All posts by Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

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Kricket: Refugee Crowdsourcing

December 14, 2015 Drew Meyers Leave a comment

I came across Kricket recently, I believe via the Techfugees Facebook group. I spoke with Tom Nassr a couple weeks ago (turns out he’s also a SigEp) to learn more, and he mentioned they were working on a Kickstarter campaign — which is now live.

How does it work?

Kricket is a map-based network for crowdsourcing information. The goal is to help refugees find safety, resources, and better travel routes. This platform is designed for NGOs, volunteers, refugees, and you, to contribute information to a single map that everyone can see & access, in realtime.

A few more details:

Everyone is looking at the same map of the worl
Everyone can “tag” their current location with an icon/photo and a comment
The tags on the map are “live” for 24 hours, then they are removed from the map
Everyone is anonymous
An Admin Panel can be accessed by Kricket & verified NGOs
Admins have the ability to update/ add / edit tags they create
This app is available on iOS, Android, and Web right now

I urge you to head on over and back the campaign.

Drew Meyers

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Videos

Gemma Sisia’s Tanzanian story – The School of St Jude

December 7, 2015 Drew Meyers Leave a comment

I came across the story of Gemma Sisia, founder of the School of St Jude in Arusha, Tanzania, the other day. It struck a chord with me, because I spent a week painting walls at Saint Monica’s, a school just outside Nairobi that my friend Racquel Turner runs. (see my the blog posts here, here, and here).

You can watch Gemma on ABC’s ‘Australian Story’ here:

I love learning more about individuals doing such fantastic work. Thank you to Gemma and staff/volunteers for making the world a better place.

Drew Meyers

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Entrepreneurship

Transcontinental Train Journeys for #Millennials

December 4, 2015 Drew Meyers Leave a comment

Crowdfunded transcontinental train journeys for #Millennials to explore America’s new frontiers = sounds pretty awesome.

A short video:

Follow them on Twitter @MillennialTrain or visit their website at http://millennialtrain.co/

Drew Meyers

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Videos

The Power of Story

October 28, 2015 Drew Meyers Leave a comment

I just watched Jodi Ettenberg’s keynote from TBEX 2015.

If you’re a travel blogger, or simply intrigued with storytelling, you ought to give it 40 minutes of your time.

Now, feel free to go capture and tell amazing stories.

Drew Meyers

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Oh Hey World Updates

Horizon is on the App Store

June 15, 2015 Drew Meyers Leave a comment

It’s been quite awhile (July of 2014 to be exact) since we’ve updated this blog, but I wanted to share the fact that our newest undertaking, Horizon, is now on the app store.

Horizon is couchsurfing/airbnb within friends, friends of friends, and communities you belong to (such Peace Corps, Sigma Phi Epsilon, or Kiva). There is a giveback angle allowing travelers to thank their hosts by making a donation to charity (either the host’s favorite charity, or the organization that facilitated the stay).

You can either download it on an iPhone or iPad from THIS LINK or use the web app HERE.

Drew Meyers

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Oh Hey World Updates

Shifting Gears – Horizon

July 10, 2014 Drew Meyers Leave a comment

You may have noticed the updates have been a bit slow these days here at Oh Hey World. There’s a reason for that.

We’re shifting gears.

Over the past 6 or 8 months, we’ve been validating a new hospitality exchange app, which we’ve recently named Horizon.

It’s our 2nd attempt at solving the rampant missed connections problem that exists for every traveler. We’re headed to Santiago (Chile) for the Start-up Chile program, and will be working on the app from there for 6 months. Unlike location sharing, finding a free or cheap place to stay for your next trip is a massive pain point for virtually all 200 million millenial travelers.

As a reminder, Oh Hey World is completely open source (code can be found here). It will remain operational for its existing user base, and we have no plans right now to shut it down.

Drew Meyers

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Online Travel Annoyances

Collaboratively Explore a Destination — via a “To Do” List

May 22, 2014 Drew Meyers Leave a comment

Why not make discovering the city a competition among friends & acquaintances?

That’s a question on my mind recently. I spent a month in Medellin, Colombia (some thoughts here). There was (and stil is) a strong community of expats there – most of whom are either teaching English or digital nomads – many of whom were fairly new to the city.

And, there were things to do in the area.

The challenge is matching them up. The people who want to go explore, with the others in the community that wish to see and do the same things. Few want to go explore a city by themselves.

So, why not a friendly competition among the expat community to help ensure everyone sees the city? The goal being to incentivize a larger percentage of that group to venture beyond their comfort zone.

What functionality is needed to deliver on this:

Group permissions.
A collaborative list of things to do, editable by anyone in the group (preferably pre-filled with some popular options).
Basic profiles that indicate which things on the list a person has already done, and which ones they want to do.
A group leaderboard.

It seems you could build this using FourSquare, Yelp, or Trover lists (doesn’t make much sense to re-create that functionality) — and add the profiles and leaderboard on top.

This would likely end up being a relocation application, which is essentially what long term traveling is; constantly relocating to new cities for extended stays. The revenue model could be to have real estate agents or property managers sponsor the experience for their specific city.

The problem is, it’s largely only applicable for the long term travel and relocation segments. The average traveler doesn’t really have time for this, given they are only in town for a short period of time. I’ve seen where a product targeted at that crowd ends up.

Anyone working on this?

Drew Meyers

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Inspiration

Project Pangia – A Cool Kickstarter Campaign You Should Support

May 20, 2014 Drew Meyers Leave a comment

I randomly found the Project Pangia Kickstarter campaign a week ago on Twitter. I’m not exactly sure how — but I’m glad I did.

I watched the video (below), and within 5 minutes had backed the project.

I reached out to the person behind the project, Alexandra Ernst — and had a 45 minute skype/phone discussion while she was in transit from San Francisco down to San Diego. We are both nomads, travel addicts, and committed to leaving this world better than we entered it — so there was lots of common ground to connect over.

Now, go back the project.

Drew Meyers

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South America, Travel Thoughts

Thoughts after 1 Week in Medellin

March 10, 2014 Drew Meyers 1 Comment

I’ve been in Medellin, Colombia for 1 week. The question I get from everyone I speak to…

How’s Colombia?

In short, it’s great. There is a great vibe here. A few details…

I’m staying in a 4 bedroom apartment in the Laureles neighborhood, with Will Moyer (OHW’s designer) and two other expats from the states.
The expat scene is largely English teachers and digital nomads working on various online businesses.
Many (most) of the locals don’t speak English, which makes me feel helpless at times. “Yo hablo un poco Espanol.“
Wifi is very reliable, I’ve had no problems with Skype calls as of yet from my apartment. Some of the cafes have too much background noise to make calls from though.
Java Bean Cafe is great.
Taxi drivers don’t have a clue. But I guess that’s no different than many other cities abroad. Drivers don’t have GPS enabled phones like Uber and Lyft drivers, which certainly makes it harder to navigate.
Contrary to popular belief, the city (at least where I am living) seems safe.

I haven’t really ventured outside the city yet for any excursions, but I’ve still got three weeks until I leave on the 29th. If you have any recommendations for things to do or contacts I should reach out to, please do let me know in the comments.

Drew Meyers

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Oh Hey World Updates

We’re Setting it Free – Oh Hey World’s Location Sharing Platform is Now Open Source

February 26, 2014 Drew Meyers 2 Comments

We’re setting our code free… will you fly with us?

Oh Hey World is now a 100% free, open source location sharing platform allowing you to share your location with the people, communities, and web & mobile services that matter.

As I mentioned in my Pando Daily post, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback such as the following over the past 12 months:

It would be great if all my friends were using it
It would be great if everyone who cares about microfinance were using it
It would be great if a large number of people in Barcelona were using it
It would be great if there was great advice for every city in Thailand

The classic chicken and an egg problem.

The location sharing components we’ve built at Oh Hey World, need a “home” within existing groups and communities. The fact that it’s now completely open source, gives anyone the ability to customize and tailor the offering to the needs of their specific community.

What’s on GitHub now?

Those using the site consistently today, are largely those who are using the first connected service we built – the WordPress plugin.

We know we won’t solve the location sharing opportunity on our own. Not even FourSquare is close to doing that. The goal is to build a community that believes that a connected travel experience, is a better travel experience. And, collectively, build the tools, webservices, apps, communities, and notifications needed to bring transparency to traveler locations in a way that enables them to spend time with the people that matter.

The platform needs more inputs and outputs. More connected services. That’s where the open source platform comes in. We’re leaving it up to you, the community, to adapt and grow it to fit your needs.

Do you want to fly with our group of socially conscious people committed to connecting with other like-minded people? If so, join us – go ahead, and dig into the GitHub repo (or email us if you’re not a developer).

Press release can be found here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/02/prweb11609447.htm

[Photo via http://www.wallpixy.com/]

Drew Meyers

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Exploring the Wild Blue Yonder