Curate and complete your bucket list with these 3 startups

The bucket list as a concept has been immortalized across media, from the surprisingly good film Bucket List to the popular book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Travel tech has also gotten into the game, with many forgettable services promising to help you achieve the items pending on that list of things you hope to achieve before you kick the bucket. Thankfully, technology has vastly improved in the last couple years, and a few new bucket list services are useable, fun and can actually help you see more of the world. Here are three of our favorites.

Bucket: Bucket has taken a content-based approach to creating, curating and sharing bucket lists. The service scans an entire page (or highlighted section) of text to pull out all places that are mentioned. These places are then moved into a user's bucket list, where they can later be organized and shared, as well as viewed on the go, via smartphone.

The idea is that there is so much great content about where to go, what to see, where to eat and what to do — yet its incredibly time consuming to note all these places down or even use Evernote to aggregate these points of interest.

Bucket also hopes that users will share more, as aggregating the content into shareable lists lends itself to group travel planning — such as a bride sending out a list of recommendations prior to a destination wedding. Bucket recently announced its expansion across all regions of the United States, extending from a beta that included only Northern California.

This approach has been tried before — namely with the beautiful dcovery app — and proven to be a challenge to keep going. Dcovery ended up folding and Bucket is hoping to succeed where others have not.

Bucketlistly: Bucketlistly is a community dedicated to helping travelers achieve their dream trips. The focus is on gamification, making the process of planning and executing travel more like a game. The service also encourages users to link up with Facebook, where they can create groups to motivate each other towards specific goals.

There is far less focus on discovery here, meaning that there is no way to browse web content and then pull in specific points of interest. Rather, it's more like a place to state clear objectives — such as "hike Machu Picchu." Then the user's community of friends can encourage achievement alongside the Buckelistly community at large.

Tripnary: Tripnary is a mobile app that helps users keep track of bucket-list destinations and then search airfares to those destinations. By focusing on actually booking a flight, the app aims to help travelers accomplish those elusive bucket-list goals.

The mobile-only experience lends itself to quick and spontaneous trip planning. It also delivers a clean and direct interface via a global map that makes it easy to see how fares play out across a set group of destinations. A price slider keeps the displayed fares within a set budget. After selecting a destination, the user then is offered a selection of options from Skyscanner for booking right within the app.

For future searches, travelers can create their own lists of desired destinations, which then can be monitored over time for favorable fares. Push notifications are a handy way to continue engagement with a bucket list, as fare drops to saved places ensure that a good travel deal is not missed.

The team behind the app recently launched Tripnary 2.0, which includes new curated collections to inspire travelers around specific trip types, such as beach or hiking/outdoor adventures.

Disclosure:The author of this story advises Tripnary on strategy.