Kyle is an International Business student at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia. He came to dodo.com in March 2008 as an intern and works writing travel guides for the website. Kyle is originally from New Hampshire, USA, and has been traveling since before he can remember. He has traveled throughout much of the US, highlighted by, Colorado, where he studied Business at the University of Northern Colorado for two years, and Martha’s Vineyard, where he worked as a taxi driver for two summers. Outside of the United States, Kyle has been to Bangkok, Tokyo, Sicily, Rome, Pisa, Messina, Monte Carlo and Melbourne, where he lived for one year and will return to following his internship in Berlin. Kyle greatly enjoys seeing the world and writing about his travels. When he is not busy with work or school, he is most commonly found skiing or golfing.
This picture shows Kyle at the summit of North Cone, at Winter Park ski resort in 2005.
Phew! Three cheers to our technicians. They found the bug which led to many log in problems over the last few days. We are sorry for any inconvenience.
From now on, you can log into dodo.com - without any difficulties. If for any reason you still have log in problems, please let us know.
As you may have noticed, we had some performance problems during the first weeks of the beta phase that started in March.
We have spent quite a bit of time correcting these problems. We modified our database and implemented caching functionality into the site. Site-performance went up significantly since we implemented these improvements.
There are still a few features that are taking a while, but overall the site is pretty fast and reliable. Let us know if you still feel the site is too slow. We’re working on it…
Our productivity will decrease by at least 46.5% over the next 2 weeks. We regrettably had to send in our coffee machine - a Jura Impressa F50 - for maintenance purposes.
It has served us well over the last 2 years, providing a total of 21,659 cups of coffee. Mostly Latte Macchiatos. In roughly 400 working days, that is an average of 54 Latte Macchiatos a day, assuming that a 14-person team makes an average of 4 cups per person per day. Actually, 30% of our team doesn’t drink coffee, so that makes an average of 6 Latte Macchiatos per coffee drinking team member per day.
After considering the numbers, it is easy to understand why it will be tough for us to live without the coffee machine for 2 weeks…
On the other hand, 21,659 Latte Macchiatos with an average preparation time of 3 minutes each means that we have spent 64,977 minutes preparing coffee. That’s 1,082 hours, or 45 days, which is more than 2 months full time work. Hmmm… Now that I think about it, our productivity might possibly increase over the next weeks 
We expected it wouldn’t be easy to build an online travel community. As it turns out, we were right. It is obvious that simply sending out news about a new travel community called dodo.com will not result in hundreds of new members or instant community activity.
We haven’t done much marketing yet, and thus, cannot expect great results. BUT, there are basic interactions on the website, and they are occurring more and more often. People invite each other and share past and future travels as well as travel tips.
It makes me happy when I see a new member that was invited by an active dodo.com member. We hope this kind of community activity increases over time. Last week, I chatted with Claudio from Argentina (http://www.dodo.com/de/travelfriends/todosmisviajes.com/) on dodo.com. I don’t know how he found out about us, but he signed up and it was great fun to talk to someone on the other side of the world with dodo.com.
Our goal is to build a worldwide community of travelers. The idea is simple: the people who know the best travel destinations are the people who live in those places. So, if I plan to visit Argentina, I would ask Claudio where to go
As I said, we haven’t started heavily marketing dodo.com yet. But, we are about to get started! I hope you hear or read about dodo.com in the months to come! We are not in a hurry. A good friend of mine used to say, “slow and steady always wins.” That’s how we try to make dodo.com better - slow and steady.
Do you like dodo.com and want it to be more informative and helpful? Help out by telling us how to improve. Tell us what you are missing on the site and tell friends all over the world to sign up.
Wow! You might be the one who will win a trip around the world, and discover the world with dodo.com! Yes, you have read correctly, you can win a €10,000 trip around the world!
How? All you need to do is register on dodo.com before the 31st of December 2008. The registration itself already brings you two lots. You think there must be a catch somewhere? If so, you are wrong. There is no catch. We will really give away a trip around the world to one lucky member.
To increase your chances of winning the trip, you can collect more lots. To thank you for your activities on dodo.com we will award you with lots for writing travelogue entries and travel tips, for uploading videos and photos, for inviting friends to dodo.com or for placing a link to dodo.com. All details for the sweepstakes, can be found here.
You’re still thinking there must be a catch somewhere? Well, have a look at our participation conditions, and you will see that we want nothing more than for you to be active on dodo.com. As a reward for participating, we will gladly give away one trip around the world, among all users. The winner of the trip around the world will be drawn out of all the lots on 15th of January 2009.
We wish you the best of luck in our sweepstakes and hope that you spread the good news around to all your travel buddies.
Have you seen our special dodo drawn for the blog? No? How could you? Check it out at the top right corner of the page. Now the dodo leads your way from the main page to the blog on dodo.com.
I get the feeling that the dodo gives quite a good impression about blogging itself. Though, it is rare to find me sitting there as our blog dodo does when I am thinking of writing my next post. I am keen to hear whether you like the blog dodo as much as I do.
I wish you happy Easter and hope you have many, many Easter eggs to collect.
Last Saturday we started the open beta phase of dodo.com. As you will notice in the photo below, Marko from thinkomat.de and Gründerszene.de, a blogger site for German start-ups, and Hilary from nobudgettravel, helped us to celebrate the event. We certainly enjoyed the company of the two alpine experts Max and Annette as well. Thanks for coming guys!
After a short introduction to dodo.com itself, our main strategies, and the community market in general, we opened up dodo.com to the rest of the world. Now everyone can easily register on dodo.com without an invitation code.
Please do not forget that we are still in beta, meaning that we are still working on and developing dodo.com intensively. Therefore, we ask for your patience and understanding as some technical problems might still occur from time to time.
Hope you enjoy dodo.com.
As you know, this year’s ITB and Blogger Summit took place in Berlin, and we were there! Last year we were incognito, but this year dodo.com was proudly represented with our stunning blue dodo shirts. Among all the black and navy blue suits, there was no chance of losing each other, and it was impossible to go unnoticed in the crowd.
Our main focus this year was on the blogger summit and technology exhibitors. We had several interesting conversations about the development of the community market and dodo.com itself. Among others we talked to Keven May, editor of travolution, who also writes for TravelWeekly and gazetteers.com. He is a great journalist and blogger! (Yes, you can be both.) You can see him and Claudia in the picture below.
We also talked to the Canadian travel & tourism technology consultant Stephen Joyce from rezgo.com. He is the publisher of the book Tips From the T-List, which gathers thoughts about e-tourism from many approved bloggers.
I would like to thank Claude Bernard from Les Explorers for the charming chat and, by the way, your English is great. I like the French accent a lot. We will hopefully accrue some more members from France now ;).
Apart from all the international bloggers, we also had a deep conversation about the community market with two German bloggers from tourismuszukunft.de: Florian Bauhuber and Jens Oellrich.
Apart from meeting several well-known bloggers, we also had the chance to see Angie (Mrs. Merkel, current Chancellor of Germany) and the famous and gorgeous actor George Clooney.
Alright, alright, so they are only wax figures! But still…. it was fun! Even more fun, though, was that we found the smallest playable foosball table—at least at the ITB. We love playing foosball. Well, not me in particular, but Axel, Daniel and most employees do.
The largest travel fair is coming up, and we will be there! If you see anyone with a shirt like the one in the picture below, it will be us. We certainly won’t miss THE PHOCUSWRIGHT BLOGGERS SUMMIT. You can find us at the blogger workshops this Wednesday, at the PhoCus Wright@ITB: Success in Travel E-Business on Thursday, and with any luck at the ITB as well.
If you would like to contact us at the ITB, just start up a chat with anyone you see wearing the dodo.com shirt. Or if you prefer, contact us in advance to make an appointment. You can click on the photo for a close-up!
