Offbeat Guides

Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. Our guides scour the web to find the best, most up-to-date information about your destination. You can personalize the information you want based on your travel dates, preferences, and destination. The guides 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 Standard guidebooks are often 12 to 18 months out of date as soon as they hit the stores.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 information is the most up-to-date because we have an enormous technology base of spiders and crawlers that find the best information out 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 also 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 guides. With Offbeat Guides, you can get your guide in electronic format that you print yourself, or we can create and ship you a printed guide just in time for your trip, with all the latest information packed inside.

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. 

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 hometown state of California, although the lure of London and Paris frequently beckons.

Liz Westover - Vice President, Marketing

Liz Westover has more than 20 years experience in technology marketing and specializes in new technology marketing and community building. As a longtime marketing consultant, Liz has worked with some of the most innovative companies in the industry, including Apple Computer, Netscape, Sun (Java Group), Linuxcare and Technorati. She worked with Technorati in its early days to help build its PR and marketing presence. She also helped build the first Java Developer Program, which included the first JavaOne Conference, and also helped build the fist Netscape Developer Program in support of the roll out of the Netscape 2.0 browser. She was an early member of the Marimba team where she was a marketing Director in charge of marketing communications, events, and the creation of its first Consultant Program. Liz is a six year veteran of Apple Computer where she held a number of roles within Apple's Developer Group. Liz would like to travel anywhere in Mexico and counts anywhere in Italy as a favorite destination.

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 from 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.

Marina Kosmatos - Travel Content Curator

Marina Kosmatos has over four years experience working for leading global travel publishing company Lonely Planet, and has worked in their headquarters in Melbourne, and in their office in San Francisco. She has also worked as a freelance writer for several lifestyle and culture websites in Australia. Marina has studied at the University of Melbourne and received her B.A of Media Studies from La Trobe University. At Lonely Planet, she worked with many of the world's leading travel writers and has a thorough understanding of the travel industry and what travelers want. She speaks fluent Greek and Italian and has promised herself that one day she will learn how to speak French. Marina's favorite travel destination to date has been Cambodia, and she would like to visit Jamaica next.