The very first post

Well I had to start somewhere, so here is our first post.

The name: ScotchHopper
In case you were wondering, I was sitting with my brother-in-law on a Saturday night last September, and we were trying to come up with a catchy name. Catchy maybe is the wrong word - memorable perhaps. The definition of "hopscotch" is to journey quickly and directly from one usually far place to another. That is definitely a travel-related concept. And then we also wanted to remind ourselves that we are here FOR someone, namely the traveler who is seeking unique experiences in travel. One quick play on the term and ScotchHopper was born.

The previous paragraph already captures what we are about, and I think it makes sense to reiterate it:

1. We are about travel
2. We are about enabling unique experiences
3. We are about you and the community

Why we came about
I read a really good book back in February 2007, Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (http://www.wikinomics.com/). What they talked about resonated with me. Also, my wife has a business providing travel services that are customized and personalized (http://www.adventures-travels.com/). It just clicked. While there are many websites that try and gather tips and reviews and organize them and make them searchable, I kept thinking that they were missing the "mass collaboration" that Don and Anthony were talking about.

The concept is that by letting people come together and exchanging about a possible product (in our case, unique experiences in travel), they could come up with a better product than any corporation would. The corporation should focus on enabling the creative process and then supply the product. Leave the conception to the masses: they will self-organize and make it a reality. Google believes it too: they are awarding $10M to generate ideas for cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users (http://code.google.com/android/adc.html). If we could let people create trips and select experiences in this way, combining, composing, collaborating, we could really change travel for the better. Imagine that trip of a lifetime, but every time you travel. Now that is a challenge we are ready for.

An example is always good to clearly illustrate. Think of reviews of a restaurant. Some say it's good, some say it's bad, there's an average and then some text. But I have no appreciation of that average with respect to who gave the ratings. Is this average rating pertinent to me personally? I know who I am, and if I could filter the rating based on similar individuals (assuming I have a large enough sample of course), the rating could mean an order of magnitude more to me. Some people travel to see museums, others do it to sweat. Their concept of a perfect trip will be really different, and yet they could give the exact same rating for the restaurant. Would it mean the same thing to you? I'll tell you what I think - it won't to me!

This is but a tiny example of some of the problems we want to solve for you. If there is one commitment we can say today: we will be different. We are excited to embark on this process, and hopefully you will give us comments and feedback. I can not stress how much importance we will give to your thoughts and opinions - please share. We are a community so let us know what you think.

In my next few posts, I will try to give you some ideas of what we found out there when we did our market survey. I might even blog about specific sites. I am not a critic for a newspaper, and I am not a negative guy by nature so don't expect me to trash anything here. As a matter of fact, it will be quite the contrary: I have been so impressed with the originality and the focus, or the success, of some of these travel-related sites. As I said we will be different. In time, I will share more with you about our "secret sauces", but for a little while, I will focus on what we will be different from. As I said at the beginning, it should be fun and entertaining. And if it's not, tell me :)