In just under two weeks, Team TravelMuse (Kevin, Eric and I) will head to San Diego to take part in our version of the Olympics—[DEMOfall '08|http://www.demo.com/DF8PTR], a launchpad for emerging technology. Although we haven’t been working on this for four years, it’s certainly taken a huge amount of planning and practice to get ready for this prestigious event.

At DEMO we will launch our latest product, the most complex release our product and engineering teams have tackled so far. With no challenge too small, they have worked diligently towards the deadline of Sept. 7. As we approach the final lock-down stage, Bugzilla has certainly been getting quite a workout! We’re really excited to show off our new product and let you try it out for yourself.

Kevin and Eric (TravelMuse Co-Founders) are our demonstrators at DEMO. We joke with our PR team about how many times we can get the word DEMO into a sentence. We’re going to give you a demo of our demo for DEMO. Anyway, Kevin and Eric are doing well with learning their scripts and can be seen listening to iPods (are they getting in the Michael Phelps zone?), clutching cue cards and muttering away to themselves. Coach Nathan has them on a regular practice schedule, and Eric, every now and again, gives me impromptu recitals.

I think we have compared this experience to a mix of memorizing your lines for a school play, to practicing the tricky sections of your piano recital, to being in a competitive race. Basically, you have to know your game plan and practice, practice, practice.

Meanwhile, I’ve been taking care of the logistics with the DEMO team, writing product marketing copy and finalizing press kits and give-aways.

Later this week Kevin and Eric will have a live audience with our company—definitely the toughest crowd yet! Everyone has been working hard to produce their piece of the puzzle and is counting on them to show it off at its best—which I’m confident they will.

Team TravelMuse DEMO schedule:

Saturday, Sept. 6: Arrive in San Diego and rehearse in the evening.

Sunday, Sept. 7: Demonstrators’ meeting and set up booth #24.

Monday, Sept. 8: Watch other demos and give demos at booth #24.

Tuesday, Sept. 9: Team TravelMuse presents at 8:52 a.m. and gives demos at booth #24.

If you’re attending DEMO, we’ll see you there, otherwise you can follow us on Twitter @[TravelMuse|http://twitter.com/TravelMuse], and we’ll post more to the TravelMuse Company Blog soon.

We’ve been bursting to tell everyone that we’ve been chosen to present our latest technological innovation! On September 7th, Kevin, Eric and I will head down to San Diego to showcase the great work of the TravelMuse team, along with 70 other companies.

In the meantime, we’re fine tuning the six-minute script and working through all the logistics from AV forms to hotel reservations. Thank goodness the DEMO handbook is so well put together! We’re working with DEMO coach Nathan Gold—he’s great and is keeping us on track. Left to our own devices, I know we’d be blowing off meetings with each other.

DEMOfall 08 is the launchpad for emerging technology. During two exciting days of rapid-fire, six-minute presentations, DEMO attendees will be the first to see the most innovative, market-defining products unveiled for the very first time.

With more than 20,000 technologies reviewed and 1,500 companies selected to launch on the DEMO stage over the past 18 years, DEMO has an incredible track record of success.

From the first launch of Palm, Java, TiVo  , E*TRADE in the mid/late ‘90s to Salesforce.com, VMware, Six Apart, OddPost, IronPort, GrandCentral and Glam Media in more recent years, DEMO delivers real products ready for market.

The results have been astounding. Past participants such as WebEx, VMware, iRobot, Linden Labs, Six Apart, and Roku have single-handedly defined or redefined their industries. Companies who have launched products at DEMO over the past four years have gone on to raise over $2.5 billion. Plus, more than 40 of these companies have been acquired by tech giants, such as Adobe, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Symantec, Viacom, Yahoo, and more.

We invite you to join us at DEMOfall 08 to see and hear about our incredible breakthrough—before anyone else does. Take advantage of the $600 registration discount and register today for only $2,395 at www.demo.com/DF8PTR.

Stay tuned as we update you on our progress here at TravelMuse and get ready for our six minutes of fame!

As head of engineering at TravelMuse, I have been rather quiet until now, being quite busy with the June launch of our Beta site. As we gear up for our next release (code name: “[Kuala Lumpur|http://www.travelmuse.com/destinations/MY/14/kuala-lumpur]“), I thought I should take this opportunity to give you some insights into the technology we’re using to provide you with new travel content on a regular basis as well as handy trip planning tools.

At TravelMuse, we’re here for the long haul to serve your needs, and we invested in a modern Enterprise Java platform based on open standards, which allows us to assemble best of breed technologies to deliver great next-generation Web applications. The 21st century brought us the open source revolution, and it happens that nowadays “best of breed” often means community-based software. That’s why many of our site’s key technologies are open source projects from the community such as GlassFish Application Server (more details in a Sun stories blog), MySQL Database Server and Alfresco Web CMS (Content Management System).

The latter is worth mentioning as it is a key enabler for our small team to be able to reliably publish destination information and a dozen new articles to the site on a weekly basis. Once the structure of each type of document is defined in the CMS and rendering templates are developed by the engineering team, our editorial team can then independently produce content into the CMS through Web forms, preview it for quality assurance and then deploy to production with minimal engineering involvement (freeing up our time to build new nifty features for you!).

Over the next few months, you will see tremendous investments made in our trip planning functionality to address all aspects of the process and improve its usability. I’m very excited about bringing all those state of the art planning tools online and we look forward to your feedback on how you use TravelMuse and what your favorite features are!