by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
We started Curiosio on the 1st of April, 2018, with the mission to build the smartest travel guide for curious travelers. For those who are following their curiosity. It looks like the product is getting into shape. Curiosio is still in active design & development. A few more versions and it will be there. Below is a heartbeat of the development of Curiosio — visualization of the source code commits over time.
(Click the plot and zoom in for the fine view. For some reason Medium does not allow to set the width of this plot to full-screen for big screens.)
Curiosio is a high-tech startup. As simple, clean, and neat it is looking visually — as advanced [Knowledge Graph, Semantic Web, Machine Learning], cutting-edge [Evolutionary AI, HPC], big [Big Data] it is behind the scenes.
During four years we made 9300+ GitHub commits in 9 repositories while implementing 1450+ tasks organized as Trello cards. We processed tens of petabytes of data; wore off multiple HDDs; killed our most expensive and the most productive HPC server; did a thorough assessment of the ARM-based server processor Ampere Altra.
The best latest version of the product — Visual Curiosio — was released on the 21st of February, 2022. Then, a few days later, in the early morning, on the 24th of February, our country Ukraine was hit by russian missiles. Our motherland is partially occupied and is fighting the large-scale invasion since then, and nobody knows when the war ends… Curious Ukraine is not safe. We will rework Ukraine when we rework it…
Where We Are Now
Curiosio is getting into shape. The best Curiosio version is available at https://curiosio.com (though we threw the war awareness text on top of the landing page without any design, sorry about that). We recommend you plan your interesting road trips in the United States, Italy, France because these countries were visualized. The visualization concept is pretty much curious itself. You could check out the making story about our thinking and design.
What is making Curiosio unique and what is making it the best travel guide?
- Curiosity. You are following your curiosity when planning. You are following your curiosity en route.
- Serendipity. Interesting things are happening when planning. Interesting things are happening en route.
- Smartness. Curiosio is powered by Ingeenee — the most intelligent [in the world] AI engine for road trip creation. You are learning every time when using Curiosio.
Roadmap From Now
We have a great road map for the consumer product, organically converging to the thing that people love. Here we will briefly outline a few next planned versions. Unfortunately, we cannot promise any dates because of the war. We genuinely want to bring Curiosio to the level of the absolutely smartest and the most beautiful travel guide, but the war has already disrupted the process.
Beta18 codenamed ‘User Loop’
The next version could be focused on the platform. Curiosio is a platform where travelers are inspired and educated by travelers. Let the best users of the Curiosio platform nurture and foster more users. People-to-people link.
Paid accounts will be able to keep their searches and trip plans private [by default]. Free accounts will have their searches and trip plans public, available for preview by other users. Curiosio will recognize cool trips and show them in the relevant context. Editing, fine-tuning, supertrip’ing will be enhanced. Productivity functions will be added.
Curiosio knows what itinerary and route are good and great from our Knowledge Graph of the points and places, i.e. potential experience capacity. We will apply Machine Empathy technology to identify what trip plans are great via human perception. Travelers must feel that they like the journeys.
Beta19 codenamed ‘Socialtubes’
Having a repository of the users’ search & supersearch, good and bad search results, trip plans that travelers like, we will start visualizing the best trip plans. The idea is to make a collection of the road trips and road trip ideas at the next level from the old good Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, Fodor’s, and Co.
Instead of 38 amazing road trips in France, you will get 38,000 or even 38,000,000 amazing road trips in France. It’s personal, unique, made for you by Artificial Intelligence that we built. Since the current version we have pictures of the points and places, hence can create a trip clip (also a brochure, magazine, book, movie, virtual reality) for the trip plan.
We liked the white route curves against the nice backgrounds in Routes du Bonheur by Relais & Chateau. Is it possible to make an algorithm producing similar viz but in motion? Below is a concept of the automatically generated video clip from the trip plan in Italy. It’s a one-way drive from Venice to Turin. It goes via Stelvio Pass, Lake Garda, Como, Sacra di San Michele abbey (inspired The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco), Dolomiti Bellunesi park.
It’s a Lab experiment so far. Here is another video clip generated by the algorithm for the road trip from New York City to the Catskills. If we get to this version we will design it nicer, produce posters and video clips for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and build a great collection of road trips and road trip ideas there. It will be Lonely Planet scaled by a million… or billion.
Beta20 codenamed ‘Map-centered’
This version could be a transition from the web form to the interactive map. At this stage, Curiosio would be Google Maps for Road Trips. To be more precise, Curiosio is becoming a combination of Google Maps + Google Travel + Wolfram Alpha for Road Trips.
Beta21 codenamed ‘Concierge’
Planned vs. experienced rarely match. Re-planning as you go is needed. En route re-planning with booking/re-booking will be done in this version. It’s your digital travel agent. With voice interface. We call it Concierge because the name looks nice together with the name of Curiosio.
There is only one life, one planet, and only two scarce resources to experience all places around the world — time and money. Curiosio is helping all curious travelers to see the world no matter who you are and how much money or time you have. Always follow your curiosity.
We want to live and we want to complete Curiosio for all of you and ourselves. The future is uncertain. We may get killed at any time now. We may get mobilized any time soon. Please help Ukraine to win the war against ruscists, and we will help you to visit all curious places on the planet. Help links below:
https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate/
https://koloua.com/en/(pictures in the clip: Sant’Ambrogio di Torino by F Ceragioli CC BY-SA 3.0, Trail to Monte Serva in Belluno by Tiia Monto CC BY-SA 3.0, La Sacra ammantata dalla neve by Elio Pallard CC BY-SA 4.0; music in the clip: Chill Out by Bensound)
