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January 20, 2014 09:47 pm GMT
HopperCEO Frederic Lalonde is bemused by the coverage of his travel startup’s “launch,” which supposedly took place this past week, according to various news stories. The company, reportedly in stealth for six years, had just now opened its doors, it was proclaimed. Not quite, says Lalonde. “The site, Hopper.com, has been live since early last spring,” he tells us, noting it has since seen millions of visitors. But around two weeks (not days) ago, the company opened up access directly from the Hopper.com homepage. But that was enough to draw people’s interest, as it turned out. The company, which was founded back 2007 and operating in stealth for some time, had been working on a “big data” solution to the challenges surrounding travel discovery. Still, it’s been more of a gradual launch, rather than a sudden opening of its doors. If you look in Google, for example, there are 1.5 million Hopper.com search results in the Google index, and the service has gotten around 2 million impressions from Google, plus over 1 million from Facebook, we’re told. “Users have been flowing through the Hopper since most of last year,” says Lalonde, discussing the site’s traffic and growth. Today, the consumer-facing travel startup founded by former Expedia engineers and backed by $22 million in venture funding, now offers site visitors who create an account access to its trip planning engine, which the company claims is powered by the “world’s largest structured database of travel information.” We first covered Hopper when the company had raised its $12 million Series B from OMERS Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, and Atlas Venture, but the company had declined to then go into much detail about the product it had in store. The founding team at the time included former Expedia engineers, with CEOFrederic Lalonde, co-founder and CTOJoost Ouwerkerk,Andr Coud, andMathieu Patenaudon board. (CMO Dena Yahya Enos, previously of Tripadvisor, has since left the company to become VP of Marketing at Carbonite, according to LinkedIn.) Why So Slow? At the core of what Hopper has been building is a large database of structured travel content. And has Hopper really been working on such a thing since 2007? Apparently so, slowly and surely. “What’s really been taking time is the data collection,” Lalonde explains. “We aggregated 2 billion webpages…we ended up realizing there was this huge amount of amazing content that was being produced on blogs.” The problem is
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/BXVjdlcUbJs/
Why Travel Startup Hopper, Founded in 2007, Took So Long To Launch
HopperCEO Frederic Lalonde is bemused by the coverage of his travel startup’s “launch,” which supposedly took place this past week, according to various news stories. The company, reportedly in stealth for six years, had just now opened its doors, it was proclaimed. Not quite, says Lalonde. “The site, Hopper.com, has been live since early last spring,” he tells us, noting it has since seen millions of visitors. But around two weeks (not days) ago, the company opened up access directly from the Hopper.com homepage. But that was enough to draw people’s interest, as it turned out. The company, which was founded back 2007 and operating in stealth for some time, had been working on a “big data” solution to the challenges surrounding travel discovery. Still, it’s been more of a gradual launch, rather than a sudden opening of its doors. If you look in Google, for example, there are 1.5 million Hopper.com search results in the Google index, and the service has gotten around 2 million impressions from Google, plus over 1 million from Facebook, we’re told. “Users have been flowing through the Hopper since most of last year,” says Lalonde, discussing the site’s traffic and growth. Today, the consumer-facing travel startup founded by former Expedia engineers and backed by $22 million in venture funding, now offers site visitors who create an account access to its trip planning engine, which the company claims is powered by the “world’s largest structured database of travel information.” We first covered Hopper when the company had raised its $12 million Series B from OMERS Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, and Atlas Venture, but the company had declined to then go into much detail about the product it had in store. The founding team at the time included former Expedia engineers, with CEOFrederic Lalonde, co-founder and CTOJoost Ouwerkerk,Andr Coud, andMathieu Patenaudon board. (CMO Dena Yahya Enos, previously of Tripadvisor, has since left the company to become VP of Marketing at Carbonite, according to LinkedIn.) Why So Slow? At the core of what Hopper has been building is a large database of structured travel content. And has Hopper really been working on such a thing since 2007? Apparently so, slowly and surely. “What’s really been taking time is the data collection,” Lalonde explains. “We aggregated 2 billion webpages…we ended up realizing there was this huge amount of amazing content that was being produced on blogs.” The problem isOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/BXVjdlcUbJs/
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