COMPANY

ABOUT US

We are a Silicon Valley-based company building a Web 2.0-based Global Distribution System (GDS) for the $95B Groups & Meetings Travel Services Market (Source: PhocusWright 2007), which is comprised of lodging, airline, ground transportation, activities, food, cruise and tour components. Our initial focus is on Ground Transportation, which is an ‘anchor’ leg for majority of Group Travel services package.

The Group Travel Services market, in general, and the Ground Transportation segment, in particular, are under-served and under-invested. While there is a plethora of portals – Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz – to serve travel service needs of individuals, business travelers and family units, Group Travel continues to be a ‘high touch’ operation with more than 90% of the bookings handled off-line with e-mail, fax, phone calls etc.

The Ground Transportation segment for Group Travel is estimated to be $8B+ in annual revenues in the US alone. This segment is primarily served by the Motor-coach or Bus industry and is comprised of Bus Charters ($4B), Bus Tours ($2B), and Bus Trips ($1.5B). With more than 85% of tours and tickets and more than 98% of the charters booked off-line, this segment could benefit immensely from an Internet-based Booking system.

Our Web 2.0 Platform - Accelaratetm

We have built a Travel Services Platform - Accelaratetm - based on Web 2.0 technology to enable:

On-line booking of Motor Coach Charters, Tours and Trips and
Dynamic packaging of the various Group Travel Service components. We have used the Accelaratetm platform to design, develop and deliver a comprehensive booking system - or GDS - for Ground Transportation sector. We project our Addressable Market to grow from ~$610M in ’09 to $4.2B in 2014 representing 47% CAGR - enabled by our state-of-the-art Internet-based Booking System.

While our core market – Ground Transportation services for Group Travel - is very attractive for its scale and projected growth, it represents only a small fraction of the total spend on Group Travel service revenues for adjacent services – airlines, hotels, activities, and food - anchored by the Ground Transportation Segment. Accelar estimates these adjacent Travel services to represent another $30B+ of addressable service revenues for the portals it delivers.

Our Accelaratetm platform is modular and designed with Web 2.0 widgets, which could be dynamically compiled and assembled to deliver Portals, Websites, and/or Widgets for deployment on other Web 2.0 sites. We have designed, developed and delivered several widgets for lead-generation and on-line booking of Motor Coach Charters, Tours and Trips. The platform also leverages the power of Web 2.0 technology with mash-ups, XML and RSS feeds and Blogs to incorporate and integrate other widgets.

Evolution of our Platform Services

Over the course of the past two years, our platform has undergone three major evolutions:

2007 : Interactive, Trip-planning and Lead-generation Website for Regional Operator
2008 : Lead-generation Portal for Nation-wide Association of Motor Coach Operators
2009 : On-line booking of Tours (Q1), Trips (Q1) and Charters (Q2/Q3, 2009)

With the launch of On-line Charter booking in July 2009, Accelaratetm has arguably become the most powerful and most comprehensive Travel Services platform for the Motor Coach industry.

Deployments to-date...

The Accelaratetm platform has been deployed by more than 20 customers for lead-generation as well as on-line booking services and has been in operation for more than two years. The portals, websites and widgets - powered by Accelar - are designed as white-labeled components and have been deployed by our customers with their own branding. Portals, websites and widgets delivered by Accelar are generating more than $1M of Ground Transportation Service revenues a month.

Over the course of the past two years, we have acquired deep knowledge and keen understanding of the Motor Coach industry. We have parlayed that experience to bring a number of innovative ideas to the Motor Coach industry:

'Closed loop' Lead - or RFQ - management system
Google map-based Trip/Itinerary planning
Instant pricing and quotation
Instant booking of Charters, Tours and Trips

Accelar-branded GDS

The Motor Coach industry is heavily fragmented with more than 3,500 Motor Coach operators serving the $8B industry. This fragmentation and surprising lack of a strong National or even Regional brand has created a unique opportunity for us - launch of our own branded portal to offer Nation-wide Services to Consumers, Groups and Meetings markets. We have launched three portals to address the three primary services offered by the Motor Coach industry:

MyCharterBus - Motor Coach charters for Groups and Meetings markets
MyTourBus -Motor Coach Tour Booking for Individuals and Family Units
MyTripTiks - Individual tickets for Fixed Route services

The Accelar GDS - made up of these portals - is truly revolutionary for the innovation, comprehensiveness and in-depth inner workings of the Motor Coach industry it captures. With more than two years of experience in building, delivering, deploying and managing various on-line services - lead-generation, pricing, quotation and booking - for the Motor Coach industry, our Platform and Portals provide a level of sophistication and maturity to the Motor Coach Industry that is 'miles and miles' ahead of any other solution currently available.

While there are many lead-generation sites - BusRates.com, CoachQuote.com, et al - currently available, there is no other system that offers:

Lead-generation, on-line pricing & quotation, and on-line booking
Charters, Tours & Trips services
Widgets, Websites and Portals that can be configured in a very flexible manner to meet the needs of our customers and partners
On-line marketing tools - SEO, SEM, PPC and Social Media - that are integral components of our system

Much like Orbitz combined the power of an Airline GDS system with a Consumer-facing Portal, we at Accelar have integrated GDS for the Motor Coach Industry with Consumer-facing Portals to provide a new, unique, innovative and exciting solution to the Motor Coach industry and to the various Groups & Meetings customer segments we address.

Our Platform

AccelarateTM: Our Web 2.0 based Booking Platform

Unlike other companies offering Internet based solutions to the Motor-coach industry started by Motor-coach industry professionals, Accelar founders have a strong Internet/Web background. Over the past couple of years the Accelar team has partnered with several Motor-coach operators and with Trailways, a nation-wide organization of 80+ Motor-coach companies, to develop the industry’s first complete booking system for Bus Charters, Tours & Trips. The portal is based on Web 2.0 technology and leverages AJAX, mash-ups, and social networking capabilities to deliver a very powerful and scalable booking system to the Motor-coach industry.

The Accelar platform is architected in a modular fashion to allow its Web 2.0-based Booking Widgets for Bus Charters, Tours and Trips to be deployed on other Affiliate Group Travel sites, like Groople, TripAdvisor, TripWiser and Consumer Travel Services Portals, like Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz. The platform is also designed to host Web 2.0 widgets for Hotel, Airline, Activities and Restaurant reservations offered by Accelar’s Affiliate Marketing Partners.

Our Mission

Our Mission is to bring to the Group Travel Services market the ease and convenience of on-line search and booking of Group travel services that individual, business travelers and family units have come to expect from Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, et al. Our Accelaratetm platform is designed to meet the needs of the Group Travel Services market.

Ground Transportation is one of the 'anchor' segments of any Group Travel package - be it for Conventions, Corporate events and outings, Sports events, School outings, School & University Athletics, Family reunions, Weddings, etc. The Group Ground Transportation service is our primary target as part of the Group Travel service package. With the investment we have made in automating the lead-generation, instant pricing and quote generation, and instant booking of Charters, Tours and Trips, what we have delivered is the Motor Coach Industry's first GDS.

Our Mission is to be the on-line voice of the Motor Coach industry. Due to the fragmented nature of the industry - with more than 3,500 operators in the US - and due to the absence of a National or Regional Brand, the industry has not been able to effectively present its collective voice to the Groups and Meetings market. In the absence of the industry being able to project its collective voice to the customers, several 'brokers' - like BusBank, USABusCharter have emerged over the past few years. These 'brokers' have commoditized the services offered by the Motor Coach industry by setting up an auction on behalf of customers and offering them the 'least cost' bids with complete disregard to the quality of service offered by the Operators.

Our Mission is to market the services of the Motor Coach industry directly to the Consumers and various segments of the Groups and Meetings market and eliminate the middleman or the 'broker'. Our white-labeled portals for Motor Coach Operators and for Associations and our branded portals - MyCharterBus, MyTourBus, and MyTripTiks - collectively present the voice of all the Motor Coach Operators and Associations to the Customers interested in Group Ground Transportation services offered by the Motor Coach industry. We work with our customers - individual Motor Coach Operators or Associations - to not only build their on-line presence with their own Web 2.0-based website or portal but also provide a full suite of on-line marketing services - Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising, Social Media/Networking, and Affiliate Marketing - to drive more business to them.

Unlike 'brokers', our mission is to maximize the revenues for Motor Coach Operators by marketing their services directly to the consumers. With our sophisticated portals, we give our Motor Coach Operator customers an opportunity to showcase the quality of their services and offer 'value based pricing' directly to consumers as opposed to 'least cost', service-agnostic offerings by 'brokers'.

Our Team

Kumar Shah, Chairman & CEO

Our Chairman/CEO, Kumar Shah, is the visionary who founded Accelar to bring the power of the Internet, Web 2.0 and Social Media to the $95B Group Travel services market. With less than 30% of all Group Travel services market conducted on-line, he saw the opportunity to bring more sophisticated Web 2.0-based dynamic packaging and automation to the On-line Group Travel Services booking market. Kumar is a veteran of the high-tech industry and brings more than 15 years of experience in working with entrepreneurial start-up companies as senior executive and as an investor. Under his leadership, Accelar has become one of the leading providers of On-line Web/Internet solutions to the Group Travel services market, in general, and Ground Transportation services, in particular. Besides leading the Accelar venture, he is also the Managing Partner of an investment fund that has invested in a brick-and-mortar Group Travel services company, El Camino Trailways, to execute on the Click-and-mortar business model that has become his and our guiding principle. Kumar has led and guided many other ventures - Kasenna, Occam, AccessLan and others - and has been affiliated with several venture capital firms, including US Venture Partners. The companies Kumar has been affiliated with have delivered more than $1B of Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer products and services. Kumar has an MS from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and BS from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, India. Kumar resides in Silicon Valley and sets the strategic direction for our company and manages the most important capital assets for our company - technology, equity and human capital.

Jaggi Ayyangar, Founder/COO

Jaggi is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with 20+ years in Web applications and Internet and wireless connectivity platforms. Prior to Accelar, Jaggi was founder and CEO of Volti/Vocaloca which developed an Interactive streaming and VoIP platform and services. In his career, Jaggi has founded, co-founded or led three other companies. Jaggi started his career at ROLM systems that invented the Computerized Branch Exchange. On account of their acquisition of ROLM, Jaggi has held Engineering, Product Marketing and Strategic Planning executive positions at IBM and Siemens. He holds a BS in EE from I.I.T., Bombay and MS in Computer Science from LSU, Baton Rouge. Jaggi is responsible for managing and handling our day-to-day operation of the company, including engineering, web infrastructure management, sales and customer service.

Andy Beohar, VP Engineering

Andy has 13+ years of experience in the E-business and Software Development industry. He has strategized, architected and led the execution of numerous web portals, enterprise e-commerce applications, wireless applications and large-scale database solutions. He has a deep understanding of web based technologies and a successful track record of translating complex processes into intuitive e-business solutions. Prior to joining Accelar, Andy was founder and President of Infoscaler, a leading Santa Clara based e-business solutions firm. At Infoscaler, Andy was instrumental in bringing in Fortune 50 and global enterprise customers such as Sony, McKesson and Covance. He successfully managed distributed teams to create large-scale web portals and internet applications. Prior to Infoscaler, Andy held development management and software engineering positions at Client Server Designs, a developer of CASE tools, and Pittway (now Honeywell), a manufacturer of security access control devices. Andy has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. Andy provides engineering management for our engineering team across the globe.

Bob Aube, Director of Corporate & Business Development

Bob Aube is an Entrepreneur and Sales and Marketing Executive who has founded, launched and managed many successful businesses – including a travel agency, Golf League, and Sports-related television programming. He started his career in the Travel Agency business, which he sold in 2001. He then founded the National Golf League, an alternative to PGA (Professional Golf Association), with NFL-like format for a league of golf teams in major cities. At Accelar, Bob is responsible for developing our affiliate marketing partnerships with Sports Leagues, Sports Teams, Travel Agencies and other customers needing nation-wide Motor Coach Charter Services. He is also responsible for Sports Events-related Charter Service opportunities.

Allan Linden, Director of Marketing

Allan Linden marketing communications professional with over 20 years of advertising, marketing, public relations, investor relations and branding/messaging experience. Over his career he has helped to successfully launch over 100 products and services, and almost as many companies worldwide. Allan’s has worked with such companies as Foundry Networks, Kasenna, Occam Networks and agency giants J. Walter Thompson and Doyle Dane Bernbach. Most recently he founded and sold Software as a Service business, which focused on digital asset management. At Accelar, Al is responsible for managing all marketing, public relations, marketing communications and advertising activities.

Dasha Avdulova, Marketing Manager

A senior manager of an international boutique travel agency, City Realty, Dasha started Moscow brunch office from ground-up. After building a network of participating hotels and real estate agents, Dasha sold travel services to clients globally and also managed hospitality services for foreign visitors providing logistics, immigration support and entertainment programs. Dasha also directly assisted with the work of Creative Executive Director at Lowe Adventa, a British advertising holding. In the course of her relatively short tenure she spearheaded the deployment and management of the customer database, budgeting and event planning processes. Dasha worked on preparation and organiztion of Lowe Adventa's big projects - International Advertising Festival. Dasha grew up in Australia, attended a business school in Finland as an exchange student and graduated from the Moscow University of Management. Dasha brings in a unique set of skills in international business, marketing and management. At Accelar, Dasha is responsible for developing, building, managing and supporting our Motor Coach Operator customers.

Tinny Arora, Web Designer/Engineer

Tinny has over seven years experience in the field of Information Technology primarily in the field of web development.She worked as an Application Analyst in Allegheny Energy and PPG(Paint Glass)in Pittsburgh, PA. At Accelar, Tinny is responsible for development of new features and maintenance of site.

Kinnery Shah, Marketing Intern

Kinnery is a second year undergraduate at University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) where she is majoring in International Development Studies. Kinnery has been on the marketing team of various music events and festivals at UCLA, including the Jazz Reggae Festival at UCLA, the largest student-run event in the nation.

Advisory Board

David Pickeral, Executive Advisor

Mr. Pickeral is a senior expert and strategist in the area of transport and telecoms, particularly in the area of technology and policy surrounding the operation and deployment of next-generation transportation systems. In addition to his work with Accelar Mr. Pickeral currently works as an independent consulting supporting US and international clients related to critical communications systems development. In this capacity he has managed large teams supporting successful efforts for nationwide interoperability initiatives working with transport public safety and emergency management entities at all levels of government. He belongs to a number of professional and academic societies related to his background in telecommunications and transportation management and policy as well as his military service.

Bill McFarlane, Advisor

Bill McFarlane is a senior travel industry executive/consultant with a proactive entrepreneurial spirit and significant achievements in both the corporate and consulting environment for companies from established Global 1000 firms to start-up ventures. He has successfully fulfilled roles as CEO and board member, as well as key leadership positions in strategic planning, M&A, marketing, sales, product and market development and operations for a variety of companies, including i-FAO, a German Corporate Travel Services Management company; TravelStora, a UK-based on-line, full-service B2B travel services site; and Galileo/North America, the joint venture between European Airlines and United Airlines for development of their GDS. Bill has Diploma in Management Studies from Abertay University, Scotland, and MBA from Edinburgh University, Scotland. Bill has been instrumental in helping Accelar formulate our strategic direction and in developing our strategic partnerships.

Our Infrastructure

We have built a robust, fail-safe and secure infrastructure for all the websites, portals and widgets we are hosting for all of our customers.

The servers we have used for hosting is based on Quad-processor, state-of-the-art multiprocessing technology from Dell and uses Linux, the open-source operating system, which has become the main-stay for majority of Internet service providers, including Yahoo!, Google, Amazon and others. The servers provide full-redundancy and resiliency to withstand even multiple failures. The RAID storage we use with our servers provide full database access and backup even in case of failure of any of the server elements.

Our servers are hosted in a facility that provides 99.999% uptime and availability. With our on-site as well as on-line backup ensures that all transactions and data are backed up completely.

Our E-Commerce system is powered by PayPal, a division of eBay. We do not store any credit or debit card information related to the E-Commerce transacations in our Servers, thereby ensuring the sanctity and security of the financinal information of consumers booking on-line with us. We also use PayPal for distribution of funds to our customers - Motor Coach Operators and Associations - to ensure that funds are distributed in a safe and secure manner without breach of confidentiality of the financial transactions.