About Us
Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel updates that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. Our travel updates scour the web to find the best, most recent information about your destination. You can personalize the information you want based on your travel dates, preferences, and destination. The travel updates come with local maps, festivals and events going on while you're there, exchange rates, key phrases in the city's language, weather forecasts and more.
Travelers need reliable, accurate, and immediate information when planning a trip. Standard guidebooks are often 12 to 18 months out of date as soon as they hit the stores. Our content is the most up-to-date because we have an enormous technology base of spiders and crawlers that find the best information on the internet, and combine it with information from established authors and thousands of locals who are always updating the information about where they live. We believe strongly in Creative Commons, in which users can share, create and build information that is available for mixing and remixing into unique new applications. As well as Creative Commons licensed information, we also use proprietary content and professional authors, which makes for accurate and authoritative information in our travel updates. With Offbeat Guides, you can get your travel update in electronic format that you print yourself, or we can create and ship you a printed travel update just in time for your trip, with all the latest information packed inside. Additionally, hundreds of our travel updates are available on the Amazon Kindle, making it even easier to access new information about your favorite destinations.
Offbeat Guides is a technology and travel startup located in San Francisco. It was founded by Dave Sifry, the founder of multiple technology companies including Linuxcare and Technorati. Leveraging his management team's extensive experience in technology development and technology marketing, Offbeat Guides is using this knowledge and experience to advance travel publishing to a whole new level. Check out the story of how we began!
Offbeat Guides Management Team
David L. Sifry - Founder and CEO
Dave Sifry is a entrepreneur with over 20 years experience in the I.T. industry. Most recently, he founded Technorati, the largest blog search engine in the world, and was CEO from 2002-2007. He is Chairman of Technorati's Board of Directors. Dave was a co-founder and the CTO of Sputnik. Prior to Sputnik, he was co-founder, CTO, and Vice President of Engineering at Linuxcare, Inc, having built Linuxcare's services infrastructure. Dave is a recognized expert on leadership development, blogs and the massive changes in the digital media environment, Open Source development, and the Linux operating system. He is also the creator of Projectdocs, an online document management and collaboration service, and Hoosgot, a lazyweb service. He served on the founding Board of Directors of Linux International, the Advisory Board of the National White Collar Crime Center, and the Technical Advisory Board of the National Cybercrime Training Partnership for law enforcement. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Dave lived and worked in Kobe, Japan for Mitsubishi Electric, and speaks Japanese in a rusty kansai-ben. While he now lives in foggy San Francisco, one of his top travel destinations is Yosemite, in his home state of California, although the lure of London and Paris frequently beckons.
Eric Willis - Chief Technology Officer
Eric Willis is a co-founder of RareEdge, a leading mobile, web, Windows Desktop application company. At RareEdge, Eric was responsible for setting company direction, product development and architecture, client management and running the day-to-day business. He launched well-know products such as GMobileSync, Twitteroo and Jaikuroo. Prior to RareEdge, Eric matriculated at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where he was also an assistant professor of information technology. While studying at RIT, Eric held a number of development positions. He was the lead developer at Van Damme Associates where he focused on high-level development and systems architecture.
Alexandra Danieli - Product Management
Alexandra Danieli has internet industry experience working in Product Management and Business Development, most recently for Tickle Inc in Germany and Monster Worldwide in San Francisco. She has consulted for internet start ups across Silicon Valley to help them with their European localization and also worked for KPMG in German income tax. After earning a degree in Hotel Management, Alexandra received a Masters in Business Law in Germany.
She has lived in Germany, the UK and Spain and speaks German, English, Spanish and French. Next up on her long list of languages, Alexandra wants to learn Portuguese and Serbo-Croatian, which is her father's language. She has always wanted to visit Argentina and the Easter Islands and her most off-beat vacation so far has been to Trinidad and Tobago where she stayed with a friend's family to live the local life.
Zain Iqbal - Writer, Content Editor
Zain Iqbal has over eight years of experience working in communications-related industries, such as public affairs, advertising and marketing, but has more recently found his niche as an writer and editor for socially-conscious media and travel. He graduated from James Madison University in Virginia with a B.A. in English and lived and worked in the Washington D.C. area before joining the Peace Corps, where he worked as a volunteer health outreach specialist in Uzbekistan as well as dabbled as a writer and editor for various volunteer and community-based projects. After a stint in the advertising world in New York City, Zain joined MTV's "Choose or Lose" campaign for the 2008 presidential election where he was the editor of Think MTV - an Emmy-winning, social networking website for young people looking to get involved in their communities. He has since settled in San Francisco and currently uses the Bay Area as a base for his travels, especially if they involve hiking and the outdoors. Central Asia and Scandinavia are high up on Zain's list as favorite travel destinations.