Some professional (and good) news from me, I’m delighted to announce I’m joining the board of AVUXI!

Long time readers will recall my post from last year about investing in the business. Since then things have gone well for AVUXI - they’ve been able to win several key online travel industry clients (and a few of the bigger names in the industry are currently testing the service), and also closed a significant investment round lead by travel giant Amadeus.

Meanwhile the team continues to steadily improve the product. AVUXI gathers data from many different sources and condenses it into useful information. Booking a hotel in a city you don’t know well? Want to quickly understand if the neighbourhood is good for nightlife or shopping or near the top sightseeing areas? AVUXI’s heat maps and location scores let you easily do that, and thus improve the conversion rate.

Here is a little demo page I whipped up a while back that shows the service in action, but you can also see it in this great video from AVUXI customer KAYAK.

As I learned during my time building Nestoria, building a service on top of an ocean of data and keeping it simple to use is an exceptionally difficult challenge. The sheer volume of data is always whispering to you, tempting you to add more features, more complication. It is a very hard siren song to ignore, it requires amazing discipline to keep a service simple. This is one of the areas I hope my experience can be useful for the team.

Right now the main focus is information for travelers, but over time other categories of location data will be added. I have seen some mockups of some of the new tools coming from AVUXI and I am blown away at how they continually find news tricks to make things even simpler for their customers and the end users. I look forward to working with AVUXI founders Alexis and Roberto and the rest of the team, on the next chapter of the AVUXI story.

If you’re in Barcelona and like geodata, AVUXI is hiring - you should join us.

One final, personal point - AirBnB if you are reading this, you need to integrate this service ASAP. I’m going to a wedding in May in a city I don’t know that well and just booked. You have great info about the apartments, but need to complement it with a way quickly understand the neighbourhood. Would make everything much simpler. Thx.