A Look Back at 2009

2009 was a big year for us, and we know that nextstop wouldn't be where it's at today if it weren't for the great contributions made by everyone in the nextstop community. As we move forward into the new year, we'd like to take this chance to highlight some of the accomplishments the nextstop community has made over the past year.

In 2009, the number of locations represented on nextstop went from zero to over 1000 locations in over 100 countries around the world. We saw a surge in the number of people contributing to nextstop not just in the United States, but in countries like Portugal, South Africa, and Turkey as well.

Over 1 million people used nextstop in 2009 to find great things to do in the cities and countries to which you've created guides. In addition to helping others find great things to do wherever they are, the nextstop community raised money for good causes. Through nextstop's challenges, you and the rest of the nextstop community:

• offset over 50 000 kg of carbon in our atmosphere
• provided 1000+ people with clean drinking water through charity:water
• donated more than $5000 to organizations such as Couchsurfing, Feeding America, and March of Dimes

The extraordinary achievements of the nextstop community have not gone unnoticed. Robert Scoble, a popular blogger in Silicon Valley, named nextstop one of his hot startups to watch in 2010. We also received some excellent reviews on our new mobile app, which uses your guides and recommendations to help people find great places to go when they're out and about.

We've got a lot of exciting plans for 2010 that you'll be hearing more about soon, but first we'd like to hear from you. Please let us know your ideas for what you think nextstop should do this year over on this forum thread.

Thanks for helping us ensure that no matter where you are in the world, you'll be able to discover something fun and interesting to do through nextstop. We're excited to watch this community of travelers grow in 2010, and look forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions for nextstop in 2010.

Announcing the winners of the nextstop API Challenge

Three months ago we launched the first version of the nextstop API -- a set of tools that let developers of other websites and applications use the content on nextstop in new and different ways. As part of launching that API, we challenged developers to push this API to the limits and impress us with innovative applications that use content from nextstop.

Today I'm happy to announce the winners of this challenge. All of the entries were impressive in their creativity, but the three winners stood out as really pushing the limits of nextstop guides and what's supported by the API. We're going to be investing more in the API over the coming months and hope we'll continue to see more and more creative uses of nextstop content.

API Challenge Winners

• Grand Prize ($1000): Travel Around the World, a highly visual iPhone application that combines nextstop guides and recommendations with other nearby photos to create an immersive location-aware experience. Travel Around the World also integrates with Google Maps to provide directions from your current location to anything you find interesting, as well as one click searching for related content on the web, sharing via Twitter, and even translating any recommendation into the language of your choice.


• 2nd Place ($250): Unrut, helps users discover new places (and get out of the rut of always going to the same old spots) by matching a list of places the user has already been with recommendations for new places to go from nextstop and other sources. You can manually mark places you've been, or link up your Foursquare account and mark these places automatically.


• 3rd Place ($250): What’s Next?, a location aware iPhone application allows you to view places around you in a fast native application, and easily find that next gem in any location you live or may be visiting.

I hope you'll check out some of these applications, and support what I hope will be a growing community of tools in the nextstop ecosystem.

New Featured Guide Feed

You'll notice that in the Guides feed at the top of your homepage, there's now a "featured" tab. We recently added this tab to your feed so that you won't miss out on viewing some of the best guides on nextstop. We also wanted a better way to acknowledge the great guides all of you create, so be sure to keep an eye on the featured feed to see if yours is chosen. Finally, please don't hesitate to comment on guides that you think should be featured -- we'll take note!

As always, let us know what you think about this feature. We hope it helps you learn about new places around the world. Take a look at some of the guides that have already been featured on the homepage, and start to plan all those trips to countries you didn't even know you wanted to visit!

nextstop now available on DROID and Nexus One

A couple of weeks ago we announced a beta version of nextstop for the iPhone and were really pleased with the awesome, thorough, reviews from the press and our users. Today we're extending support for mobile nextstop to Android 2 phones like the Motorola DROID and Google Nexus One. If you have an Android 2 phone, just visit nextstop.com on your phone and you'll see the mobile version in its full glory.


On a more technical note, one of the reasons we continue to be really excited about HTML5 is that it lets us support new phones quickly. If you haven't heard about how we're using HTML5, check out this interview that Robert Scoble did with us a few weeks ago. In contrast to the time it usually takes to support a new mobile platform (often months of work), we were able to port to Android 2 in about a day's worth of work. Yay, HTML5! Some of the (relatively minor) things we ran into:

• Animated gifs are not supported on Android, so we implemented progress spinners using CSS3 animation.
• Geolocation requests often took longer to complete on Android than iPhone, so we had to adjust one of our timers to wait longer for these requests to complete.
  
• The DROID and Nexus One have higher screen resolutions than the iPhone so a few image files and CSS properties had to be modified (though fewer modifications were required than I expected, as Android 2 renders most iPhone formatted websites pretty well in spite of the hardware resolution differences).
  

As you can tell from the above list, as far as ports to new platforms go, this was very straightforward. The only feature we support in the iPhone version that isn't available on Android is the ability to use the camera in the phone to add photos to your recommendations. I look forward to this being available in the web browser of a future Android release (maybe this bug report is a glimmer of hope?). In the meantime, please try out nextstop on your new DROID or Nexus One and let us know how it goes.

First Postcards of the New Year!

A giant world map graces one wall of the nextstop office, and thanks to so many of you we've begun to decorate it with postcards sent in from all over the world. Today we received mail from SharonGosling, vkam, and sharon. SharonGosling sent us a lovely postcard from Cape Town, South Africa, which depicts some of the top tourist spots in the city, including Table Mountain and the beach where you can swim with penguins. vkam sent in a very cool brochure to Toronto's First Post Office Museum and sharon sent us a postcard that shows El Capricho De Gaudi, one of the many spots she's collected in her guide to all things Gaudi, On the Gaudi Trail. Thank you all for helping to liven up our office with mementos from your travels -- we really appreciate it!



Can you help us fill up the rest of our map? We think it needs a little more personality, and postcards really seem to do the trick. Send us one from your hometown and we'll pin it up on the nextstop world map. I promise to write you back!

Please send postcards to:

nextstop
650 Townsend St., Suite 310
San Francisco, CA 94103

Thanks!
Josh and the rest of the nextstop gang

Thanks, Zancudomama!

Another postcard arrived in the nextstop mailbox this morning, this one from Zancudomama, sent from her lovely hometown of Huntington Beach, a seaside city in southern California well known for its surfing.



If you ever head to Huntington Beach, you should bring along your dog and head to this beach zancudomama recommends!

Can you help us fill up the rest of our map? We think it needs a little more personality, and postcards really seem to do the trick. Send us one from your hometown and we'll pin it up on the nextstop world map. I promise to write you back!

Please send postcards to:

nextstop
650 Townsend St., Suite 310
San Francisco, CA 94103

Thanks!
Josh and the rest of the nextstop gang

San Francisco Day Tours

donovan, a top nextstopper and "scribe of all things San Francisco," has created amazingly in-depth guides to the city he calls home, including a spectacular guide to Golden Gate Park and even an historical tour of San Francisco. For most of his 800+ nextstop recommendations, donovan has used his own photos of the city, which are all hosted on his website sanfranciscodays.com. Recently, donovan created an impressive set of seven guides, or day tours, designed to cover many celebrated and locally loved areas of San Francisco via walking and public transportation. He then used the nextstop API to display the guides on his site in such a way that each recommendation is placed next to a map, so you can follow your route as you go from place to place. Go check them out. You'll feel like you're walking around San Francisco with a friend who's lived here for years!


Anyone considering a trip to San Francisco should skip out on the tour buses and head over to sanfranciscodays.com to check out this comprehensive, easy-to-follow series of tours donovan has put together for us.