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

The best sources for trusted travel recommendations tend to be from those who know us best—our friends and family—combined with vetted research and content from select publications and websites. But gathering that information can involve several steps, and potential missteps.

Today, Uptake.com has re-launched its travel-resource site—the company’s new tagline is “Travel like you’ve been there before”—and introduced a new service, Travel Q&A, that aims to harness social networks, targeted user-generated content and travel resources to make the trip-research process easier and help users find the travel information that’s most relevant to their needs.

“We’ve designed the new Uptake to reflect natural travel-planning behavior. When people plan vacations, they pour over travel reviews and sift through star ratings, but ultimately they prefer advice and recommendations from people they trust the most who have been to that destination before,” said Yen Lee, president and co-founder of Uptake.com, and formerly of Yahoo! Travel.

Travel Q&A uses Uptake’s patent-pending “destination mining” technology to access users’ Facebook friends and analyze structured data (such as hometown, current city, college and check-ins) as well as unstructured data (status updates, photos and comments) in order to find individuals who are best suited to provide personalized travel recommendations on designated destinations.

Users can supplement their Travel Q&A answers with information found through two other key elements of the site: Uptake’s large travel library of vacation experiences, with more than 1.8 million destination ideas, hotels, restaurants, activities and attractions culled from 30,000 travel websites, and its significant body of users. Since launching about four years ago, Uptake has become one of the most-visited travel sites, with roughly four million unique visitors each month.

Here’s how the new tool works:

A user posts a question on Uptake, and provided they’ve allowed the site to access their Facebook account, Uptake then lists those friends who have content that match the destination queried about. Users have the option to select all who appear in those results, a designated few, or their entire friend list. Their travel question then posts to their friends’ walls—all through Uptake, without having to switch over to Facebook.

The benefit of using this service and not just posting the question to users’ walls is that it ensures friends see the question, with the added bonus that their friends also can see it and respond. At the same time, the query goes up on Uptake, where anyone can respond.

I tested the new tool by asking for London hotel and restaurant recommendations. Six of my Facebook friends were deemed a match. I know many more have been to London, but the information on Facebook is only as good as what gets posted, and not everyone completes their demographic fields, nor allows their information to be crawled. As a result, friends of mine who currently live in London did not show up as matches, and I couldn’t add them individually to the list of people that I wanted to ask without choosing to post on everyone’s walls.

Nonetheless, by querying just my six matches, I received four responses within a few minutes to two hours—three from my friends, one from someone who had seen the question on Uptake. I received email notices whenever someone responded, and I could easily get to my Travel Q&A page with a link on the right side of the Uptake homepage under Recent Activity. It should be noted, however, that replies from Facebook friends need to be posted using the application link in order for them to appear on the Uptake question page and for the user to receive notification.

Still, it’s great that you can quickly find a targeted group of friends who likely can provide valuable insight about destinations. Despite a few minor glitches—one friend commented that there was a hitch with the Facebook permission screen, and they never received a confirmation that their permissions were received—I have to say that compared to other travel research tools I’ve tried over the past few years (and there have been many—millions of venture-capital dollars have gone into building companies and tools hoping to capture the travel-planning market) Travel Q&A is one of the easiest to use, and it provided quick, relevant responses that I found valuable.

And I’m not just saying that because I work for the company. Those who know me know that I don’t hold back when I think something doesn’t work very well. Plus, those friends who answered my question separately commented that they thought the Travel Q&A tool looked interesting, and that they already recommended it to others. That’s a pretty good response.

Check out the new Travel Q&A for yourself at Uptake.com and let us know what you think.

Lesley Kao

Chris Hickson

The mood here at UpTake is one of excitement surrounding the announcement of two additions to the executive team and a new board member, signaling the company’s new aggressive push toward accelerated growth and product improvements.

Joining the team are Lesley Kao, as vice president of product, and Chris Hickson, as vice president of revenue. Both are based in UpTake Networks’ Palo Alto, Calif., offices, and will report to president and co-founder Yen Lee. (UpTake Network is the parent company of RealTravel.com and UpTake.com.)

Lee previously worked with both new executives at Yahoo!, where Kao led the global product management, product marketing and design teams for the Yahoo! Listings businesses, and led the global launch and growth of Yahoo! Answers in more than 21 countries and nine languages. Hickson, who joined UpTake last May, was formerly general manager of Yahoo! Travel; prior to his time at Yahoo!, he worked in business development at Ingenio and NBC Internet, Inc.

Entrepreneur Russ Fradin, who ran business development at Flycast and Wine.com, joins as an independent board member. He also was executive vice president at comScore.com Inc., and CEO and co-founder of Adify Media. He recently co-founded Dynamic Signal.

The additions of Kao, Hickson and Fradin will help UpTake to deliver an improved user experience across platforms and accelerate revenue growth through partnerships and new business initiatives. In an interview last week with Tnooz, Lee indicated that UpTake is on track to be profitable by summer.

To learn more about the new executives, visit UpTake’s bio page.

Well, we tried to make your day by offering to fly you to the Moon (Virgina) but it seems airport pat downs and body scanners have got you in a bad mood. What’s a traveler filled with wanderlust to do? A road trip might be just the thing to pull you out of your funk. Imagine only getting patted down when you really want it.  It’s okay to admit – we’re all friends here.

UpTake will send you on the road trip of your dreams if you refer someone for any of the full-time positions listed on our jobs page. So cheer up and start driving! Who could be sad motoring through Happyland (Connecticut) or Happy Hills, (Massachusetts)? Maybe a quick tour through Christmas (Florida) might get you in the holiday mood. Of course, a cruise to Climax (Georgia) is certain to perk you right up (see ‘pat downs’ above.)

Then again, if a road trip isn’t your thing, Uptake will give you a $2000 gift card instead. That might come in handy if you find yourself in Poor Town (North Carolina.)

Any full-time applicant hired for any of the full-time positions listed on our jobs page as a direct result of your referral earns you the “Road Trip Finder’s Fee”– The Road Trip Of Your Dreams. Please send your referral candidates to jobs@uptake.com. If the same candidate is received from two sources the first email received will win.  Offer expires 1/31/2011.

So good luck winning the road trip of your dreams! Just make sure it doesn’t turn out like this: