Behold the blue marble we call Earth

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

Pretty incredible, right? 

This photo is a composite image of several swaths of the Earth’s surface, all from January 4, 2012. Here’s the giant 8000x8000 version  - gorgeous.

For a comparison of how much imaging technology has improved over the years, here’s the 1972 version of the same photo:

Quite a difference. Looking forward to seeing what other images come out of the satellite’s rotation.

-Jodi

England & Scotland in Photos

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

After months of travel through Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, I spent the last few months in England with my brother and his friends. It was great to relax and enjoy the holidays with family, but it also gave a perspective of the country that I didn’t have before. There’s something offputting about returning to a comfortable place after being abroad, but it is also wonderful to see it in a different light.

Here are some photos from my winter months in the UK.

English countryside by train:

Gloucester, shot through a pinhole:

Zizzi’s restaurant in black & white:

Burger of Champions:

London graffiti:

London Eye & the Thames at night:

Tilt-shift Cheltenham:

Sunset over the Cotswolds:

Walking through Lanercost Priory:

View of Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat:

Downtown Edinburgh, as seen from the castle:

Sheep on the drive back to England:

And of course, Hadrian’s wall:

Surreal underwater photos by biologist Alexander Semenov

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

I stumbled on this bright, ethereal photos from under the sea and had to share them here. Alexander Semenov is a biologist who now does a gorgeous job of photographing what he spent so long studying.

Exhibit A:

Semenov notes that he got into underwater photography by accident:

When I first began to experiment with sea life photography I tried shooting small invertebrates for fun with my own old camera and without any professional lights or lenses. I collected the invertebrates under water and then I’ve shot them in the lab. After two or three months of failure after failure I ended up with a few good pictures, which I’ve showed to the crew. It has inspired us to buy a semi-professional camera complete with underwater housing and strobes. Thus I’ve spent the following field season trying to shoot the same creatures, but this time in their environment. It was much more difficult, and I spent another two months without any significant results. But when you’re working at something every day, you inevitably get a lot of experience. Eventually I began to get interesting photos — one or two from each dive. Now after four years of practice I get a few good shots almost every time I dive but I still have a lot of things that need to be mastered in underwater photography.

You can check out more of his photos on Flickr, or this photoessay of jellyfish on This is Colossal.  Don’t miss his Northern Lights photoset on his website either - it rivals the above deep sea photos in brightness and beauty.

-Jodi

The Making of Hotel Search on Mobile

It began with a demo. 

Our mobile hotel search app was weeks away from shipping. The UI was tight, performance was shaping up and the punchlist was shrinking. 

But there was a problem. Jacqueline, our press whisperer, did a hotel search in the new app. She couldn’t figure out which, from the dozens of hotels depicted on the map, was the one she actually wanted - and didn’t know where to start.

While seeing all those options from the comfort of a desktop’s huge screen wasn’t bad, now the results were unusable. We debated changes but my head wasn’t really in it. My ears were ringing.

For all our slick UI and data visualization, we were nowhere in terms of making it easy and fast to find a great hotel from your phone.

We’d failed.

Alongside this, I’d been devouring Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information. The book is packed with styles and strategies for displaying data, along with analysis and cautionary tales. On the train one morning, I turned a page then violently emptied the contents of my forehead onto the seat in front of me.

For on that page, Tufte had helpfully supplied the solution to our problem.

We could fill the entire map with hotels, as we already were, but now we’d only color rooms whose stats made them worth recommending. The rest would appear grayer and smaller – easily ignored, but still illustrating the contours of an area’s hotels. When the user moves or zooms the map, we do all the math again, coloring only the best options in the new region.

The resulting experience was so quick and satisfying, we wanted it on the site, too. So go try out the new Hipmunk Hotel search for Android, iOS, and now, the web.

— Danilo

Incredible footage: a peregrine falcon hunting in a murmuration of starlings

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

 Not too long ago, I posted about a murmuration of starlings in flight over Istanbul. The sight of it stopped me in my tracks nightly as clouds of birds circled their way around the city.  

Here’s another version of the remarkable phenomenon over Rome, with a peregrine falcon hunting for its dinner:

A friend sent me this footage today, shot by John Downer Productions and BBC as part of their EarthFlight series. What blew me away was how close the camera got to these birds. According to the Earthflight website:

To create its bird’s-eye view of the world Earthflight uses a host of extraordinary filming techniques including filming “imprinted” flocks from microlites, wild flocks filmed from model gliders and silent drones, full-sized helicopter with stabilised mounts and cameras on the backs of trained birds. Slow-motion techniques also reveal extraordinary detail such as swallows plucking feathers from the air.

Looking forward to the rest of these videos in the series. Beautiful stuff.

-Jodi

Tahiti + surfing + a rainbow = a perfect photo

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

Over 13,000 votes were cast for Surfer Mag’s 2011 Photo of the Year contest, and the winning picture is a stunning capture, shot in Tahiti by Zak Noyle:

In an interview with the photographer, Surfer mag asks how the photo came about. Noyle notes:

It was an amazing afternoon with just my friends out in the water. There were five guys in the water with pristine conditions. It wasn’t huge, but I saw that rainbow forming. I was shooting fisheye, and I was quite close in, so I kind of kicked back toward the channel and framed it up like that. It was just a quick moment, it only lasted for two waves, and it just happened to be a setup.

You can head on over to the interview to read more about Noyle. While you do that, I’m just going to sit here and stare at the photo above - it’s just that beautiful. (Thanks to Alex Ogle for bringing it to my attention.)

-Jodi

A Glance at 2011, and Look to 2012

2011 was Hipmunk’s first full year in existence. And we couldn’t have asked for better—not only did millions of new users try us for the first time, but we were able to remove even more agony from their travel searching. On our one year anniversary in August, we calculated that we had saved you over 150,000 hours of agony within our first year, and we’re pretty close to doubling that already!

What happens to your books when you go to bed?

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

In a departure from the usual travel fare, I wanted to share this whimsical video animating what happens to a bookstore at night, if you use your imagination. For booklovers, camera lovers and those who enjoy a short film:

Some background, from creator Sean Ohlenkamp:

After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago, my wife and I decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto. 

It definitely paid off! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Back to usually-scheduled programming on Friday.

-Jodi

New: Hotel Search on Mobile!

You’ve been asking, and so we’re pleased to announce that hotel search and booking is now available for free through our iOS and Android mobile apps. Until now, just flight search was available on the go, but with this major update, we’re bringing our innovative, visual hotel search to hundreds of millions of mobile devices, including yours! Check out these great reviews from TechCrunch, VentureBeat, San Francisco Chronicle and CNET!

Hot on the heels of our successful 2011 launches of the iOS and Android apps, our mobile developers, Danilo Campos and Ryan Oldenburg, have been cranking away on this since summer. They’ve brought the same unique, map-based hotel experience you know and love from our website to our apps. Now, you have Hipmunk’s inventory of over 300,000 global hotels at your fingertips. 

Here’s a quick walkthrough of what you’ll see (on iPhone):

First off, we noticed that most of our users who were searching for hotels from mobile browsers were searching for a hotel for that night. So we automatically search from your current location, enabled by GPS, with ability to enter a new destination:

We use “Ecstasy,” a combination of reviews, prices and amenities to figure out your best options. The hotels we think you’ll like show up as colorful dots. Red ones are pricey, green ones are cheap and blue ones are average.

But picking a hotel is unique to an individual, which is why we let you filter by price or chain, and overlay heatmaps:

Heatmaps let you see which parts of a city are most active for different interests, including food, nightlight, shopping, and tourist attractions:

So let’s grab a hotel. Click on the colored dot for quick hotel details:

Tap again to see more details on that hotel:

We also let you see TripAdvisor reviews if you’re interested:

And when you’re ready to book, we give you options. You can book through the supplier, email the link to a family member, colleague or friend, or receive the finish code so you can finish the booking from a desktop:

And here’s what you’ll see on iPad:

And on Android:

And it’s that simple! The Hipmunk Flight and Hotel Search App is available for free from the App Store here and Android Market here.

Update your app or download it, test it out, and let us know what you think!

Not your everyday travel photo: dogs on motorbikes

This is a Hipmunk post from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

A weekly hashtag called FriFotos has emerged on Twitter, started by Jonathan Epstein as a way to share themed photos to a group of curious travelers. I don’t always participate, but this week’s theme is dogs, and I wanted to share my not-so-everyday photos of dogs on the road. Literally:

While I was trying to get a photo of the first dog, he turned to look at me with pure disdain, as if to say “What? You find this interesting? Please.” And it’s true: the amount of things and animals and people that Thais can fit on one tiny motorbike is staggering. 

Oh and by the way? They drive cars too:

Have any travelling dog photos of your own? Share them in the comments - photos are enabled.

-Jodi