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.
