Wayn
|
Type of site
|
Travel & lifestyle social network |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2002 |
| Founder(s) | Peter Ward, Jerome Touze, Mike Lines |
| Industry | Internet |
| Employees | 21 (July 2016) |
| Divisions | London, Cape Town, Szczecin |
| Website | www2 |
| Alexa rank |
 11,463 (July 2016) |
| Current status | active |
WAYN (an acronym for Where Are You Now?) is a social travel network. Its stated goal is to help discover where to go and meet like-minded people. WAYN was founded in 2002.
WAYN has been known to send spam emails to all contacts of its users. Others have raised concerns that they misuse users data to make money. Other sources of income include showing advertising for places a person is visiting.
Like some other social networking sites, WAYN enables its users to create a profile and upload photos. Users can search for other users and link them to their profiles as friends. In 2015 it claims to have over 20 million users. As of late 2016, the website is owned by Lastminute.com.
WAYN was founded in 2002 in London by Jérome Touze (Co-CEO), Peter Ward (Co-CEO) and Mike Lines (CTO), after two of them came up with the idea to connect people based on their location while having a few beers in their local pub. WAYN initially grew through word-of-mouth and reached almost 50,000 members by the end of 2004. Following its relaunch in May 2005 it reached over 2.5 million members by the end of 2005. On 26 March 2012 the site claimed "over 19.1m members".
The business started with initial seed funding in 2003 from the original founder of Friends Reunited. In 2006, the WAYN Founders managed to complete a Series A Fund Raising of $11 million from DFJ Esprit and attracting famous internet entrepreneurs such as Brent Hoberman (ex founder of lastminute.com), Hugo Burge (CEO of cheapflights.co.uk), Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips (ex founders of Active Hotels) and Constant Tedder (ex CEO of Jagex, an online gaming company) and was referred to at the time as the 'MySpace of Travel'. In 2015 the site claims to have over 20 million users. It was also named as one of the top 100 Global Companies to watch at the AlwaysOn Global Watch List.
WAYN users may post photos from their trips. Registered users send and receive messages using email, discussion forums, E-cards, SMS, and instant messages and Q&A. WAYN provides a destination browsing service to discover Where to go next and WAYN members can interact with each other and ask questions on the destinations through a Questions & Answers service. The site also provides Social Opinions which generated over 25,000 opinions daily in 2014. In 2015, WAYN has announced major strategic partnerships with Booking.com to offer hotels booking to its users as well as Viator to offer tours and activities booking.
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Wikipedia