or because of their travel.

I love Tripit on two fronts. One, the ease of getting my travle schedule into my calendar which I previously had to manually type in from whatever obscure form it was sent and the ability to know whhen I’m close to other people I know who are also traveling.

I’m not sure how Tripit will fare (har har) as a standalone business but they seem like a likely acquisition target or would do well to license or otherwise sell their technology to the big travel sites by creating an integration point between them. Hopefully they have a patent or other protection on their idea as the idea would not be difficult to replicate.