As everyone was enjoying their Halloween weekend, we were working away and quietly released a handful of new feature that further improves your trip planning experience.  First off, we redesigned our city pages to provide you with activities and hotel recommendations.  Secondly, Duffel is more social, thanks to sharing capabilities with Facebook and Twitter.  Thirdly, our bookmarklet tool is better and smarter for easier web clipping.  There are many more new and hot features, which we’ll try to summarize them for you below.

All new city page

As you can see from our New York City page, we have significantly improved the look and feel.  Not only are there “profile pictures” for every duffel, we also have a slew of activities and hotels recommendations for you, hand-picked from our partners.  Now you can browse through other travelers’ duffels as well as activities and hotels all on one page.

Sharing and Favorites

We know you want to share with friends and family that perfect trip you planned, and we make it easy.  With a click on the “Share” button, you can instantly post a message on your Facebook wall or Twitter account.

Find an interesting itinerary built by your friend or another duffeler?  Favorite it and it will show up under your favorites collection.

Smarter Bookmarklet

Forget copy & paste!  Our new Clip-It tool automatically picks up your highlights on a website.

Google Search your duffel map

Are you looking for the closest coffee shop from your hotel?  Use Google’s search right on your duffel map!  You can also add the search results to your duffel directly without copying and pasting, making your trip planning even easier.

And many more…

There are many more exciting new stuff on Duffel, so why not check them out!

The day finally arrived.  After a year and half of eating, breathing and living Duffel, and nine months of interacting with our favorite Beta testers, we finally launched at TechCrunch50 DemoPit on last week!  To say that we were nervous is a drastic understatement — we were scared sh-tless (pardon our French, though we do love France).  Despite the staying up late and waking up in a cold sweat, launching at TC50 was one of the best experiences we could have hoped for.  People loved our intuitive interface and were fascinated by the ease of use, but perhaps most rewarding of all, they shared Duffel’s vision and gave invaluable feedback.  Sometimes being entrepreneur takes a little bit of “crazy” and it’s comforting to know that we weren’t alone.  Besides, earning Jack Arrington’s (Michael’s father) poker chip was one of the events that made our day a bit different than ordinary.

A big thanks to our die-hard fans who helped to make this day happen.  Duffel would not have been what it was without your support and feedback.  Thank you for your passion.  Thanks for all the buzz on Twitter and Facebook, and if you haven’t had a chance to, you can follow us on Twitter @duffelup and fan us on Facebook.  Moreover, thanks to our stellar Duffel team who believed in Duffel and worked endlessly around the clock - you are the brain of Duffel.  And finally, thanks to TechCrunch50 for putting up a great show.  It was absolutely an eye-opening experience.

As part of the launch, we did put in quite a bit of interesting features.  The list goes on, but first off, we gave our homepage a fresh face-lift.  It is now more interactive and inviting - do you agree?  We are also integrated with Facebook Connect, so now you can invite and share with Facebook friends.  And of course, you also can sign up using a Facebook account.  Besides the new features, we made quite a bit of changes to improve our trip planning dashboard, as well as gave users recommended activities to kick start their travel research.  We’d love your feedback on these.

Despite the successful launch, we’re not stopping here.  There are still a lot of work to do, problems to solve, and challenges to overcome.  Our vision - to build the most flexible trip planner for every traveler - remains unwavering.  We are stronger than ever, and we are here to make a difference.  Stay tuned - we’ve got more exciting news coming!