CouchSurfing is a hospitality exchange service by which users can request free short-term homestays or interact with other people who are interested in travel. It is accessible via a website and mobile app. It uses a subscription business model, and while hosts are not allowed to charge for lodging, members in some countries must pay a fee to access the platform.
Tripadvisor, Inc. is an American company that operates online travel agencies, comparison shopping websites, and mobile apps with user-generated content.
Kayak is a metasearch engine for travel services, including airline flights, hotels, rental cars, and vacation packages. It is owned and operated by Booking Holdings.
Trippy is a social and mobile friend-sourced tool launched in September 2011 founded by technology entrepreneur J.R. Johnson. who also founded Lunch.com, OneTime.com and VirtualTourist which was acquired by Expedia in 2008.
eBuddy is a privately held Dutch software company that offers instant messaging services. As of 2011, eBuddy reported 100 million downloads. The company's flagship service is XMS, a proprietary cross-platform instant messaging service. After some changes of ownership, the company is now again owned by its original founders, Onno Bakker and Jan-Joost Rueb.
Shazam is an application that can identify music based on a short sample played using the microphone on the device. It was created by the British company Shazam Entertainment, based in London, and has been owned by Apple since 2018. The software is available for Android, macOS, iOS, Wear OS, watchOS and as a Google Chrome extension.
Gowalla is a location-based social networking service. It originally launched in 2007 and closed in 2012, but was relaunched on March 10, 2023. Users are able to check in at "Spots" in their local vicinity, either through a dedicated mobile application or through the mobile website. Checking-in will sometimes produce virtual "items" for the user, some of which are developed to be promotional tools for the game's partners. As of November 2010 there were approximately 600,000 users. In January 2021, Gowalla made an announcement that the app is coming back in 2022.
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.
Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver, and Beijing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. It aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites, and other websites, presents it in magazine format, and allows users to "flip" through the articles, images, and videos being shared. Readers can also save stories into Flipboard magazines. As of March 2016 the company claims there have been 28 million magazines created by users on Flipboard. The service can be accessed via web browser, or by a Flipboard application for Microsoft Windows and macOS, and via mobile apps for iOS and Android. The client software is available at no charge and is localized in 21 languages.
tvtag was a social networking website and mobile app for television fans. Users "check into" the shows, movies and sports that they consumed using a website, mobile website, or mobile app.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.
Magisto is a technology company founded in 2009 to provide artificial intelligence (AI) technology for video editing. It produces an online video editor of the same name for automated video editing and production aimed at consumers and businesses. The company was acquired by Vimeo in 2019 for an estimated US$200 million.
Buffer is a software application for the web and mobile, designed to manage accounts in social networks, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, as well as analyze their results and engage with their community. It is owned by remote company Buffer Inc.
Scan is a mobile app development company headquartered in Provo, Utah, United States. The company was founded in January 2011 by Garrett Gee together with his college friends Ben Turley and Kirk Ouimet. The company, owned and operated by Scan, Inc, was acquired by Snapchat in 2014 for $54 million.
Musement is an online platform for activities, tours, museums, shows and art events which launched in March 2014. a service initially focused in Europe and then progressively expanding to the rest of the world. Musement aggregates third-party activities and tickets for users to book online. Tour suppliers have access to upload and manage various activities through the platform. The company's offers are available via website, iOS and Android. Once a customer books an activity, they receive a digital voucher or e-ticket for the reservation which can be saved on their device or printed. The company has four major competitors in this market, Viator, GetYourGuide, Berlin-based startup, Klook, Hong Kong–based startup, and Peek.com, a U.S.-based startup. The headquarters are located in Milan.
Sunrise is a discontinued electronic calendar application for mobile and desktop. The service was launched in 2013 by designers Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van. In October 2015, Microsoft announced that they had merged the Sunrise Calendar team into the larger Microsoft Outlook team where they will work closely with the Microsoft Outlook Mobile service.
Gogobot was an online travel business headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company was rebranded Trip.com in November 2016 and acquired by the Ctrip Group in 2017. Founded in 2010, by Travis Katz and Ori Zaltzman, by 2014 the company was the fifth most visited travel-planning site in the United States.
Hinge is an online dating application. Using an algorithm, the app displays potential matches, allowing the user to dismiss or attempt to match by responding to a specific piece of content on their profile. The service emphasizes uploading user-generated content in a variety of formats, such as photos, videos, and "prompts" as a way to express personality and appearance. The app is fully owned by Match Group as of February 2019.
