A big congratulations to Uptake.com on their launch today! The VP of Marketing and investor in Uptake is none other than Elliott Ng of CNReviews. Apparently in addition to the China blog and all that twittering, he's got a pretty busy day job. :o)

According to them, UpTake is a travel search and discovery site - the first step for travelers to decide where to go, where to stay or what to do. We help users make informed decisions about what best fits their travel preferences. We scoured the web to collect 400,000 places to go, things to do and places to stay in the U.S. Then we analyzed and organized over 20 million travelers' opinions to enable search based on exact travel requirements and preferences. See about UpTake for more information about our company.

UpTake was founded by Yen Lee, GM of Yahoo! Travel and a serial online travel entrepreneur. Backed by Shasta Ventures, the company looks like they have a solid business model tackling the $8-10 billion—and growing--specialized lead generation market in travel.

Even though the company hasn't launched in China, there's definitely a China angle to them as 2 of their top engineers are from China and helped them to build a Beijing R&D Center in Zhongguancun.