{"id":527863,"date":"2010-04-14T18:37:26","date_gmt":"2010-04-14T22:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=113154"},"modified":"2010-04-14T18:37:26","modified_gmt":"2010-04-14T22:37:26","slug":"social-travel-app-%e2%80%9cwhere-i%e2%80%99ve-been%e2%80%9d-gets-funded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/527863","title":{"rendered":"Social Travel App \u201cWhere I\u2019ve Been\u201d Gets Funded"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Where I’ve Been, a company<\/a> whose Facebook application lets users chart their travel plans and discuss them with friends, has gotten an additional round of funding from the co-founders of Groupon, a group-buying service that reportedly just closed its own<\/a> round of funding valuing the company at $1.2 billion. The money raised by Chicago-based Where I’ve Been is somewhat smaller than that, however, at $750,000. The company — which was widely rumored to have been acquired<\/a> by TripAdvisor for $3 million in 2007, in a report that turned out to be false — raised $1 million in 2008 from Chicago-based Sink or Swim, which was acquired last year by TD Ameritrade.<\/p>\n

The latest round of financing came from an entity called Lightbank<\/a>, a recently formed investment vehicle created by Groupon founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell. Where I’ve Been says that it will use the money to “aggressively expand” its current user base of 9 million registered users, who the company says have shared close to 500 million “travel intents” or travel plans on the application’s interactive map. Users can share either trips they have taken or plan to take, then discuss them with their friends and other Facebook users. Lefkofsky said that Where I’ve Been “has enormous potential to change the landscape of the travel industry.”<\/p>\n

According to the company’s release, Groupon President and COO Rob Solomon sits on the Where I’ve Been advisory board, and was formerly a partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, as well as president and CEO of SideStep and a senior VP at Yahoo.<\/p>\n

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):<\/strong><\/p>\n

Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Future<\/a><\/p>\n

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy<\/a> of Flickr user Dunechaser<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Where I’ve Been, a company whose Facebook application lets users chart their travel plans and discuss them with friends, has gotten an additional round of funding from the co-founders of Groupon, a group-buying service that reportedly just closed its own round of funding valuing the company at $1.2 billion. The money raised by Chicago-based Where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2260,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-527863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2260"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}