The least we can say is that 2020 has been very special for us as for everyone else. So we wanted to take stock of what it has meant for Notos and to take the opportunity to tell you about our current projects.
A year full of changes
Notos has undergone a lot of changes in a year, the most important being of course our name (and look) change. Following the takeover of Memotrips (one of France’s leading online travel diary websites) in early 2020, we made the decision to merge Talegraph and Memotrips to create Notos and thus offer you the best possible experience for sharing your photos and stories. It took us many months of work, but we are very proud of the result and all your feedback shows us that you are delighted with the new interface as well!
On a more personal note, there also has been an important change for Renaud and I (the co-founders of Notos) as we had to look for a new place to live and move quite suddenly. This explains why we were less present and sometimes less reactive at the end of the year. We are now well settled and full of energy to make Notos better!
The impact of the pandemic on our business
2020 was also the year of COVID, a pandemic that affected the whole world, including us. The various health restrictions forced people to stay home as much as possible and the travel industry shut down almost entirely in a few weeks. Traditionally, summer is a very busy time on our platform but this year it was not, as a lot of trips were cancelled. The tourism industry was heavily impacted and this pandemic was fatal to many of its actors.
However we want to reassure you about Notos’ future. One of our strengths is indeed that our site is not limited to travel diaries. On Notos you can share other stories, other pictures: your lockdown journal with daily news for your loved ones, the results of your creative hobbies, your DIY or real estate projects, etc… Many of you have created albums and subscribed to Notos Premium, so thanks to you we were able to overcome these difficult times.
To sum things up: yes, we had to slow down some of our projects, but this is only temporary and some upgrades should arrive in 2021!
New features coming in 2021
First of all, as announced in our roadmap we are in the process of setting up activity notifications on Notos. This will allow you to be informed by email and/or on the site of new comments and replies on your albums, updates on the albums you follow… This is an important and long awaited feature, thank you for your patience.
The other big news should make many of you happy! Currently Notos’ website is working well on phones and tablets with an interface optimized for these “small” screens. This is enough for most of our users, but we know that a mobile application offers a much better user experience, and is often faster and more reliable than a website when traveling. The development of such an application requires a lot of resources for our small team but we have started working on it and the Notos mobile app should be available within the year. We’ll keep you posted on the progress!
In the meantime of course we’ll continue to fix any small issues you may have. Our list of new features is full of ideas (exporting albums to PDF, printing photo books…) and we are committed to the continuous improvement of Notos. Don’t hesitate to send us all your comments on the site, we always receive them with the greatest attention (you can leave us a message here).
See you soon on Notos!