In the next two weeks, we will have new interns here, Clément (F / Dev) already started this week, Alain (D / Dev), Laure (F / Marketing), Thomas (F / Dev), Morgan (USA / Marketing) and Christopher (D / Dev) will start beginning of February, so our small office is going to be a bit more packed again. Daniel and I are looking forward to it, and the future interns do so as well. I took some pictures of nice "real" wall postings from Annie, Moritz and the team. :) Annie, we miss you too! We will open up an office in Madrid one day! :)

Yesterday we found out that there is a 1994 House anthem called "I love this place". The beginning is a bit boring, but the vocal part rocks! We have our hands in the air a few times a day. ;)

OMG, time passes by so quickly! :) We wish you all an amazing year 2012! May at least some of your wishes come true!

We made our biggest dream come true! We built earthfaves, for End Users, Professional Experts, Business Owners! We built an iPhone App for End Users and soon we have the iPhone App for Businesses and earthfaves for Facebook ready, too.

earthfaves for End Users - a solution to always find the favorite places and insider tips from your social circles and experts, to support great businesses and to save some money there.

earthfaves for Business - a solution to grow cost-efficiently and sustainably by means of the most powerful advertising in existence: positive word-of-mouth in the social circles of satisfied customers.

We worked on it for almost four years. During this time, we could always count on the support from our families. You can imagine, doing this felt like being close to hell, more than once. But we used our talent, passion and our zen-buddhist-like patience to get through it. Friends stopped talking to us about it, external people thought we are crazy. But we knew we can make it, and we made it. We built earthfaves all by ourselves, with around 90.000 Euros from the founding team, from friends and family. All code was written inhouse, all designs were made inhouse, all ideas, decisions and features were made inhouse by:

Markus D. Schneider - Product & Project Management

Oliver Schneider - Art Direction, UI designs, Marketing

Daniel Stötzer - Development

Anna Roytburd - Web Design

Tim Klauck - Conceptual Design

Thomas Krämer, Barrett Conway, Markus Tetzlaff - Co-Founders & Legal/Concept/Dev/Sales

plus our numerous development interns, mainly from our great and beatiful IT-region SaarLorLux and from Madrid, especially:

Frédéric Klauss, Dorian Bauer, Rémi Sinicco, Markus Flesch, Pascal Jung, Fabrice Thiel, Moritz Strohm, Benedikt Kappes, Miguel Angel Escalona, María Lara Díaz, José Angel Garcia, Jesús Huerta and Diego Rubio.

So you might ask yourself, why did we do this? Here are some reasons.

• Because from the start, we believed in earthfaves.
• Because we believe that we all have the talents to do something special in our lives if we only believe in it - and put it into action.
• Because we believe that excellence can win over big advertising budgets if the right technology is in place.
• Because we want transparency about the good things in life so that we can all benefit from the talent, passion and creativity of those people who really provide exceptional products and services.
• Because we traveled a lot, and we know that every country has nice places and nice people to see and visit.
• Because we believe that together, we can chance the world to the better. This can work if we all share the best places and let others know why we love this place. This way, more and more people will visit these "earthfaves". Non-loved places will have to improve even quicker if they want to survive as positive word-of-mouth travels fast.
• Because we think that companies waste a lot of money on worthless advertising instead of investing in their most important people: their FAVERS and their FAVER FRIENDS.

We just updated the website with our new designs and all the information and tools about "earthfaves for Business", see footer menu. The direct link is www.earthfaves-prm.com .

Remember, it is all in D.I.Y. beta mode which means Daniel, Olli, Anna and Markus build earthfaves actually in their spare time, supported by our interns. So don't expect everything to work perfectly or to be superfast. Because of this DIY-Beta mode, we also never advertised earthfaves. We start to talk to investors now so that we can offer earthfaves to a broader audience.

If you are interested in trying out "earthfaves for Business" for free, send us an e-mail to info @ earthfaves.com . We are happy to get you into our "Pilot Program".

Hi folks, long time no news! We are busy getting our platform ready for 2009! Here are some new things we added recently:

1. Videos: two new introduction videos on the homepage, one about the benefits of earthfaves, one about how to add earthfaves – don’t miss them!

2. Your new location recommendation network size overview: the area on your user home page that shows the number of all the location recommendations you have from your friends and their friends at earthfaves!

3. New “Invite your friends” tool: on top of the page you now find the tool to quickly grow your number of friends at earthfaves. This is important, as the more friends you have, the more earthfaves they have, the more and better location recommendations you can get. So invite your friends!

4. Your discovery rank score – the points you got so far for adding earthfaves and for people that earthfave them. You get 10 points for adding an earthfave, 20 points if someone earthfaves them and 10 if you earthfave another users’ earthfave. You start as “Freshman”. With 1000 points you become “Pearldiver”, with 5000 “Connoisseur” and with 10000 “(Wo)Man of the World”! So adding earthfaves and finding people who like them increases your reputation in the network a lot!

5. “Recommendation rank”™ results: if you are logged in and you search for locations, you get results filtered along your personal trust levels. This way, we make it easier for you to always find the best and most trusted results first. Your own earthfaves appear on top, followed by those of your friends, those of your friends of friends and then those of other earthfavers.

6. Messaging: if someone wants to become your friend or if somebody has earthfaved one of your earthfaves, we send you notification mails so that you quickly can reply to the other users actions.

7. Mapping: simply by copying and pasting code just like at youtube, you can now add your map with your earthfaves to your blog or any other website. This helps you to make more new friends quicker and, for sure, you can show the great places you know much more easily to your friends and readers. You find the link on your user home page.

We plan a lot more for 2009: especially we want to improve the search and the adding functionality (please always search first if you want to add new earthfaves ;). We also want you to say about earthfaves “I love this place”, so keep us posted with your ideas and the bugs you find at info@earthfaves.com.

We wish you and your families a great year 2009!

Happy discovering & recommending!

Your earthfaves team:

Barrett, Daniel, Markus T, Oliver, Tim, Tom, and Markus S.

We are getting ready for the official launch of earthfaves which is expected to happen in July/August. Since the start of our public but secret beta in April we fixed more than 100 bugs, developed more than 20 new features and finalized our first “real” UI design (you will see it soon). Apart from that, we heavily work on our marketing and communication strategy. We have loads of things to keep in mind, therefore we created an “old school” real world mind map that helps us a lot to not forget important aspects:

“

YES, WE MADE IT! The public but secret beta version is live for ITB, thanks to our amazing and incredibly dedicated development, design and editorial team: Daniel, Markus T, Serge, Tilo, Barrett, Tim, Olli and myself, Markus S. Hope it helps you to keep track of the greatest places you ever visited! As soon as your friends, colleagues and other people add more earthfaves, it will also start helping you to find really cool spots on earth!

During the next weeks and months we will get rid of bugs, soak up your feedback to improve earthfaves and add some new features. So please bare with us if you encounter errors, rather send us a screenshot showing the problem! And: some features do not yet work today, e.g. add as friend, edit earthfaves. We will add them later.

…and next week we will be at the ITB presenting the platform to selected partners!

You might think, well, good idea to create a platform for people to recommend each other the coolest locations on this planet, but you might ask as well: how much do these earthfaves guys know about this planet?

Well, here is the list of countries the core team has already visited:

Andorra
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bangladesch
Barbados
Belgium
Belize
Brazil
Canada
Chile
China
Cook Islands
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cuba
Czech Republic
Denmark
Ecuador
Egypt
Estonia
Fiji
Finland
France
Germany
Gibraltar
Greece
Guadeloupe
Guatemala
Hawaii
Hongkong
Hungary
India
Indonesia
Italy
Japan
Kenia
Luxembourg
Maldives
Martinique
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Paraguay
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Samoa
Seychelles
Singapore
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sri Lanka
St. Lucia
St. Marten
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad & Tobago
Turkey
United Kingdom (England, Scotland)
United States (California, New York, Florida, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Georgia)
Venezuela
Western Samoa

Not bad, eh?

And now, having Serge in the time for two months, we could even add some more African states…so you see, we are developers, designers, marketers, but we all share the same passion: TRAVEL!

The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s.
The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s.
The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s.
Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet.”

- Andy Warhol

You, dear reader and future earthfaves community member, and us, we certainly are going to prove that Peking and Moscow do have beautiful places, I am sure.

Well, hi there, this is Markus writing, and this is my HELLO WORLD! Finally I found the time to ask for my blog user/pw !

There is sooooo much going on here:

- we just registered our brand as trademark
- we are finalizing the version 1.1 of our custom search engine to give you even better results than so far.
- Serge is here, our first intern, computer science student at Metz University, France, originally hailing from Cameroon! Welcome to our team!
- We are heavily coding to get our platform ready as our launch date is coming closer and closer (will be March 1st, but don’t tell anyone! .
- Five guys in the development headquarters in Saarbrücken every day, Markus T, Markus S, Daniel, Serge and Tilo, from our partner agency Interactive Software Solutions
- Plus currently three guys Olli, Tim and Barrett, always online, delivering great usable designs and preparing our dates at ITB, the largest Travel and Tourism Trade Fair in the world which we plan to rock this year
- we now have a nice company car with pretty cool earthfaves stickers on it, pictures tomorrow
- we use two rooms in our office now (before one was enough
- we eat croissants every morning

Hmm, my last entry was too long ago…how embarrassing. And no, my New Year’s resolution isn’t to make sure the blog is updated every couple of days…although, I will try. I guess I don’t have to write a 500 word essay every time…

So, where were we? Ah yes, the World Travel Market 2007. It was, in a surprisingly small way, a success. The weeks leading into the event, I really didn’t know what to expect at all. I thought, “it will be two guys running around at the world’s second largest travel event with a heavy stack of brochures in their hands, trying to explain what earthfaves is, how it works, and why travel bureaus, tour operators, and other travel-related businesses should be psyched about it.”

My preconceived notions were not so badly preconceived at all, except for the brochures – they weren’t just a heavy stack; they were more like lead bricks – and we didn’t even use them all at the event! Markus and I decided to stick together and pitch earthfaves as a team – our personal styles are quite different, to say the least, and I think we complemented each other well when “pitching” earthfaves. Our team effort usually resulted in me randomly running up to people without reservation, chatting them up for a couple of minutes about the uses of the site and how “cool it is” and then Markus smoothly sliding into the conversation with his obvious knowledge of the travel industry and our platform. Barrett lead in, Markus lead out. Lots of fun, and lots of positive response.

We connected with travel bureaus from around 50 different countries. Many were interested in the platform, but I have to say, in this business seeing is believing — and because the site wasn’t live, it took more time to explain the earthfaves concept. No matter, we did a good job getting solid contacts and since the event, we’ve had a many countries follow-up and ask us how the site is coming along. The Republic of Malawi and Brunei were among the first to contact us, which I thought was completely cool – and their reps at WTM were also completely cool!

How are we coming along, you ask? Well, our travel custom search engine is live! You can access it here: http://www.earthfaves.com/travel-search-engine/

Let me know what you think. Personally, I think it rocks…good job Markus, Daniel, and Tim!!