Turn All Your Location Check-Ins Into A Travel Map With Mentaway

By Alexia Tsotsis

Location-based startup Mentaway

 did not get funded by YCombinator

 but it did get our attention (as mentioning whiskey shots in a pitch email is wont to do) . One upping the Facebook app “Where I’ve Been

.” Mentaway automatically compiles checkins from Foursquare, Twitter, Flickr and Posterous and turns them into pins on a personalized travel map.

The Brazilian startup is able to show every leg of a trip or multiple on a Google map with added photos and texts.

 All you need to do is just set up your Mentaway profile and keep using the services you’re used to.

“This is not another social network you need to feed,” says founder Gisele Muller

 referring to the best part about Mentaway. Muller and co-founder Eduardo Sasso set out with the goal of making things easier for both professional travel bloggers and people who have a love of travel and technology, and have achieved it with some success.

While the service does have glitches (Muller says they’re working on known UI issues) it does do its basic duty of synching up all user checkins, tweets, and photo uploads from GPS enabled smart phones. You can even link your Instagram

 account with Flickr and set it up Mentaway to defacto support Instagram.

Mentaway plans on integrating Facebook, Gowalla and Tumblr next and intends to monetize through a ‘Freemium’ model. Muller tells us that basic use will be advertiser supported and premium accounts will eventually offer more features and increased privacy control.

The travel space is huge with TripAdvisor, TripIt, Kayak all competing for eyeballs, a fact that bodes really well for small startup Mentaway. Interested TechCrunch readers can sign up for the beta here

 with the promo code “9z3e.”

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/mentaway/