down the avenue

BT Tower by Night

BT hosted a magical dinner for the Traveling Geeks at the BT Tower in West London last night. BT's CEO Ian Livingston greeted us (below) and JP Rangaswami followed up with introductions to countless meet-and-greets, which included BT and NESTA managers and directors, as well as other partners and affiliates, such as a team from Ribbit, over from Silicon Valley for a board meeting. (they were acquired by BT roughly a year ago).

The view was incredible:

The food a treat (scallop salad, jersey royal potato pancetta frisse sauce with slow roasted beef fillet, girolles, baby carrot broad beans and summer truffles with red wine reduction).

The hospitality and service incredible (our telecom giants could learn a thing or two). Below a few fun snapshots from our evening.

The BT creative mastermind behind our a collage with character-like images of each of the Geeks...

Ribbit's Don Thorson, Tom Foremski, Rocky

Howard Rheingold, Sarah Lacy, Joe, Renee Blodgett, Meghan Asha, Jeff Saperstein

Sarah Lacy

Ian and Jeff Saperstein at dinner

Two of our BT hosts and Renee Blodgett, Sarah Lacy and Susan Bratton

Susan Bratton and Sky Schuyler

Meghan Asha

The Geeks crowd into one of the last elevators south for the night...

London even delivered us a sunset...

And Robert Scoble wasn't quite done shooting.....all the way home

Voyij Adds European Destinations: Tons of Deals Under One Roof

Client Voyij.com, the most comprehensive site on the web for travel deals and sales, has now added European destinations.

For the first time, travelers now have one central location where they can discover the widest variety and largest number of European travel deals and specials under one roof.'

The concept behind Voyij is simple. Voyij fills a void on the web that people want: “what travel destination is on sale today?” With Voyij, you can explore and discover travel sales and deals you never knew existed independent of origin, destination or dates.

Other travel sites concentrate on real-time inventory and the few that do focus on deals have substantially less offerings, focus on one aspect of travel but not another, i.e., hotels, or do not include filters so you can narrow down what you want.

Travelers simply enter the city they are leaving from and Voyij does the rest. You can choose to review the deals and specials that are on sale that day, which is a compelling part of the discovery experience Voyij offers. Because the site grabs deals from hundreds of travel suppliers, you often learn about destinations and deals you never knew existed and from sites you never heard of.

Additionally, Voyij goes one step further. If you choose to narrow down your scope, a second step allows you to filter by region, time of year, popular destinations, hotel star ratings, beach hot spots and more.

These features are particularly useful for European destinations where popular hot spots are often more expensive and booked up months in advance during the summer months.

NY Times Useful Travel Sites for the Practical Traveler

Client Voyij today makes the NY Times in a piece for the practical traveler looking for useful sites to visit.

Clark Howard on Cheap Online Travel Deals

Client Voyij makes the Clark Howard show.

Great New Travel Sites on MSNBC

Great new travel sites on MSNBC including client Voyij for travel deals and sales.

Eve Ensler on the Atrocities in the Congo

Eve Ensler, probably most well known for her creation of Vagina Monologues, was interviewed on the D stage last week. She's not a geek, VC or a start-up or Fortune 500 CEO, so it was an interesting and curious add to the schedule.

When she came onto the stage, 20% of men walked out of the room. A couple of days later during a reading of her new play OPC in Los Angeles that I attended, she said, "I think they see themselves as business men."

Meaning perhaps that business men who have their own issues, don't need to know about or be aware of the issues in the Congo, what companies could do to create rape-free products, or how it may in fact impact their own businesses tens of thousands of miles away.

Years away from her original work on female sexual violence, she's speaking up around the world and putting new movements and voices into action. At D, she talked about what was happening in the mines in the Congo, how hundreds of thousands of women are getting raped and die, and how most of them go undiscovered.

If the women don’t die immediately from the rape, they die years later from AIDs. The mines are largely controlled by Rwandan and Uganda troops. Control means something entirely different in central Africa where dictators get away with things that are too painful for people in the west to talk about.

Troops come into a town and rape women in front of their husbands, force sons to rape their mothers, encourage gang rapes and then take over the mines. They use sexual violence as a tactic to enforce slave labor for no or minimum wage. They control the mines by raping a husband’s wife in front of him. They demoralize men and their self esteem. After taking control, they export the minerals from the mines and profit.

As for what can be done to stop these atrocities, Eve says boycotts are not a good idea. "A boycott would increase the violence," she says. "Boycotts will hurt the Congolese people.

They are already too poor. They're only making $4 a day in these mines or $300-500 a year. It needs to be done in a way that serves the people of the Congo. Companies should hire those third parties to survey these mines. Those who are currently working the mines would turn them into the militia if we created boycotts."

It's not enough to simply have a signed piece of paper that says a product comes from a conflict free area. She talks about how things are all interconnected, a way to demonstrate to those still in the room and sadly to those who walked out, that because everything is connected, awareness in the west matters, particularly among men who have power and money.

"Is it an accidental thing that I’m a playwright who gets moved into a world of sexual exploitation and violence who has then moved into a world of larger human rights violations and issues?"

She adds, "we can’t really look at sexual exploitation anymore without looking at economic exploitation. $7-11 billion is being made a year from sex trafficking and sexual violence tactics are being used more and more because its cheap warfare."

"What would you do in the Congo?" asks Kara Swisher who is one-on-one with her on-stage. Eve answers quickly - "have companies document and trace the roots of the mines, have surveyors witness the atrocities and track them and to ensure that this sexual violence doesn’t happen. Learn how to create rape-free products."

"All of these issues are very much intermingled. Documenting and putting surveyors there who can oversee things and witness what’s going on. Ensure that human rights violations are not occurring. People need to learn what is happening to get these products.”

About her work with V-Day, they're apparently now in 130 different countries. She encourages companies to think of their involvement in creating rape-free products as a 'selling and marketing proposition.' It’s something that can move the economy forward.

She says, "we have to think about how to create products that are not connected to violation of human rights. We have to see this as a much more holistic integrated process – this is crucial."

Some companies have made pledges to clean up their products, but companies can do much more than a pledge to ensure people don’t suffer in the process of creating their products. It's about the bigger picture: specific work that changes the situation on-the-ground and human consciousness in the rest of the world.

Hear hear Eve. I was most definitely one of the 80% who didn't leave the room and was eagerly listening in the front row. What happens in the Congo should matter to us in the west. By turning our backs on something that doesn't impact us directly, we turn our back on humanity. Why else are we here?

Go Eve. And go to whoever Eve touches who can make a difference, whether that be their time or their wallets.

La Calle Mission: Poetry & Visuals in Motion

Everyone's having fun with video. A relative of someone I know was involved in the creation and production of this amateur video about San Francisco's Mission District. Directed by Xaul Reyes, poem by Huracan Gomez.

While the quality is sketchy at times, remember that these guys don't have video experience and simply by playing around with basic video editing tools, they can throw Huracan's poem up on the web in no time without spending a fortune and give viewers a pretty realistic view of the lower Mission.

Cool Factor in SF Gate

Client Voyij makes SF Gate this morning. Rock on.

"Cool factor: Voyij assembles all the available deals based on your original city, allowing you to see any current applicable sales. You can refine the search based on travel dates, hotel star ratings, destination, activities and price. The site is especially useful for people who are interested in seeing deals first and are not wedded to particular destinations or dates."

Shopping for Travel Deals

Client Voyij gets picked up in LA Times, Lifehacker and a smattering of Web 2.0 and travel blogs this week following their launch on Wednesday.

Voyij Brings People the Most Comprehensive Travel Deals Under One Roof

Client Voyij.com launches today to bring people the most comprehensive travel deals and sales under one roof. No more need to search hundreds of sites’ deal tabs. If you travel as much as I do, you know how much lost time is spent searching for bargains.

Voyij is designed for the flexible traveler. If you know your exact date and location, then sites like Kayak are better bets, but if you have some flexibility in your schedule and want to explore & discover or be able to refine travel offers that match your exact criteria, then it's definitely worth a visit.

The site is being launched by a crew of SideStep alumni, who sold to Kayak for nearly $200 million a couple of years ago. Veterans in this space, they developed the technology behind Voyij because they were frustrated by not having a way to easily search for and find just the best travel deals, sales and bargains on the web.

Says CEO Brent Stewart, "with Voyij, people can now find the best offers and specials on the web from one site, while learning about interesting new destination and vacation options from websites they never heard of and places they never thought of. It’s deal discovery and refinement in one place.”

Voyij fills a void on the web that people want: “what travel destination is on sale today?” You simply enter where you are and Voyij presents the most comprehensive list of travel deals, sales and offers on the web at a given time. Not every destination or date is on sale every day, but Voyij allows you to find what is on sale at the time you search. In the process, you will explore and discover new travel destinations to a variety of exciting places.

Rob Solomon, an online travel industry veteran who formerly ran Yahoo's Travel business and was CEO of SideStep says about the launch: "having worked with the founding team at SideStep, I know the Voyij team has the persistence, ability, technology, and experience to build a sustainable and differentiated online travel company."

In addition to finding new and unexpected travel possibilities, you can filter by criteria that matters to you most. Voyij provides complete filtering for what is important to each individual person including travel dates, hotel star ratings, location, activities, price, and more. Unlike other sites that may list random deals, with just a few clicks Voyij.com quickly finds offers that match your exact criteria.

It's meta-search at its best. Not only do we spend far too much time researching, planning and booking for that romantic weekend or summer vacation, but we have to go to far too many websites to do it. It is not uncommon for people to visit over 20 sites to research their travel needs and if you’re specifically interested in travel deals and sales, you need to navigate through complex deal tabs with no filtering capabilities and hope your destination and timeframe show up.

Voyij leverages their metasearch technology to solve the deal and sale search problem. Literally tens of thousands of deals across hundreds of suppliers are brought together in one place. From one central location, Voyij searches travel “deal” and “sale” offers exclusively, including last minute specials, sales, promotional rates and excess (undersold) inventory, so you get the widest selection of offers from any one site.

Below are Priyank Gandhi, Brent Stewart and Paul Kim at last week's Plug and Play EXPO in Sunnyvale, CA.