We were pleased to learn that one of our partners, UpTake successfully closed its second round of funding, raising more than $10 million. Congratulations to Yen, Elliott and the rest of the UpTake team!

UpTake has so far focused mainly on hotels and activities and has cleverly indexed more than 20 million online reviews and opinions from travelers across the Web, personalizing results to match user preferences. Compared to TripAdvisor, which claims 15 million online reviews in its company fact sheet, that’s 33 percent more reviews!

UpTake includes content from thousands of trusted Web sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Fodors, goCityKids, Virtual Tourist and Yahoo Travel. I put its site to the test with Puerto Vallarta, a destination I’m visiting in a couple of weeks on my own family vacation, and found some great sites for activities, including canopytours-vallarta.com, which offers zip line tours through the jungle.

I was able to save the research I’d found on UpTake into my Mexico Trip plan on the TravelMuse Planner using the TravelMuse Plan-It! Widget that UpTake has placed on all of its content pages. I simply clicked on the TravelMuse Plan-It Widget at the bottom of the UpTake page, and just like on Del.ic.ous.com, I bookmarked the information. So now, my family and I can refer to that information as we collaboratively plan our trip and can revisit the relevant page on UpTake.

UpTake has done a truly remarkable job to grow traffic to 150,000 unique visitors per month over the past five months, and as research shows, 73 percent of people use the Web to find information for their trips. The SEO investment Uptake has made is paying dividends with Google’s search results, where its content is highly discoverable. If I type “Santa Barbara family hotels” in the Google search box, UpTake shows up as the first result, beating TripAdvisor (which, let’s face it, has been around for a lot longer and has a much larger budget than UpTake).

So what’s next? Having built a solid search offering in Hotels, it sounds like UpTake is heading off to champion new categories such as UpTake Lodging, UpTake Things to Do, UpTake Restaurants and UpTake Beaches. This makes a lot of sense, given how it has excelled in aggregating information so far.

It’s also not surprising that UpTake seems to be investing further in business intelligence and analysis—after all it’s a data driven business! However, on a lighter note, I really do think the key lever for UpTake will be the Facebook Secretary. Elliott, do you not have this covered already with all those Twitter connections ?

UpTake has brought order to the mass of fragmented travel data that exists on the Web today. I’m excited to see what it rolls out next to help people find relevant travel information even more quickly.

Coastal Cleanup Day is this Saturday, Sept 20th. People across the country will volunteer to pick up trash along coastal waterways from 9 a.m.-noon.

Here at TravelMuse, we all love to travel and know you do too. The Beach Vacations tag on our Inspiration Finder is constantly the top selection that our customers click. To that end, we feel it’s our responsibility to help keep our beaches and waterways clean and encourage you to do so too!

Team TravelMuse will be helping on a project to clean up Permanente Creek, at Rock Street Bridge in Mountain View, Calif. Come and join us, or find a project near you.

This will be the 24th Annual California Coastal Cleanup Day, and it’s the premier volunteer event focused on the marine environment in the country. In 2007, more than 60,000 volunteers worked together to collect more than 900,000 pounds of trash and recyclables from our beaches, lakes, and waterways. To find out more visit: www.coastal.ca.gov.

Be part of the solution to marine pollution

It was a whirlwind two days for TravelMuse at Fall DEMO’08 in San Diego on Sept. 8 and 9!

The experience was amazing and even surpassed the high expectations we had going in. Let’s be clear about this. DEMO is the real deal. I recommend it for any start-up.

The DEMO team is an A+ outfit. They make sure that everything goes smoothly, and as one demonstrator said, they make you feel like the only company at DEMO. The organization is meticulous from pre-event planning to the ongoing relationship management with DEMO alumni.

TravelMuse got great coverage by the press in attendance, and the show definitely stirred the interest of the investor and partner community as well.

I’d like to thank the TravelMuse team and the families of the team for enduring some very long days and nights over the past few months. You rose to the occasion time and again, and the results speak for themselves! Gracias!

Here are a few pictures from the show. We were honored to be a part of it!

Taking the stage….

Fiona does her best roadie impersonation…

Eric goes vertical on the monitors…

Did you know that 20 percent of travelers report spending more than 10 hours to plan a trip? (source: TIA.org)

Think about the last time you planned a big vacation. How was the planning experience for you, and how long did it take?

Since we started thinking about what we’d like TravelMuse to be, we consistently came back to the amount of pain involved in planning trips and how we wanted to enable people to easily research, plan and book a trip, regardless of how complex the itinerary is.

Today, we’re excited and proud to announce Social Trip Planning within the TravelMuse Planner. Planning is really at the heart of what we do, so we are just thrilled to share it with you. Read full release

With Social Trip Planning you can plan trips with friends and family, and reuse the travel research of people you trust. Let’s face it, who would you rather get advice from—your best friend whom you’ve known all your life, or “crazy4cabo” whose comments you read on advice sites.

Here’s a list of just some of the many new things that this release enables you to now do on TravelMuse.com:

• Create a day-by-day schedule of your planned activities,, restaurants you’re eating at and places you’re staying from our repository of more than 100,000 points of interest and 90,000 hotels spanning hundreds of destinations globally. Or you can add any page you find on the Web.
• Invite people you’re traveling with to collaborate on the plans. Everyone can add research and modify the schedule, and everyone gets notified immediately of changes to the itinerary.
• Network with people whose travel advice you trust. View your friends’ trip plans and repurpose their research.
• Keep apprised of the trips your friends are planning (if they choose to let you see them) and give them the benefit of your experiences.
• Combine research you find on the Web with reference information and travel articles on TravelMuse, and easily drag and drop these items into a scheduler. You can even move entire days around when the need arises!

The net result: You can now plan trips the way you’ve always wanted to, with great content and easy-to-use tools, plus with a little help from your friends.

So stop e-mailing links back and forth and abandon the manila folder—try the new TravelMuse Planner for yourself today!

Finally, we have to extend our deepest thanks to the entire TravelMuse team and their understanding families who pulled out all the stops to make this release possible.

Happy planning!

Kevin and Eric

DEMO just announced the list of companies participating in this year’s DEMOfall 08, expected to have the largest attendance ever. Travelmuse is looking forward to participating alongside these other companies in San Diego and telling press, bloggers and analysts all about our new release.

Kevin, Eric and I are bound for San Diego tomorrow on Southwest Airlines. Stop by and see us at booth #24 if you’re also heading to DEMO, or follow us on our blog here and on Twitter @[TravelMuse|http://twitter.com/TravelMuse].

In the meantime, here’s more from DEMO’s press release earlier today and the list of companies participating at DEMOfall 08:

Leading Technology Conference Continues to Highlight the Best in Entrepreneurship from Around the World

The DEMO conferences, known for launching some the world’s biggest technology products, will kickoff this Sunday with 72 new products poised to launch onstage in just 72 hours. Beginning its nineteenth year of supporting innovation, DEMOfall 08 will highlight products from more than 11 countries and 19 states. Known as the conference that launched products from Google, Apple, Palm, Intel, Yahoo!, and TiVo, the fall conference will host one of its largest attendances of journalists, investors and business professionals in its history. DEMOfall 08 is being held from Sept. 7 – 9 at the Sheraton San Diego. To learn more about the event and register to attend visit http://www.demo.com.

“Every DEMO we strive to identify the companies that will defy all the odds and have significant impact in the technology markets. Ours is a year-long process that culminates in seventy-two hours of products that are more than disruptive; they change the rules of the game as we know it,” said Chris Shipley, product analyst and executive producer of the DEMO conferences. “I am very excited to unveil the class of DEMOfall 08. They are innovative, they are important, they are fun, and they represent the future products and solutions we all will be using soon.”

The DEMO conferences are held twice a year requiring the DEMO team to hold in-depth interviews with more than 1,000 companies ready to launch new products at the event. This rigorous process ensures that DEMOfall 08 attendees will, for the first time, see new products from around the globe including  Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Taiwan. Some of the products launching at DEMOfall 08 include:

• • products that help you manage, deliver, and socialize your mobile phone and content.
  • tools that enable you to personalize, navigate and deliver multi-media, rich-media presentations and television content over the Web.
  • a solution that brings RFID right to the consumer.
  • an application that promises to keep spam out of your inbox for good.
  • a tool that takes the mystery out of eating healthy wherever you are.
  • services that take personal finance management to a new level.
  • a solution that makes everyone a game developer.
  • tools to make you fall in love with your photos again.
  • products focused on reducing our impact on the planet from energy consumption to traffic congestion.

Videos of each live onstage demonstration will be available on http://www.demo.com beginning Monday afternoon Sept. 8.

DEMOfall 08 Demonstrators

Accordia Group, LLC; New Rochelle, NY; http://www.accordia-group.com

Adapx, Inc.; Seattle, WA; http://www.adapx.com

Alerts.com, Inc.; Bellvue, WA; http://www.alerts.com

Arsenal Interactive, Inc.; Mountain View, CA; http://www.heycosmo.com

Asyncast Corp; Campbell, CA; http://www.rocketron.com

Awind Inc.; Junghe, Taiwan; http://www.awindinc.com

beeTV; Milano, Italy; http://www.bee.tv

Best Buy; Minneapolis, MN; http://www.giftag.com

BizEquity Corp.; Spring House, PA; http://www.bizequity.com

Blue Lava Technologies, Inc.; Honolulu, HI; http://www.bluelavatech.com

Cerego; Tokyo, Japan; http://www.usa.iknow.co.jp

Cinergix, Pty Ltd.; Melbourne, Australia; http://www.creately.com

Clintworld; Boenningstedt, Germany; http://www.clintworld.de

CoreTrace Corp.; Austin, TX; http://www.coretrace.com

crowdSPRING, LLC; Chicago, IL; http://www.crowdspring.com

DesignIn, Inc.; Marblehead, MA; http://www.mydesignin.com

Dial Directions, Inc.; Alameda, CA; http://www.dialdirections.com

DOCCENTER; Omaha, NE; http://www.doccenterinc.com

Enterprise Informatics, Inc.; San Diego, CA;

http://www.enterpriseinfomatics.com

Familybuilder; New York, NY; http://www.familybuilder.com

ffwd.com, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; http://www.ffwd.com

Fortressware, Inc.; Mountain View, CA; http://www.fortressw.com

Fusion-io; Salt Lake City, UT; http://www.fusionio.com

G.ho.st; Ramallah & Modin, Palestine and Israel; http://g.ho.st

Green Sherpa; Santa Barbara, CA; http://www.greensherpa.com

Infovell, Inc.; Menlo Park, CA; http://www.infovell.com

Intelius, Inc.; Bellevue, WA; http://www.zumende.com

Invision TV, LLC; Bethesda, MD; http://www.invision.tv

iWidgets, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; http://www.iwidgets.com

Kadoo Inc.; Washington, DC; http://www.kadoo.com

Koollage, Inc.; San Jose, CA; http://www.koollage.com

Mapflow, Ltd.; Cork, Ireland; http://www.eirlift.com

Maverick Mobile Solutions, Pvt. Ltd.; Maharashtra, India;

http://www.maverickmobile.in

MeDeploy; Hamden, CT; http://www.medeploy.com

Message Sling; Worcester, MA; http://www.messagesling.com

MeWorks, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan; http://www.meworks.net

Microstaq, Inc.; Austin, TX; http://www.microstaq.com

MixMatchMusic, Ltd.; Burlingame, CA; http://www.mixmatchmusic.com

Momindum; Paris, France; http://www.momindum.com

OpenACircle.com; Dallas, TX; http://www.openacircle.com

Paidinterviews, LLC; McLean, VA; http://www.paidinterviews.com

Paragent, LLC; Muncie, IN; http://www.paragent.com

Photrade, LLC; Cincinnati, OH; http://www.photrade.com

PlanDone, Inc.; Petaluma, CA; http://www.plandone.com

Plastic Logic, Ltd.; Mountain View, CA; http://www.plasticlogic.com

Qtask, Inc.; Burbank, CA; http://www.Qtask.com

Quantivo Corp.; San Mateo, CA; http://www.quantivo.com

Radiant Logic, Inc.; Novato, CA; http://www.radiantlogic.com

RealNetworks, Inc.; Seattle, WA; http://www.real.com

Rebus Technology, Inc.; Cupertino, CA; http://www.rebustechnology.net

RemoTV, Inc.; New Haven, CT; http://www.remotv.com

Rudder, Inc.; Houston, TX; http://www.rudder.com

Semanti Corp.; Alberta, Canada; http://www.semantifind.com

Sim Ops Studios, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; http://www.wildpockets.com

SitScape, Inc.; Vienna, VA; http://www.sitscape.com

SkyData Systems, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; http://www.skydata.com

SpinSpotter; Seattle, WA; http://www.spinspotter.com

Telnic, Ltd.; London, England; http://www.telnic.org

TetraBase, LLC; Boothwyn, PA; http://www.tetrabase.com

The Echo Nest Corp.; Somerville, MA; http://echonest.com

tikitag, an Alcatel-Lucent Venture; Antwerp, Belgium;

http://www.tikitag.com

Toolgether; San Mateo, CA; http://www.toolgether.com

TravelMuse, Inc.; Los Altos, CA; http://www.travelmuse.com

Trinity Convergence, Inc.; Durham, NC; http://www.trinityconvergence.com

TurnTo Networks, Inc.; New York, NY; http://www.turnto.com

UbiEst S.p.A.; Treviso, Italy; http://www.ubiest.com

UGA Digital, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan; http://www.ugadigital.com

Unity Solutions, LLC; Clearwater, FL; http://www.unitysolutions.com

Usable Security Systems, Inc.; San Francisco, CA; http://www.usable.com

WebDiet, Inc.; Henderson, NV; http://www.webdiet.com

Xumii, Inc.; San Mateo, CA; http://www.xumii.com

Zazengo, Inc.; Santa Cruz, CA; http://www.zazengo.com