Jooveler blog

Few days after our startup, we continue to work on adding new useful features to Jooveler.

The news for today is that we’ve introduced a new commenting system, specific for the travel inquiries. On each travel inquiry’s page, any website visitor or traveler, that has some suggestions to help the traveler who launched the inquiry, can add their opinion as a blog-like comment.

For instance, say a traveler initiated a Flight + Hotel travel inquiry for his trip to Brasov, Romania. And say that another traveler reaches the inquiry page on Jooveler, and have some experience with this itinerary route. Well, this other traveler can add his comments on inquiry’s page, and suggest the initial traveler that “Hi, I’ve traveled to Brasov twice this year. You might consider choosing a hotel downtown. Also, for the flight I would suggest you book a flight departing in the afternoon and arrive to Bucharest early in the morning. This way you will gain few hours for visiting beautiful Brasov, because there is a 3 hour drive from Bucharest to Brasov.”

So, if you are a good traveler and you would like to help other travelers with your suggestions for their trips, go ahead and add your comments for travel inquiries on Jooveler.

Today we’ve opened Jooveler to public. We were pretty silent, fired the matches with only a status update on our Twitter account and… this blog post. If everything goes well, eventually the buzz will jump up the following days or weeks.

Later in the day we’ve updated our About page and also have tweaked the header based on first user behavior on the website. Users began to submit their feedback as well, using our opened forum on UserVoice.

Well, we won’t keep you much here on the blog. Enjoy Jooveler!

First invitations for Jooveler.com in private beta has been sent today. Expect more invites to come out the following days.

Jooveler’s official startup is scheduled for August 6th, 2008. Meanwhile you can still have your invitation requested at www.Jooveler.com/beta.

We’ve done it! Please visit Jooveler.com/Beta to get yourself an invitation. First invitations will start being delivered by the end of July 2008. Please follow Jooveler on Twitter or subscribe to Jooveler Blog to find out more news.

How Jooveler really helps:

Custom Travel Inquiries

Help Travelers, free of charge, and protected by Jooveler’s privacy rules, build their custom Travel Inquiries, specific for their travel needs at any time over the year.

Custom Travel Arrangements

Allow Travel Operators to publicly respond with their best Travel Offers and Arrangements for each travel inquiry.

Travelers-Operators Intercommunication

Provide an intelligent multi-communication-channel contacting system that any traveler can use, to have Travel Operators contact them back regarding one or more of their travel offers.

Travel Customer Care

Allow Travel Operators to contact Travelers back using several online and offline communication channels: local or international phone, email, chat and online calls over Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, or direct messages on Twitter.

Social Travel Network

Encourage all users to build and continuously expand their social network, as well as their professional contacts graph.

Professional Travel Network

Guide Travel Operators to maintain their internal and external business and professional network.

Not a Classic Travel Tool

Well, it does almost all that our old local ‘06 Goovel.net did not do.

Have safe and wonderful trips!

We are organizing Jooveler’s Beta page, with all the initial information, invitations request form and stuff. Should here from us in a bit!

Can’t decide which slogan to place on top of the pages under website’s logo, so I would think I’ll create a system to show different slogans randomly. This will eventually better define website’s goals for anyone who navigates on more than one of its pages.

It may not be end of May ‘08 for launching this new web product - as planned a month ago -, but I am approaching a milestone from where its development will start running in a straight line.

To dos:

• contact a few potential customers and ask for help in defining functionalities while returning advertising offers
• contact legal entities for TOS and other contracts
• define cron jobs, payments, searches, item listings
• plan startup strategy

Actually it was not “found” but created. It is a bit simple and sort of dark (side background only), but the information that a user really needs to see can be found very easy.

Now I need to focus more on the process of sending alerts and notifications for different important actions on the website, then to review and revise the entire process from inquiry creation to viewing responses.

Startup estimation - based on things I see building up right now - is end of May 2008.

Since a few weeks ago I have resumed working on Jooveler structure, look and feel. After tweaking some actions within the system, I’ve started looking closely on providing a good look for the website.

I am still a fan of “simple looks good“, so I will go with a basic color scheme and the classic column layout. Web 2.0 items will surely be present in Jooveler’s template, to deliver a good browsing experience to our users.

Now is the time when I removed all the information entered in website’s database during its first stage of development, and made space for the second set on testing data, entered from scratch. I’ve changed a bit of how things works for user management and I also still need to tweak some functionalities for the main module. I need user registration and login/logout processes to run smooth and very secure, so I will take a much closer look on how these things work so far and adjust all that it seems appropriate to accomplish the goal for this matter.

As a reminder, and also for those of you who turned your TV sets on after the show began, these first posts on this blog are written before the actual website product is released to general public use. That’s the reason why you will notice some secretly hidden statements and somewhat confusing text that, for the moment, avoids revealing the purpose and functionality of this website product. All of these will definitely become much clearer in a bit, after I will open Jooveler’s gates to you for daily basis use. Looking forward to it!