Founders of Mapness, an online travel journal service and European Startup of the Month for December 2007, have shared their plans for 2008 exclusively for EuropeanStartups.com. To recap, Mapness lets users share their travel experiences and plan future trips as easily and effortlessly as possible.
As of 24th of November 2007, Mapness is online with a new release. The new release covered fixing all the little bugs, inconveniences and glitches reported by Mapness users. In addition, they have made the service faster, IE6 is now fully supported, while some visual cues and tips have also been added to make the process of creating your travel journals easier and an address search has been introduced.
"We have received an overwhelming amount of ideas and feature requests since the launch of Mapness in October 2007. We are grateful to our beta testers for their time and active support. We never expected this kind of innovative and creative feedback and were very happy to see Mapness beta testers enjoy the service so much and realise so much potential in Mapness." - said Tom Sieron, one of Mapness co-founders.
Where Mapness is headed in 2008
The Mapness team claim to have a detailed plan for 2008. Development of Mapness in the first months of 2008 should focus on advancing the social features. Rich comments, featured journeys and a fully blown profile page with a whole lot of added functionalities is said to be introduced. A first sign of Mapness going more social will be the update of the Mapness home page to make it more personalized for the registered users and more informative and interactive for the newcomers. On top of the technical improvements Mapness team is working on increasing the number of registered users to make the service more attractive and full of journeys to explore.
"In 2008 we will be committed to establishing an increased presence on the travel market." - continued Tom Sieron - "This will come to life along with a stronger and more focused identity of Mapness, partly redesigned graphics and a new logo to help us differentiate from the competition and establish partnerships with other travel-related ventures. I should also mention that we are planning on going mobile in 2008."
All in all 2008 looks very busy for the Mapness team and, as they claimed, there is a lot of interest in their startup from potential partners and investors.
Here are some questions I'd like to have answered by EuropeanStartup.com readers and the Mapness team:
1. Who is Mapness competition?
2. What could Mapness team do better or improve on?
3. If you could use Mapness service for something other than the travel journal, what would that be?
4. How can Mapness attract more users? Who is their primary target audience?
Note: Please answer in the Comments section of this post. Answers made by the Registered Users (you must be logged in) will be accredited toward their EuropeanStartups.com Expert Status.
