We haven’t had a chance to update our blog recently, because there are so many good things happening!  But we wanted to let you know about a few things that we’re really excited about:

• In addition to being accepted to the SXSWi Startup Accelerator program, we have been selected as one of 33 companies that will be showcased at the TechCocktail’s SXSW event!  If you’ll be at SXSW, please stop by as we’ll be demoing Zamp, giving away some cool swag and telling you about our April user contest.
• TechCocktail is running a “People’s Choice Award” as part of their event—please vote for us by scrolling all the way to the bottom and choosing Zamp!
• Incidentally, this event is sponsored by our friends at .CO and is part of the #Startup Life Celebration 2012.  Stay tuned, as we may have some other things with .CO lined up!

Oh yeah—did we mention the most important part?  We’ll be releasing our latest version of Zamp just in time for SXSW!  This is a huge upgrade to our first version (which was really just an early adopter preview) and will include some of the social features that we’ve been talking about recently.

As a teaser, we’ll be posting some images here in the coming days so make sure to follow us on Twitter.

See you in Austin (for SXSW) or wherever your travels may take you!

We’re pleased to announce that we have been selected as an alternate finalist for the 2012 SXSW Interactive Startup Accelerator!  That means we’ll be attending the conference to demo Zamp, show off of our recent updates, invite feedback from our users and to give a preview of the some of the exciting things we’re working on.

We’ll also be announcing some great partnerships with leaders in the travel industry as we work to change the way you travel for the better.  Stay tuned!

The fourth annual SXSW Accelerator will take March 12-14 at the 2012 SXSW Festival in Austin Texas. A live audience, as well as a panel of expert judges will be discovering advancements in social media, mobile applications, web entertainment, and more. The best part? Product demonstrations by the most ambitious talents in the world with the most creative new ideas to change it. We will catch a glimpse of the industry’s future, with a guided tour by our emcees and judges.  [source]

Whether you are a frequent flyer or casual traveler, we hope to see you next month in Austin and learn more about where your journeys are taking you these days!

For the latest updates, follow us on Twitter @ZampCo.

Wanted to let you know of some feature updates that are coming soon (progressively in the next few weeks):

• OpenFlights.org import — this was requested by a user on FlyerTalk and we agree that it’s important enough to do right away
• Ability to post flight activity and achievements to Facebook and Twitter
• TripIt integration so you can import your itinerary and automatically check-in when the mobile app is launched (geofencing for iOS to come later, so you don’t even have to launch the app)
• User profiles—the ability to brag about your stats and share your travels with others.  We still have to work out the privacy details of this one, but for starters it will be either fully public or off.

As you can see, right now we’re focusing on enhancements to the web site, but we’re also planning an update to the iPhone app as well as a beta release of the Android app.  More on that soon…

The Zamp iOS client is finally here!

So our AngelList profile went up today—hopefully we’ll be able to use our network to start recommending Zamp and talking it up.  

If there were ever a place that embodied Silicon Valley culture, AngelList is it.  And I don’t mean the aspect of Valley culture that involves innovation, collaboration, meritocracy (or otherwise), etc.  AngelList is clearly a place where connections mean everything.  Referrals and recommendations are your lifeline (hopefully you have more than 3).  For a small outfit like us that’s got one foot in Atlanta, it means we have to work extra hard to cultivate those relationships.  But it also means that you often only need a handful of people who believe in you and themselves know enough other people to get your foot in the door.  

The other interesting thing about AngelList is that it exposes some of the characteristics of the “influence” graph (a la Klout), but that’s a topic for another blog for another project run by the Zamp team…

It seems kind of odd writing the first blog post AFTER we’ve finished submitting our 1.0 release to the Apple App Store.  We’ve been working really hard in the past few weeks to put the finishing touches on both the mobile app and the web site.  Of course, this is just the beginning as we have so much more planned.  For now, we’re at the mercy of the App Store reviewers—once that process is done, we’re going live…