The Holiday Contest winners have been selected! Thank you to everyone who wrote guides and reviewed existing trails. You are contributing to an ever-growing valuable resource to find trails and discover the outdoors.

The following EveryTrail users will receive an EveryTrail T-shirt for their efforts:
Sestrales
AleP
ManawatuNZ
kirkastroth
Achaetes
beachwalker
Edithcowanuni
glichnos
dimyep
sjsteph
jimanikki
fabiorome

Thank you again!! To find out about updates and future contests,
follow us on twitter: @everytrail
or on find EveryTrail on Facebook

Until next time, happy trails!

Update: January 20, 2012
We have received a couple of pictures from our happy winners proudly sporting their new EveryTrail shirts:

AleP

kirkastroth

‘Tis the season, and to show our thanks for all of your support in 2011 and years past, we decided to open up a fun Holiday contest. In the spirit of giving and helping others, this contest will be focused around helping others plan the perfect trip. With so many amazing trips, stunning pictures, and local expertise shared in the EveryTrail community, I imagine that together we can create something very helpful for others.

Contest 1: Review the trails you have hiked

As we move forward with EveryTrail looking into the future of the service and community, we see a huge need and value out of trail reviews. Imagine being able to check trail conditions or hazards by reading a review of a fellow member who hiked the trail only a few days ago. With more ratings and reviews, it helps our system find the best trails to recommend for your specific needs.

From now until the end of the year (12/31 11:59pm, Pacific Time) we will record all Guide and Destination reviews. You will receive 1 point for every review you write (only trails you have done), and an extra 1-2 points based on how helpful we think your review is for other community members.

The top 5 reviewers will receive EveryTrail T-shirts, and we will select another 5 in a raffle-style drawing, where every point you have earned counts as a raffle entry (no duplicate winners).

You can find a list of destinations and guides that we think you have been to based on your shared trips by going to http://www.everytrail.com/user/todo.

Remember, even if you do not win, your trail reviews can help thousands of others who are trying to plan their outdoor trips. Happy reviewing!

(If the trail does not exist as a guide, please see contest 2 for how to add it to the system and earn DOUBLE points)

Contest 2: Write Trail Guides for your Favorite Hikes

Over the last year we have focused on creating tools to allow anyone to create hiking trail guides which are then available for download using our mobile apps, and available on the website for trip planning. We have seen some amazing guides so far, but we have a long way to go to provide useful information on all of the trails in the world.

In an effort to throw some fire under this goal, we are running another contest to write trail guides for your favorite hikes. (Yes, if you review them, you can get points in the other contest as well).

The focus of Guides is to provide a helpful description of the trail, area, and any other useful information that a hiker may find valuable (parking, view points, difficulty, dog-friendly, seasons, etc.) Some authors really get into it and add details and history about many points along the trail, while other guides provide just the facts and vital information you need to do the hike yourself. Your style is up to you, but we ask that you do not duplicate existing trails for which there are guides already.

To make the process easier, we have added a “quick-create” method on all of your trips. If you go to your trip detail page, you will see a link to “create guide” in the top left. Click this and we will pull in your track and some other information to help you get started. You can also go through the normal creation process and get started here

You can earn 1-3 points, based on how much information is provided

As in the first contest, the 5 authors with the most points will receive EveryTrail T-Shirts, and another 5 will be randomly selected in a raffle, with your number of points representing your number of entries.

Get Started Today

You can find your existing trips here
Or go here to start creating guides

If you have any questions at all, please email us at holiday-contest@globalmotion.com and we will respond as soon as we can.

Today we are happy to announce that our iOS5-compatible EveryTrail iPhone App is now available in the app store. iOS5 has only been available for a few days now, but we have received some emails from enthusiastic everytrailers who upgraded to the new OS and found a few things to not behave as expected.

These issues should all be fixed in our newest update, which has just become available a few minutes ago. If you still notice any issues after upgrading to iOS5, please let us know (or, if you have not ugraded to iOS5 but download the update and notice any problems).

We tried to catch all of the iOS5 bugs, but we may have missed a few. Email us at phonedev@globalmotion.com if you find anything.

Get the app:
EveryTrail PRO
EveryTrail

Happy Trails!
- The EveryTrail Team

EveryTrailers,

You may have noticed a lack of blog posts and major site updates over the past few months, and we apologize for that, but are very excited to announce what we have been busy working on recently: TripAdvisor City Guide Apps!

As many of you know, we were acquired by TripAdvisor back in February and yesterday we launched our first apps on the Android Market (iPhone currently pending). Much of the new technology we have developed while working on this project can be directly applied to our current EveryTrail apps and Partner Destination Apps to make them faster, more-stable, and easier to use, and we will be launching iOS-5 compatible apps as soon as we can for the new iPhone operating system.

You may also notice that EveryTrail Guides are now available on TripAdvisor.com when you are browsing relevant cities (check out the “Guides” tab on the Yosemite National Park page on TripAdvisor. This will make EveryTrail guides available to a much larger audience who can now benefit from your expertise and hard work. Thank you to all of our guide writers who have created some AMAZING guides.

If you are interested in helping out as well, go to http://www.everytrail.com/guides to learn more and get started.

City Guide Apps

For the city guide app project we wanted to create apps from the ground up with the mobile traveler in mind. With so many points of interest and reviews from TripAdvisor, we were able to provide a great search interface that allows you to filter by cuisines for restaurants, attraction types, or just search by keywords for things nearby.

The Best Match algorithm helps find the best stuff that is nearby and relevant to where you currently are by taking location and community ranking into account. Give it a trip to find a nearby place to eat or place to see!

One of the best features of the apps is that they work completely offline, with maps, reviews, pictures–everything you need while traveling without incurring any steep roaming charges. If you find a WiFi connection, we sync the data to make sure everything is fresh and up to date.

Each of the 20 apps come with 5-10 self-guided walking tours created on the EveryTrail Guide Platform. A number of EveryTrail community members have helped creating some truly informative and inspiring walking tours around the world, and the apps are that much better with their support.

Thank you to all EveryTrail members who helped contribute to this project, your work has been top-notch and will be read by many, many travelers around the world

We have a number of other helpful, easy-to-use tools in the apps as well, such as a Point Me There screen that uses GPS and the Compass to–well–point you there! You can save favorite places for later, read about interesting sights, or filter information many different ways. It’s the perfect pocket-companion for your travels.

Here are the current apps available in the Android Market, and they are all FREE! If you try them out and enjoy them, we would appreciate reviews and feedback to help us improve upon them for the next versions.

Americas
Boston
Chicago
Hawaii
Las Vegas
Los Angeles
New York City
Orlando
San Francisco
Washington, DC

Europe
Amsterdam
Barcelona
Berlin
Florence
London
Paris
Rome

Asia
Beijing
Hong Kong
Tokyo

Australia & Pacific
Sydney

EveryTrailers,

We released a new version of the EveryTrail iPhone app about 2 weeks ago and have received feedback from users who have been experiencing problems since upgrading. It appears that a conflict with the previous local database and new database causes issues in some cases and causes the app to crash after showing the initial black screen for several seconds.

We apologize to anyone affected by this, and would appreciate your help while we figure out the exact cause of the issue (as it does not happen for everyone). If you have been affected, please send us your iPhone crash logs so that we can dig deeper to find any patterns.

To get the crash logs, follow these steps:

1) Plug in your iPhone to your computer, open iTunes, and sync your phone (this will download the crash logs to your computer).
2) Browse to the following directory, and send the logs for the EveryTrail app (For the Mac, “~” refers to your home directory)
Mac OS X :~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/
Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/
Windows Vista: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter/MobileDevice/
3) Zip up these files, and email them to phonedev@globalmotion.com

Thank you for helping us find the problems more quickly, we hope to have a new version out soon.

In the meantime, if you are still experiencing problems opening the app, you can delete the app and reinstall it from the app store (If you paid for Pro, you will not be charged again). Please only do this after sending the crash logs.

Happy Trails,
The EveryTrail Team

A couple of months ago we partnered with the California State Parks Foundation to create a great new iPhone app for California State Parks. Today we are happy to announce that the CalParks app for Android is now available in the Android Market, and it’s FREE!

The CalParks app includes detailed information for 50 California State Parks (more coming soon!), who together receive tens of millions visits each year. Each park has an overview, history, and other activity sections as well as several trail guides each containing maps, trail routes, points of interest, pictures, and great descriptions.

We know many of you have patiently waited for this app, and we hope you find it as useful as we do.

Some of the great parks included in the app are: Big Basin, California’s oldest State Park, Point Lobos, with its awesome coastal wildlife, Crystal Cove State Park and many others. See the California State Park partner page for a full list of parks and guides.

If you are a park management organization, destination marketing organization (DMO), hotel or other travel organization, and you are interested in making your travel destination information available to your visitors in optimized mobile format, please drop us a line at bd@globalmotion.com.

If you cannot be in Ireland for St. Patrick’s Day this year you can still experience it virtually with our iPhone App for Kilkenny Country in Ireland (get the free app here).

The TrailKilkenny app is everything you need for a trip to Kilkenny, one of the great counties in Ireland. It comes with information about the county, history, the best places to eat, the best places to stay, and a listing of all of the craft stores.

Best of all, it comes with several pre-planned itineraries such as the “Taste of Kilkenny Food Trail”, and the “Made in Kilkenny Craft Trail” as well as a number of other walking guides and cycling guides.

Check out the app today and let us know what you think!

Here are some of the guides within the app

Kilkenny to Bennetsbridge, Ireland
One of three sections of the Nore Valley Walk,following the River Nore and featuring members of the Food and Craft Trail

Thomastown to Inistioge Walk, Ireland
One of three sections of the Nore Valley Walk. The trail follows the River Nore from Thomastown to Inistioge.

Castlemorris Wood Walk, Ireland
A beautiful walk through the woods of the old Castlemorris Estate. 3 looped walks available – 7km,6km + 3km.e

Kilmacoliver Walk, Ireland
A beautiful 6km walking trail incorporating hill-top views and a megalithic tomb.

Here are some more Community Trips in Ireland
Glendalough: White Trail
Comeragh Mountains Traverse
Tour of the Northern Coast and Malahide Castle
The Point to Marlay Park
Dublin and Howth

It is with great pleasure that I can today announce that EveryTrail has been acquired by TripAdvisor, an operating company of Expedia, the world’s largest travel company. The official press release can be found here: TripAdvisor Acquires EveryTrail.

Above all else I am happy to bring you this news because it means we can make EveryTrail even better than it is today. Let me take the opportunity here to look back at the past 5 years, and share some of our plans for the future.

Brief History of EveryTrail
I founded EveryTrail in 2006 based on the vision that GPS-enabled devices would change the way we all travel. Since then, the mobile market has gone through tremendous transition and this vision has largely become reality.

Since launch in October 2006, EveryTrail has attracted a growing global community of passionate travelers, who together have created over half a million highly engaging travel experiences in over 160 countries, with more than 2 million geo-located photos. Over time, as the EveryTrail community grew and a vast amount of content was uploaded every day, we developed tools that make EveryTrail a better tool for trip planning. To that end we launched EveryTrail Guides in 2010.

As the travel market entered the mobile age during the last several years, we have partnered with a growing number of global travel organizations. During our quest to forge more partnerships, it wasn’t before long we crossed paths with TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel site. When we started discussions it was immediately clear that there was a lot to talk about. Like EveryTrail, TripAdvisor is what it is because of a large global community of passionate users who help each other plan their trips. While TripAdvisor has successfully grown to massive global scale, they recognized that EveryTrail has created important elements for the mobile travel age that would be tremendously useful for the TripAdvisor community. As our discussions evolved both parties realized that joining efforts makes a lot of sense.

EveryTrail Going Forward
Going forward, EveryTrail will stay the course. We will be even better positioned to offer the best way to share travel experiences using smart phones and GPS devices, and continue to work hard to stay at the leading edge of mobile travel planning. We’ll also accelerate our partnerships with destination organizations, similar to our partnerships with the California State Parks Foundation and Kilkenny Ireland. Last but not least, we’ll bring EveryTrail functionality into the TripAdvisor suite of products.

A Huge Thanks To You All
I want to use this opportunity to thank those who helped us get where we are today: Our fantastic global community who trust us with their great content, and never hesitate to give us (sometimes brutally honest) feedback; Our partners, business customers and investors who trusted and supported a small team with a dream; and the phenomenal EveryTrail Team of engineers, designers and business folks, who stuck with the company through the many ups and downs that we may share in more detail some day. I trust you will all stick with us as we enter a new exciting phase in the life of EveryTrail!

Happy Trails!
Joost Schreve – Founder & CEO EveryTrail

At EveryTrail we are working hard on a new hiking trip planning tool which we plan to release in the next few weeks. As a part of this initiative we are trying to create a large set of great hiking trails in California*, all available to download for FREE.

Over the past week I have personally contacted a number of hikers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Lake Tahoe, and Los Angeles area who have uploaded high-quality trips asking them to create guide version of their guides and provide information that other hikers could use when planning. (See the distinction between Guides and Trips below).

Within the past week about 30 members in California submitted guides that have been published, with over half of them already downloaded a couple of times by other hikers who can then follow the guides on their mobile devices, and almost 1000 people have already viewed the guides online!

Help us describe Every Trail
We current have a good number of hiking guides in California, but we have a long ways to go before we can give useful hiking information on every trail. With your help, we can get there and help each other find the best trails.

If you have a trip on EveryTrail that you think other hikers would benefit from, please create an informative guide with the necessary information, or send me a private message with your trip name and I can send you a link that will do most of the work for you–Simply add a title (the name of the trail), and a subtitle (short snippet to grab their attention). After clicking “continue”, we will pull in your track and ask you to select a main picture and write an overview of the trail.

That’s it! With your help, we can increase the number of hiking trails listed in California and help thousands of local hikers find the best nearby trails.

If you are interested in checking out our new planning tool, find great nearby hiking trails here.

Thanks for making EveryTrail the top hiking community as we work to make it easier to find nearby trails to hike.

Difference between Guides and Trips
The difference between a guide and a trip, is that a trip is a personal experience of the trail, while a guide supplies information for others planning hikes and is seen as more “premium” and high-quality content. Guides also go through an approval process and other users can review the trail to help push the best trails to the top.

* We are starting in California because that is where we have the most trips uploaded by users. We plan to roll this out to other states and countries as we get enough guides there to make planning a good experience.