All right! After many months of discussions, brainstorming, legal and trademark research and negotiations, we finally have the domain name for our new venture - dodo.com

We thought about thousands of different domain name options – animals, places, straightforward generic domain names, new name creations and many others. (See the pictures for just a few of our brainstorming ideas.)

The dodo.com idea was actually just a joke made by Axel when he said “How about dodo.com”? We both laughed, but we soon came up with tons of ideas on how to use the dodo bird for some really funny marketing campaigns.

In a nutshell, here are our reasons for taking Dodo.com:

- It’s short.
- It’s easy to remember.
- It’s hard to misspell.
- Most people have some kind of association with it.
- We often heard people talk about the dodo and why it is extinct.
- The dodo is friendly.
- The word dodo is the same all around the world.

So after many weeks of thought we decided on dodo.com, and just a few weeks later we came to an agreement with the prior owner, so here we go! Say hello to the new dodo.com travel community!

Welcome to our blog! This is the first of many entries to come in the next months and years.

Let us introduce ourselves: We are Axel Lehmann and Daniel Hoffmann. We founded our first company “transparent” together in 2004, and it grew to be a rather relevant player in the German online insurance industry. We are still investing a huge amount of time into transparent to make it bigger, better and nicer. However, we figured we wanted to invest the knowledge that we gathered throughout the last 4 years with transparent into a new project - a new challenge.

After thinking about several potential business models in various industries, we found the online travel sector to be very interesting. We both love to travel, and have already traveled together a lot (the picture shows us on a quite windy hike in scotland in 2005).

Since we both met in the US and both want to expand our entrepreneurial activities beyond the German borders, we decided to launch a truly international travel community.

The main features of the community will be:

- To connect international travelers with each other.
- To generate reviews of interesting places from all around the world, be it restaurants, mountains, hiking trails, or whatever is of interest to the travelers on our website.
- To offer travelers an opportunity to create their own travel blogs and share their experiences more easily with their friends back home.
- To create a place where travelers can save and show their travel pictures and videos.
- And there will be many more features in the future.

We had the idea in October 2006, and it took us a couple of months to get going with the basics. Now we are ready to go with the first version of the website online -along with this blog. We will soon launch the first invitation-only version of our community.