TechCrunch
Travel Search Site Wego Closes $17M Series C
Travel search site, Wego, just closed its Series C round of $17 million.
The round was led by Crescent Point, a fund manager with offices in Singapore and China that focuses on investments in Asia.
Wego’s site provides a metasearch across about 600 airline carriers and 400,000 hotels, and charges business clients based on referrals to travelers coming in.
Earlier this year, it teamed up with home rental marketplace Travelmob to include the latter’s 400,000 Airbnb-style listings in its search too.
This round of funding brings the total so far to $36 million for the eight-year-old company, said Ross Veitch, Wego’s co-founder and CEO.
Wego was founded by Veitch and Craig Hewett, two Australians living in Singapore, where its headquarters are. The company also has offices in Australia, Indonesia, India and most recently in Dubai.
Veitch said the company plans to use the funding to hire more people for its headquarters and to push its expansion in the Middle East. About 50 people work in Wego’s Singapore offices, and he expects to add about 20 more marketing staff and a couple of data scientists to the headcount there. Additionally, about 12 country development managers will be hired as well in Singapore; each person will be responsible for a new country, and will accompany the spin out of a new office in his territory if business there reaches a tipping point.
The point on data scientists is indicative of Wego’s plans to make its user data more interesting for corporate clients. “We’ve been collecting data from users since day 1—every flight they’ve searched for and taken, brand preferences, favorable price points, destinations they like, business or economy flights, five or four star hotels,” said Veitch. This data mined from the audience segments can be used to augment display ads on Wego, as well as on its ad bidding exchange.
Advertising contributes about a third of its revenue at the moment. The rest of it comes from referral clicks or successful transactions at the hotel or airline end, depending on the contract with Wego.
Wego competes with sites like Zuji and Agoda, although Wego embeds the others’ search results in its own.
The lead investor in this round, Crescent Point, has had previous investments in the travel space. According to its site, it was the second-largest shareholder in Malaysian airline, AirAsia before the company went public in 2004. Crescent Point has also invested in Chinese video-sharing site Tudou.
Bing For Schools Will Strip Out All Ads, Beef Up Privacy Protections And Adult Content Filtering
Bing is taking a step to hep make its products more appealing for school-age children, with Bing For Schools, an opt-in program targeting K-12 institutions launching later this year. The program is context-specific version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine that gets rid of all ads from search results, and offers some bolstered privacy protections and more rigorous SafeSearch filtering of adult content.
Bing For Schools is a completely voluntary, opt-in program for schools in the U.S., so it’s still possible for any school to offer up the standard, none-modified version of Bing as well. Opting-in means Bing rolling out its more student-friendly version for anyone who types “Bing.com” into any URL field on any computer in the school’s network. It’s completely free for any participating school, too.
The Bing team isn’t sharing too much about what’s going on with Bing For Schools in terms of specifics at this point (details are still beingn pinned down), but the aim of the project is to help keep kids from getting distracted or being sold to by advertisers in an educational environment, and to help protect kids by defaulting to the strict setting of SafeSearch and disabling the option to change it. Finally, it’s not just about taking things away: Bing will also add short lesson plans that help teach digital literacy to its homepage images, to encourage critical thinking skills.
Of course, Bing is promoting this as a purely giving move, but should it prove successful, it will give the company a way to seed its search engine early with educational institutions across the U.S., who will likely encourage its use as part of the program. There’s a lot of value in figuring into the lives of students early in their education in terms of later adoption, so Bing For Schools isn’t just an investment in the future of our kids, it’s an investment Microsoft is making in Bing, too.
Bing rival Google offers a host of tools for educators, including Search Education and Google Scholar, but this approach by Microsoft could help it gain more ground in early- and middle-stage education, which is a big advantage to have.
Turkish Police Shoot Down Drone As It Flies Over Protestors
As personal drones become more usable – and more ubiquitous – I think we’ll see more and more scenes like this one. The video, taken in Istanbul by a protester named Jenk Kose, shows the quadcopter falling out of the sky after being shot at by the police. The quadcopter’s camera failed when it was hit, but Jenk was able to save some of the footage.
Jenk wrote:
I contacted Jenk about the event and he had a few things to say. “I have no idea why they shot it down,” he said. “I’ve been flying that model every day for the last four weeks.”
He said he will be uploading more video later this week.
FOOTAGE FROM RC DRONE THAT WAS SHOT DOWN BY POLICE / Polis Tarafindan Dusurulen Helikopter [HD] from Jenk K on Vimeo.
This video, accompanied by some stirring music, shows some of the footage Jenk took with the quadcopter before it was blasted out of the sky. While I could see the danger inherent in having a quadcopter flying over a big crowd, I would say the violent reaction was a bit much.
ACTUAL SCENE OF TURKISH POLICE SHOOTING RC DRONE / Polisin Ucan Kamerayi Vurma Ani [HD] from Jenk K on Vimeo.
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