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Ian
Founder, Travel Massive
⭐️ Community Leader 🔥 Top 12%
Member for 8 Years
Joined December 2014
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608 comments
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About me

Hey everyone, I built this community to do something good for travel.

👉 How I started this. Before starting Travel Massive, I co-founded a software consulting firm — and worked on many projects (too many to list) including the first search engine for large-scale climate research data. On a trip to the US (way back in 2006) to visit some colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, my friend sent me on an adventure to the Green Tortoise hostel in San Francisco. That trip mostly changed my life, and I decided to build my own travel startup to help connect fellow travelers. I quit my job (blah blah) and continued traveling and after a few months of living cheap and working from internet-cafes in Thailand and Laos, I presented at CES Australia (2009) and met a travel insurance company who bought my startup. At a hostel in Sydney, me and a few friends started a meetup for travel startups and bloggers, that accidentally grew to a few cities around the world. After a few thousand meetups in a few hundred cities, this created Travel Massive :)

I've also invested in a few startups, including an accelerator in Sydney that funded Tinybeans.com (which floated on the ASX). I'm interested in programming, the open internet, and ways to help people connect and share ideas online and in-person.

I've spent time living in Sydney, Bangkok, Berlin, and Tasmania. Get in touch!

What is your favorite travel destination?

East Coast, Tasmania

Where do you dream of traveling to?

East Africa

What was your first travel job?

I wrote a booking engine for a small airline.

What do you want to learn more about?

The most remote places in the world

Three words that describe why we should travel?

Travel with purpose

Comments

  • Good question! Offline: Attend business / startup networking events and ask people. "Hey, I'm working on a side project in travel, and I want to know what tools you use to plan your trip?". In person, people generally love talking about travel, so that... show more

  • Hi Tom, thanks for sharing World Travel Index with the Travel Massive community. Congats on what you've created. A few questions / feedbacks! :) 1. Are you the sole developer or are you working with a team? There's quite a lot of functionality! 2. I ... show more

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    World Travel Index 12 hours ago

  • The W3C accessibility standards are probably the best place to start… but there’s no “cheat sheet” I’m aware of. That said, these standards are mostly aimed at making existing web pages accessible. For this project, we’re kinda taking the inverse appr... show more

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    /blind yesterday

  • Hey everyone, We've created an experimental landing page on Travel Massive for blind readers. It's called "slash blind" because the URL is literally https://www.travelmassive.com/blind (get it?) On this landing page you'll find the latest member acti... show more

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    /blind yesterday

  • Great topic! Here's the top 3 things I've learned about this year. 1. Get involved in Accessible Travel I attended my first accessible travel conference this year (AITCAP in Queensland hosted by GetAboutable) and learned so much about this part of tr... show more