Ciafo, a technology start-up started in 2010 and based in Bangalore, India has launched its flaghip product, a web service called Travelomy.com. This next-generation travel guide uses the latest web 2.0 technologies to offer detailed travel information for hundreds of travel destinations across five countries in South Asia – India, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal.

Travelomy.com - Travel Guide for South Asia- India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives

The website catches a user's location when he or she opens the website and automatically displays travel suggestion to the user depending on the physical location. The website has listings of about 505 getaways, 2440 sights, and numerous more photos, videos and user inputs to offer. The user can also log in to the website using a Facebook account and make the entire experience of browsing through Travelomy more personalised. The site apart from giving sight listings itself, even invites users to add a location or sight of their own and contribute to the information available on the website.

The idea behind Travelomy is to step out of the traditional travel guides available on the web and offer travellers something different. This is precisely what the founders of Ciafo have done with Travelomy. They have used next-generation technology to provide better information to the users, focusing on three key aspects in the process – rich-content, geo-location and social media. By tying up with Facebook, Travelomy sure covers the third aspect quite well.

A few interesting features that the site offers currently include photo geolocation, video and photo uploads and Hidden Gems. Photo Geolocation basically lets the user include a certain location he/she came across on the site through a picture, and let's them add it to their trip. Users can easily upload photos directly to Travelomy, and add links to their favorite videos for a particular location and these show up on the site for everyone else to see. The concept of Hidden Gems is something the site builds on from the fact that uploading content to Travelomy takes mere 30 seconds, and users are encouraged to keep sharing the little gems from their travel with other travellers.

While plans for expanding Travelomy globally continue, some other features such as Activities and Travel bookings and Deals will also be available on the website. Meanwhile, two more products from Ciafo were also launched last year – wayr and The Social Radio Project. Wayr is an app for the Symbian platform which provides basic location sharing on mobile. The Social Radio Project is a much larger avenue, which makes use of the large amount of social information available on the web, brings it down to the local level and offers it to the users in the simplest consumable form. Socialradio currently covers about 20 cities internationally, and more are to come.

Source: travelomy.com