Trip planning helper TripIt has announced today their Series B round of financing to the tune of $5.1 million. TripIt notes that the largest investors in this round are: Sabre Holdings, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and European Founders Fund. The company claims the money will be used to, "expand development, marketing and support for the rapidly growing number of travelers who rely on TripIt."

Oliver Samwer, European Founders Fund said, "The diverse European travel market is ideally suited for a service like TripIt that helps organize travel plans made across multiple travel suppliers." I am still looking for the revenue generation side of TripIt. If they are a post-sale service, then will an affiliate scheme work? Will users think of TripIt as more than just a receipt/itinerary application?

TripIt recently launched a new mobile site and also their closeness alerts earlier this year.

Partner Links
– Web Jobs
– NY Tech Directory
– CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group
– CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page
– Purchase an Apple iPhone

TripIt is announcing the launch of a mobile service today called TripIt Mobile. TripIt aggregates your trip plans into a nice "folder" for each trip which makes taking the actual trip easier. Instead of carrying around printouts of your travel plans, TripIt can bundle it together and now deliver it directly to your mobile for later retrieval.

The company also noted that the mobile version is great for their "closeness alerts". These alerts tell you when someone on your TripIt friends list is near where you will be near. I wrote about these alerts before and had concerns about the privacy of my trips. Check out the explanation for more details.

I am still looking forward to seeing how this company plans to generate revenue since their service is free. They have a travel search which I am assuming they make a rev share on but isn’t TripIt an "after the purchase" service?

Partner Links
– Web Jobs
– NY Tech Directory
– CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group
– CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page
– Purchase an Apple iPhone

Trip planning service TripIt is launching a few userful updates to their service today. The most useful is their updated calendar integration which now syncs itineraries with any personal calendar that supports iCal, including Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, and Plaxo.

We’ve reviewed the service before but here is the simple description: take your email trip confirmations, email them into TripIt and get a nicely formatted page of your trip plan - almost like the old days TripTiks from AAA. Then you can share the plan with family and friends and, as noted above, add it to your calendar.

They’ve also added the ability to accept trip confirmations from Aer Lingus, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, Tiger Airways, Virgin Blue and Avis Europe, Amtrak, Eurostar, GNER, UK Trainline and VIA Rail.

What’s interesting is a discussion I had with a fellow at the NY Tech Meetup about TripIt. He said he wouldn’t use this service because it really doesn’t save much time. I think the real benefit of TripIt is in the one printout and the sharing ability. When I travel, I print out every hotel, air, rail confirmation — with this I would only need for one printout.

Triple A (AAA) needs to acquire TripIt fast.

Editor’s note: We were provided a 10AM embargo time, but as other sites have posted this information prior to 10AM, we shall follow. They might have had different embargo times.

Online store creator Zlio is in the beginning stages of launching their Version 3 of their application. When we interviewed founder Jeremie Berrebi he described Zlio as, "Zlio helps you start your own online shop in 5 minutes! Even if you don’t have anything to sell! Zlio offers you to choose from an exhaustive catalogue of thousands of products and arrange your own ZlioShop without programming anything!"

Check out the Zlio blog for more details on the upcoming release which appears to launch "soon". They are using the strategy of sharing bits and bits before the full launch. This can have positive and negative buzz effects. If they keep it to a short duration and deliver on the dates they promise, it’s positive. If they miss dates, and/or keep the game going for a long period, their shopkeepers might become frustrated.

The first piece of the upgrade is the management interface split between store promotion and store management. Here is an example of the updated version:

Source:CenterNetworks -

TripIt, the itinerary planning service, has added some additional functionality over the past month. Restaurants and Rail are now available to add to your itineraries. Check out the service demo.

It’s a very easy service to use - email your bookings to TripIt and then you receive a response email. It handles almost any type of booking information from any service provider. After that you add everything into your TripPlan and then you receive an organized trip plan with lots of info about the location you are going to visit. It’s a great organization tool for keeping track of a trip. They have a social feature whereby you can add other people to view your plan and select users to edit your plan. Great for managers and their assistants. I could see a whitelabel version of this tool for the corporate environment doing very, very well.

We wrote about TripIt at TechCrunch40 and I believe they have seen the most buzz, both online and in print, since their launch.