RISE is in the fifth year of its existence and it’s an upcoming hotbed for disruptors and innovators across Asia. The success of this tech conference is quite dependable on one startup that showcased itself last year for the first time.

Odigo travel is a travel start-up that aims at English and Chinese speaking travellers to Japan. Odigo boasts a catalogue of information on dauntless explorers, casing famous sports and unmapped areas, all chosen by a community of local-ites.

Odigo came into existence in 2015 and is quickly becoming a go-to site for trip planning in Japan. With an active community of local experts covering 47 prefectures, the tool provides excellent tips and recommendations for the traveller.

Altogether the algorithm of their planning tool creates an exclusive combination of itinerary and activity plan that the visitor will swear by on their trip to Japan. Odigo is the fastest growing travel site in Japan with over 500,000 page views every month.

Amazingly, in its second year of being an exhibitor, Odigo would be treating RISE attendees to a private launch of their new version 2.0 Travel Planner, fully updated and optimised to gather feedback from the current user. Travellers would be able to add spot notes, to-dos to enhance the trip hence making the tool more customizable. It is also possible to view trips across all platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile) and even export itineraries to access offline on mobile and/or printable as a booklet.

Anyone and everyone who marks his attendance at the Odigo booth and trials the new planner will be rewarded a sneak preview and would stand a chance of winning an all expense trip paid to Tokyo later this year. This year Odigo will also include an exclusive tour of one of Tokyo’s most famous attractions, Tsukiji Fish Market, complete with a personal chef!

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While cities in India are struggling to provide seamless WiFi in public areas, Hong Kong has already taken leaps in this technological advancement. Hong Kong’s government and many other private and public organisations of the city have worked together to offer the best WiFi services to its residents and travellers. Currently, the city has 17,000 hotspots that are available under the Wi-Fi.HK brand, including the WiFi hotspots provided by the Hong Kong Government.

Map of Hong Kong with Technology Icons

Hong Kong’s WiFi service in public areas:

The Hong Kong government’s free WiFi service, GovWiFi, is widely available in the city. It is available at all major tourist spots like museums, public libraries, public parks, sports venues and cultural centres. A few tourist locations with hotspots include: Peak Road Garden, The Peak, Kowloon Park and Repulse Bay Beach. This facility is not available for private and commercial buildings. The Hong Kong’s government scheme was launched in 2008. In the initial days, their WiFi service operated at only 35 locations. Today, there are 3000 Free-WiFi hotspots available at 570 locations for the international travellers coming to the city. This WiFi service provides better signal coverage, enables faster data transfer and reduces signal interference and support for the latest Internet communication protocol (IPv6) for accessing websites and Internet services delivered through IPv6. There is 120-minute connection time limit and 15-minute idle time limit. Users can reconnect to continue the service after reaching these limits. The secretary for Commerce & Economic Development, Gregory So, recently said that the Government has increased the average connection speed for each GovWiFi user up to 3Mbps for general Internet use in the past three years.

GovWiFi Locator managed by the Government of Hong Kong

Hong Kong International Airport has free wireless Internet at most of the seating and public areas in the passenger terminals. No registration is required to access the internet in these locations. The metro stations in Hong Kong run ‘MTR Free WiFi Hotspot’ network for free connectivity of up to 15 minutes per session, with a maximum of five sessions for each device per day. Focusing on tourist spots, shopping malls and restaurants, WiFi services like Hong Kong Broadband Network and Y5ZONE networks are easily accessible.

To make it easier for residents and travellers to stay connected through the internet, an initiative under ‘2014 Digital 21 Strategy’ was undertaken to promote the common popular WiFi brand, “Wi-Fi.HK”, where services by several public and private sectors are offered free of cost for a certain time period. The residents and travellers can use the Wi-Fi.HK mobile app and the positioning function of their mobile phones to detect free public WiFi hotspots in their vicinity. For a broader search, they can use the app to find out hotspots by districts, venue-type or keywords.

With the wide availability of WiFi services, Hong Kong is a truly connected destination for the international travellers. The travellers can stay in touch with family and friends and share their travel experiences through texts, photos and videos without any hindrance.

Also Read: Hello Startups! STARTMEUPHK Festival is happening in Hong Kong in January 2016

Harsh reality of Government’s WiFi Projects and what India can learn from Hong Kong

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It has only been over a month since we made our public launch, but the journey has been quite an eventful one since we started. We have done live coverage of over 3 summits across India, Singapore & Hong Kong, have interviewed travel entrepreneurs and startups from countries such as US, Singapore, Japan, South Korea etc. Our Social communities have grown exponentially and in general we have received a very positive feedback from the entire travel community.

A Quick Rewind

Here is a round-up of some of interesting content that has been published on TravHQ.com so far:

Unique Gadgets & Travel Accessories to redefine Travel Experience: We believe that technology is deeply integrated in every aspect of travel and will continue to disrupt how we plan our trips and experience our journeys. We have curated an exclusive list of handy tech gadgets & accessories that will potentially redefine your travel experience.

Summary of our experience at the RISE Summit: We met a number of enthralling travel startups at the recently concluded RISE Conference in Hong Kong and this piece on some of their stories has generated a lot of interest among the startup fraternity.

Discover Turkey with MakeMyTrip: There have been a number of travel campaigns that we stumbled upon during the last month, but this unique campaign by MakeMyTrip to create awareness of Turkey as a destination deserves a special mention.

Opinions on Emerging Digital Travel Trends: We have been closely monitoring the emerging technology and how it will impact the Indian travel & hospitality sector. If that interests you, consider visiting our Opinions section for some thoughts on the same.

What’s Coming up?

With a rousing start, there are some really interesting activities that are lined up in the next quarter. Next week, our team heads to Mumbai for SATTE, where we’ll be meeting a number of businesses in the region’s biggest B2B Travel Festival. Watch out for our live updates from Aamchi Mumbai next week

We are also experimenting with different layers of content including video and are keen to start a YouTube feed where we will be publishing our conversations with travel marketers, startups and business decision makers. We are also contemplating some research on the key travel developments that are happening within the online space in the SEA region. So you should expect to see more infographics and opinions coming your way.

Most importantly, we are now looking to scale-up our team and are looking for a content expert. So if you have a passion for the travel industry and live by digital content, do give us a shout at info@travhq.com. If you are a travel brand and have an interesting story to share with us, write in to us at editor@travhq.com.

The post A month into our Journey. Here is what’s coming next! appeared first on TravHQ.

When was the last time you walked up to a random stranger at the airport waiting area and struck a new conversation? Or perhaps during that bus journey or with someone during your last flight? Most of the times we are so occupied with our mobile devices that we hardly acknowledge the world around us. Even if we feel like talking to a stranger and striking a conversation, we are unsure whether the other person would reciprocate.

Even in flights, we spend time tinkering with our smartphones in flight mode. During our recent visit to HongKong for the RISE conference, we came across two startups that are trying to enable conversations via their chatting apps specifically designed for such situations. These apps won’t take your device away from you but will help you socialise with strangers nearby. Neither of the apps require a data connection so when you are disconnected from the social media feed and messaging apps, you can try to discover interesting people near you.

AirTalk

‘Social Networks are built around friends, AirTalk around strangers’ is what their promo-flyer says.

Airtalk is an app by Tokyo based OFF Line Corporation that would let you talk to strangers when you happen to be near them. This is an exciting proposition which adds a new dimension to the whole concept of proximity based chatting apps. You don’t have to look up for people or add friends to your network to have a conversation. If there are people around you using AirTalk, simply leave a message and maybe you will be able to start a conversation around some interesting topic. The messages are backed-up on cloud and the profile builder offers the option of integrating with Twitter account which allows the messages to be shared with twitter followers as well.

With AirTalk you can communicate with people within 100m radius without an active internet or data connection – If they do have an iOS device. You can record users who pass each other in a 3km radius and search for other users as well as their posts. The app has a very slick interface and has an intuitive design which makes the overall user experience a great one. Having said that, currently there is little or no awareness of the app in South-East Asia including India and its major user-base seems to be from Japan.

We believe that with some refinements, the app has a great potential for travellers in countries such as India where internet penetration and consistency of data connection continue to be a challenge. Imagine, going to the rain-forests in Coorg for a hike or probably going to areas where there is no 3G connectivity at all. An app like AirTalk can help you to stay connected with your fellow hikers and exchange messages even if there’s no cellular or a data connection.

FlightChat

Another startup that offers an app for connecting with people during flights or at the airportis FlightChat. Designed by Giinger Pte Ltd. in Singapore, FlightChat enables you to trigger chat with people who are on the same app and stay anonymous at the sametime.

FlightChat’s single line description says “Bored while travelling? FLIGHTMODE ON? CHAT ON A PLANE FOR FREE !”

Unlike AirTalk, FlightChat is available to download for Android as well as iOS platform. To start a conversation, you can join an existing group or start a new one. You can create your avatar and during a private chat, you can choose to reveal your identity. User discovery is not just limited to your flight when you are offline but you can discover new users before reaching the airport using an internet connection. To add more fun, they have added some mini games that you can play with other travellers while waiting to board your flight. To make sure that you can stay connected with your new friends after the flight as well, the app synchronises the chats once you are back on-ground.

Our take

Both these apps use connectivity options like Wi-FI or Bluetooth PAN to connect with other app users. While the idea is interesting, such apps require a strong community outreach program to gain initial traction and adoption beyond their countries of origin. For such apps, the growth rate usually goes up as more users join for obvious reasons. They need to target wide geographical areas and make it relevant to travellers.

We don’t see the app being downloaded by users who don’t fly or travel frequently. To make sure they have the app(s) when they do travel, the developers might have to explore the option of adding other features that are relevant to such people. FireChat is a similar app when it comes to basic functionality but they are trying to target a different segment of users with a very different marketing message.

These apps are very fresh in the market at the moment and will take a while to build up momentum. We might see them adding more innovative features to lure more users. We would love to hear more use-cases of such apps from you in comments below.

You can find more updates from RISE here.

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If you have been following the Travel Startups section on TravHQ, by now you would have observed that the online travel industry isn’t just about the OTAs & Airbnbs of the world. There are many travel startups that are shaking various segments of the industry such as trip planning services, hotel bookings apps or even exploring offbeat destinations with locals.

We interacted with an exciting lineup of travel startups on Day 1 at RISE 2015. Our experience on Day 2 with few others, further echoes our belief that this industry is poised to grow at a revolutionary pace, faster than one would imagine.

These startups are solving unique problems either on the consumer side or on the business side. Like most startups, this ride is not going to be a cakewalk as they will face questions about scale, competition and even whether consumer actually needs their services. However, events like RISE, do provide the right platform for these startups to do a self check, understand what they are doing right or wrong with mentorship from peers in the industry. We are enthralled to have connected with so many young startups who are determined to make it big. We have interviewed many of them on Periscope and will very soon have a YouTube feed for you.

Here is a round-up of the travel startups we met on the Day 2 of the RISE Conference.

Singapore based travel startup Travelog offers smart mobile city guides to plan your trips

Hotel Quickly saves travellers time and money by offering dynamic deals at the best hotels in Asia-Pacific

Ireland’s Weestay is a mash-up of CouchSurfing + Airbnb with no cost. In a nutshell, it helps you to find free stay.

Singapore’s Nothing to Hide wants to revolutionise the untapped hotel review segment by providing hoteliers free WiFi in exchange for hotel reviews.

Operating from Hong Kong, Klook is your gateway to find out the best activities to do in Asia.

We will be digging into some of these startups, taking them for a spin and come back with our detailed review sometime soon.

For those who missed the RISE Conference this year, here is why you should definitely attend the next one in 2016 and the Web Summit later this year.

• RISE is your passport to meet like-minded folks such as investors, mentors, potential job seekers and competing startups and the media to share your story  In addition, such events give you the perfect opportunity to identify right partners with whom you can explore collaboration and expand your array of services.
• Other than the exhibiting startups, there are separate tracks such as the Marketing track, Development track and more depending on your industry interests. While 2 days aren’t enough, try to learn and absorb as much as you can.
• Post event networking parties are again a great way to meet more people and talk over some drinks.
• Lastly, it happens in Hong Kong which is located just about 5 hours from India

You can find more updates from RISE here.

The post We are in love with RISE Conference & these Travel Startups appeared first on TravHQ.

Welcome to Hong Kong where we are reporting live to you from the RISE Summit, which is currently being organized in the picturesque venue of Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre. While we were a little late to join the party on Day 1 and actually made it to the summit not before lunch, once we did step in, it was all crazy indeed.

For those of you who don’t know, RISE Summit is brought to you by the awesome bunch of people who organise the “Web Summit”. In its inaugural edition, we have a completely sell-out crowd with over 5000 people attending it from 70+ countries. There is so much happening at the summit, that 2 days do not seem to be sufficient

Here are some really interesting Travel startups that exhibited on the first day. As you would expect from the travel industry, we had exhibitors from Japan, US, Australia and many other countries at the summit.

From an app that allows you to chat with fellow flyers even when your phone is on airplane mode to an app that uses beacons to enhance your on-road travel experience, we had them all!

Here is a short photologue of some of them, more updates & reviews to follow.

Guillaume Panot, CEO of FlightChat app that allows flyers to chat with each other without the need of a bluetooth connection

Malaysian startup Seeties, helps you to explore Asian cities like a local

TripVerse from United States, aims to be the one-stop trip planning app for your next vacations

Singapore based Triplynr helps you to plan that perfect trip by making it easy to search best itineraries

Representing the home country Hong Kong, Sam the Local is an online market place that connects explorers to locals who take them on the best experiences

Odigo is the trip creating and sharing platform to help you plan your visit to Japan

Representing Western Australia, down-under JamJar helps you to explore bars, beans, art, music & food in Western Australia

You can find more updates from RISE here.

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Last week, we had shared our list of travel tech startups who are coming to the RISE Conference. In addition to a fantastic bunch of global startups from across verticals, RISE also has a line-up of exciting speaker sessions where you will get to hear some stories on their initial days of struggle, challenges and growth.

Here is our pick of some sessions, that you certainly can cannot afford to miss.

Opening remarks by Paddy Cosgrave & Casey Lu

We are big fans of Paddy & rest of the team behind RISE and Web Summit. While RISE is being organised in Hong Kong, the Web Summit happens in Dublin and we’ve just got the word that there is an India edition called SURGE planned for next year in Bengaluru. These initial “5” minutes would set the tone for your 2 days at RISE. Be there and hear the guys behind the world’s biggest tech summit on the concept of RISE.

From West to East: Outside Making an Impact

Recent trends indicate the emergence of many startups in Singapore & Hong Kong whose entrepreneurs are from international markets such as Russia, France, UK and even US. Starting up in a different country has its own challenges in-terms of understanding the culture, the geography and the demands of the consumers. This panel session featuring Nathan Huey from SoftLayer, Sam Halse from Adyen, Allan Grant from Hired and James Griffiths from South China Morning Post will focus on How to make an impact in Asia when you are not from the region.

Line them up: Replicating Success Across Borders

This one should be a classical talk for all travel startups looking to expand beyond the geographies of their origin country. We have been meeting many startups specially in the travel planning segment who are providing offbeat experiences to their consumers. Hear LINE’s new CEO Takeshi Idezawa on how they travelled beyond Japan to countries such as Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico, and the US and reach 560+ million registered users.

Searching for the Best User Experience

Travel startups which are in the space of destination marketing should focus on optimising their websites. Once users do land on their website or mobile app, the real challenge is to delight their users with visual experience. If you have a new mobile app or a website, you will learn how to improve user’s experience in this session by Shay Banon from Elastic & Jeremy Ben Sadoun from Algolia.

The key to millennial engagement

Travel or no travel, ultimately all of us are looking to reach out to our consumers. So how do you tap the digitally savvy millennial generation? Learnt it all from the cracking line-up of speakers which features Ray Chan from 9GAG, Michael Wolf from Activate & James Griffiths from South China Morning Post.

Does the best product win?

This session featuring Dave McClure from 500 Startups, Brian Koo from Formation 8, Hugo Burge from Momondo Group and Pamela Ambler from Thomson Reuters will give an overall insight from investor perspective to the attendees.

Oh wait! If you thought these are only sessions of interest, check out the entire schedule of both Days. Day 2 of the summit has some amazing tracks on 3D-control technology , wearable technology, robotic control and on branding aspects.

We can’t wait to get to RISE. If you are interested, rush to the registration page for any last minute spots

You can find more updates from RISE here.

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The much awaited 2 day Rise Conference kicks-off in Hong Kong next week on July 31 – August 1 2015 at the HKCC (Hong Kong Convention Centre). For those of you are not aware, RISE is the first ever tech-summit in Asia brought to you by the same team that organizes Web Summit, held annually in Dublin every November. The event gives a fantastic opportunity to hear and meet exciting startups from across the globe that are solving business & consumer problems.

The inaugural edition of RISE conference also has a line-up of Travel startups from countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, USA and Australia. Here is our ultimate list of 7 startups exhibiting their travel prowess at RISE.

Image Credits: Rise Conference Facebook Page

Travelog.me, Singapore

Singapore based Travelog is an iPhone only mobile travel guide helping you to plan your next trip in an easy way. By downloading the app, you can join a community of like-minded travellers, bloggers, local experts and receive tailored recommendations on top things to do.

We will be keen to understand how are they are different from similar services and where exactly do they fit in the traveller’s cycle?

Wanderlust, Australia

Australian startup, Wanderlust claims to build a travel tribe consisting of strangers from different countries enabling travellers to take help when in need. Can they change they way we travel? We’ll find out at RISE

Jamjar, Australia

Another startup from Australia, Jamjar is a travel discovery app for the explorers who are on a constant quest to find out the most happening places. They seem to be focussed on the Australian region for now but we will be keen to chat-up with the Jamjar team for more info.

Klook, Hong Kong

Representing host country Hong Kong, Klook caught our attention from the list. They are providing unique travel experiences across entire APAC at discounted rates. For instance, Bicycling experience at Kyoto or exploring Bangkok on a Scooter.

However, the competition seems to be very high for services providing offbeat and custom travel experiences. We will know Klook’s future roadmap soon.

Weestay, Hong Kong

Weestay is also from Hong Kong and their single line pitch is that they combine CouchSurfing & Airbnb removing the element of cost from between. Simply speaking, you can find free accommodation via network of your friends using Weestay.

Their focus seems to be backpackers who are on a shoe-string budget. Who else are they targeting? We’ll learn more at RISE.

HotelQuickly, Hong Kong

HotelQuickly is the Uber for hotels in APAC providing last minute dynamic deals on your bookings. We had recently reviewed an Indian startup RoomsTonite that seems to be pretty similar in-terms of overall offering. More on HotelQuickly coming your way pretty soon!

Tripverse, USA

Completing the list is Tripverse, a travel startup coming all the way from United States. Tripverse is an offline readable itinerary viewer that makes creating, viewing, and sharing travel plans simple and easy. There is no dearth of itinerary planning apps but we are optimistic that Tripverse has a unique positioning and target market. We’ll discover more of that, when we catch-up.

So if you are a travel startup coming to RISE, we will be keen to meet you in person, hear your stories and understand how you are making tripping experience better  If we have missed you out from the above list, please drop us a note at editor@travhq.com.

You can find more updates from RISE here.

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