Uptake has been acquired by Groupon! We had been watching Groupon for some time, and admire how they created a powerful new business model, assembled a world-class team, helped consumers discover deals with increasingly tailored recommendations, and saw global, record-shattering growth along the way. Today, we’re delighted to announce that Uptake is now a part of Groupon.

Before we move on to this promising new opportunity with Groupon, we’d like to look back at what we’ve built and accomplished together – our tenacious and creative team, partners, blogger community, investors, advisers, and the 75+ million travelers that trusted our sites and recommendations so that they could enjoy amazing travel experiences.

Lasting more than four years, it’s been a phenomenal journey working hard to execute on our mission: to make it fun and easy for consumers to create and enjoy their ideal vacation. Our mission was rooted in the belief that consumers didn’t want to search for hours on end, but rather preferred a more thoughtful, interactive and personal way to discover and plan their travel – for example, to find the right hotel for the romantic escape or the best activities during their kid-friendly getaway.

Uptake was early to harness the Wisdom of the Crowd for online travel research and recommendations. Since the summer of 2008, Uptake has connected travelers with recommendations, driven by their preferences and intent, and drawn from the largest online travel library. En route, we developed patent-pending technology to aggregate, analyze and recommend reviews, articles and blogs from over 30,000 sites for activities, hotels and restaurants. And because travelers could discover recommendations based on their travel companies and preferences at Uptake.com, we became the third largest U.S. travel research site, behind only TripAdvisor and Yahoo! Travel.

In 2011, we discovered our technology also allowed us to uncover and organize the most valued source of recommendations – the Knowledge of your Friends. While reading reviews is helpful, whose opinions do you trust more than friends and family who have been there previously? While Facebook’s open graph initiative will structure your friends’ future travel history, Uptake was able to determine the past 8+ years of your friends’ travel histories to identify over a thousand destinations your friends have already been – without any additional work required!

All in all, we were able to combine the Wisdom of the Crowds and the Knowledge of your Friends – something no one else in the travel space has been able to cultivate to date.

Behind all of these amazing accomplishments was a stellar team of Crud-loving, problem-solving technology geeks who love travel, and travel junkies who love technology. Our new adventure at Groupon is possible thanks to the drive, energy and talent of the entire Uptake team.

We’re excited to jump in at Groupon right away – with our attention focused there, you may notice that some of Uptake’s features will slowly wind down. We hope you’ll use Groupon to continue to explore your city and fantastic places around the world.

We can’t thank you enough for all your support over the last four years! It’s been one heck-of-a ride.

All the best,
Gene & Yen

Tuesday, February 28th in the Year of the Dragon

Co-Founders Gene Mckenna and Yen Lee