Monday, September 03, 2007

And I thought group travel was a niche...

Alarm:clock is rumour spreading that stealth mode start up Kango has raised some money from venture firm NG Ventures (ie angle Elliott Ng). What caught my eye in this deal is that it builds on the story that is forming around niche/sector focus businesses and online group travel. Kango's pitch is to help family's plan travel through organisation tools, reviews and editorial content. Site is "almost alpha" (which means somewhere between static web pages and private beta) so impossible to judge but am now officially keeping a watch on co-ordination tool sites and see if they go on to prove my theory that we are entering into a phase of industry development where consumers need help dealing with "too much information".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Tim, thanks for mentioning Kango to your readers. We're still in stealth, so not providing too much detail about what we are doing (the Alpha site is just our cover story :).

I really like your characterization of the evolution of travel. I'll add a comment to that post. In short, we believe consumers are (a) already overwhelmed with information and (b) increasingly looking to the Web for help on where to go *next*, what to do *next*, and where to stay *next*. The confluence of these two trends (phases) is exactly what we think our platform will address in a massively scalable way, far beyond than our almost alpha static web pages :). Hope we can continue this dialog when we are closer to Beta. Please sign up for the Private Beta so we can remember to offer you an invite! Thanks again!