Interview with Gary Flake about Clipboard and Cruise Travel

I had a chance to talk with Gary Flake about Clipboard.com to ask how the new content curator can help the cruise traveler or individuals involved in the cruise industry. What I discovered is that I have a new “favorite” technology tool and I have not been this excited about a computer invention since the early days of Twitter.

Can Clipboard help relieve the symptoms of information overload?

I am hoping that Clipboard will be the answer to my question, “where did that link go?” I am using Clipboard as my secret-weapon to filter through an overabundance of web-based information. As I explained in the Introduction to Clipboard article, Clipboard is a web clipping service that acts like a content curator allowing cruise travelers to grab pieces of the Internet and save them. Clips can be in the form of text, images and almost any other part of a webpage. The information can then be stored for private use by a single user or the information can be shared with many. 

Gary Flake, founder and CEO of Clipboard tells me how cruise travelers and travel professionals can use the program.

Gary has been around the computer industry for a long time. Although he boasts four decades of age, Gary is wise beyond his years. A look at Gary’s Wki will list his accomplishments, which are quite impressive by Silicon Valley standards.

Carrie Finley-Bajak: What are the best use cases for Clipboard? When is Clipboard a better tool compared to other services?

Gary Flake: Clipboard really shines in two general cases. The first is when you are seeking to fulfill some goal on the Web, and the answer to the goal is not something that can be expressed as a single search, result, or link. In these cases, you need two or more things in order to express the answer. You may be planning a cruise, buying a car, remodeling a room, managing a health concern, or planning a trip. In the case of planning a trip, users will have flight details, maps, hotel confirmations, events, and other relevant items. Because Clipboard allows you to pull together all these clips in one place, it is easier to manage multiple items of information; we shine in these scenarios. The second generic use case is a bit different. Instead of being goal oriented, let’s suppose that you were focused on the journey, in the sense that you hope to build out a body of work over a long period of time. Maybe you are collecting recipes, working on a research project, or collecting interesting quotes. Clipboard works really well in these cases as well because we allow you to clip just the things you need (and not necessarily the whole page), which helps you to manage information overload over the long term.

Carrie Finley-Bajak: Should service providers like travel agents love or hate a tool like Clipboard?

Gary Flake: I strongly believe that Clipboard is an ideal tool for travel professionals because we allow you to focus on the thing that you do best. Think of it this way … booking one part of a trip is the easy part; what’s really hard is to construct an itinerary where each step resonates with the others and is such that the whole of the trip is much greater than any individual piece.

With Clipboard, that value can come through because a board of clips is much more powerful than the clips that it contains.

Your business, as a travel professional, is to provide travel *wisdom* not just travel data. The whole of your contributions is more than the sum of parts. With Clipboard, that value can come through because a board of clips is much more powerful than the clips that it contains.

And with that said, let’s start clipping.