It’s been a busy week for the rome2rio team. After a bunch of engineering groundwork over the past two months we’ve been shipping a bunch of changes to the site and adding more transport coverage (mostly trains) around the globe.
The big event this week was the release of an integrated carbon offset calculator. After our launch in April we began working with Offset Options, an exciting startup that is creating a market place for carbon offset providers. Through the partnership, rome2rio now displays the carbon footprint for each multi-modal journey to the user. What’s especially cool is that Offset Options provide a list of projects, and the user can select one to offset their trip. Examples include a geothermal power plant in Turkey or a hydro plant in China. This gives a lot more transparency to the whole process and where your money is going. Now rome2rio provides three axis for comparing vehicle-agnostic journeys; time, cost and carbon footprint.
The carbon calculator launch was covered by a tech blog sites including techcrunch, tnooz, lifehacker, and techin5.
Yesterday we also pushed out a new release that included Irish trains. Ireland has a reasonably extensive train network that links popular tourist destinations such as Dublin, Belfast, Derry, Cork, and Galway. To make planning your trip in Ireland a bit more complicated there are two independant rail network providers; Irish Rail in the republic and Northern Ireland Railways in the north. There are also a couple of ferry routes linking Ireland to England and Scotland, which we’ve also added to rome2rio to make planning your next Irish adventure easier. Give it a go now, and try a query like this one: http://www.rome2rio.com/?colwyn+bay/kilkenny
Finally, after winning the Victoria startup category, this week rome2rio won the national, start-up category merit prize at the iAwards. An exciting honour for us, and a great confidence boost that the ICT industry in Australia see the merit in what we’re doing. The top prize went to 99dresses, a very cool start-up based in Sydney and run by the impressive entrepreneur Nikki Durkin.