Friday, October 17, 2008

TripChill.com web and mobile itinerary service draws revenue

By Jim Kozubek, Special to Mass High Tech

Skyward Innovations Inc. is seeking $3 million in venture capital for its TripChill.com, a website and mobile concierge service that monitors itineraries to help travelers avoid pitfalls by presenting alternative options, flights or reservations on a handheld device.

The automated travel assistant is accessible via text messaging, e-mail or a web-enabled phone, and the company will release an interface for Apple Inc.’s iPhone next month. Travelers e-mail trip details to TripChill.com to create an itinerary, and the service monitors the itinerary for travel updates on flights, hotels and cars.

A user of the service, which is still in beta, can check flight listings or inbound-aircraft status, as well as book a hotel or car when stranded at an airport — all with a handheld device, according to Skyward Innovations co-founder and CEO Alex Shore. The target user is an employee of small to midsize companies that have no corporate travel office, he said.

Stratham, N.H.-based Skyward Innovations has just begun to see revenue from commissions from companies such as Hotels.com and advertising, Shore said.

It expects to charge a subscription fee of $10 per month for a concierge service it plans to release if it gets the venture capital funding it’s looking for. The concierge service would add features such as a wakeup call and restaurant reservations. “It will enable you to send your wife flowers or grab a limo on the fly. It will prompt you, and say ‘We think you might need this,’ and its assistance depends on the amount of information put in a user profile,” Shore said.

Skyward Innovations began in 2006, securing $175,000 in seed money. It released its service in August. It is now “going back to look more seriously for money,” Shore said. 

TripChill’s competitors include Missouri-based Handmark Inc., which makes Pocket Express, a mobile service that already has an iPhone application but doesn’t take an itinerary or give personal updates based on issues as they arrive. California-based WorldMate Inc. makes WorldMate, a travel assistant that is a closer competitor with TripChill’s BlackBerry application, but WorldMate requires an application download to a device and lacks an iPhone application.  

Matthew Dickson, a New York investor who put money into TripChill, said he became a supporter after using the program. “I invested after I got stuck,” Dickson said. “I was in an airport, stuck in Savannah, and people were waiting in lines — and we got out. I saw the real value in it, the way it organizes information and enables a user to get around these delays that are now all over the place.”

Skyward Innovations founders Shore, David Miller and Christopher Holt worked on the software for the first versions of the PalmPilot and Windows CE devices at San Jose, Calif.-based Pumatech, acquired by Nokia, and contributed to the development of Intellisync, software for syncing mobile devices and desktops.  

Skyward Innovations now consists of its founders, four advisers and two part-time consultants. Its users number in the hundreds, according to the company.

Domenic Pugliares of North Andover in 1999 sold Aquarius Travel Management, a travel agency with revenue of $250 million, and now serves as an adviser to Skyward Innovations. “It sits on top of what their corporate travel agent would do for them. It’s really slick stuff,” Pugliares said. 

Matthew Cummings, CFO for Travizon Inc. In Woburn, is now testing TripChill with feedback from his clients, and said, “The logic seems to be flexible, and I think TripChill will be a good product for what it does.”

 

Jim Kozubek is a freelance writer and lives in Portsmouth, N.H.