8 Technologies to take on holiday with you.
So I’m back and want to let you know what worked well and not so well on the trip (see this post)
TripAdvisor
Perfect! The feedback was accurate and the reviews were spot on. The client pictures helped sort out the good from the bad and ugly, and after travelling a few thousand kilometers, it was a relief to find the accommodation as expected.
Opportunity: Maybe integrating FourSquare check in’s with TripAdvisor Reviews would be a great solution to ‘update as you go’ ?
Google Maps on the iPhone
Very handy to have for quickly locating food, train stations, etc in the various cities over short distances.
Kayak on the iPhone
Useful upfront, but no value on the trip.
Skype integration on the iPhone
Limited connectivity of any decent speed so not useful
Excellent!
Accurate, with many alternate route options, had most obscure back roads on the maps and quick route recalculation making navigating a breeze. Also had all POI’s that we searched for, so a great experience!
DropBox
This was critical. The only trick with DropBox is to mark the document that you’d like to access as a favourite to ensure that it’s stored locally on the iPhone for offline access. Besides that, it worked perfectly.
and the surprise fun killer app was…not even on the original list! but it is….
FourSquare lets you check-in to places or venues based on your GPS location via your mobile (iPhone in my case), and integrates a Tweet to update to Twitter as you travel. You can become the ‘Mayor’ of a venue you visit often enough, but the great part on a trip like this is that at the end of the trip you have a history of those ‘point-in-time’ memories as you experience them, along with all the weird place names and great food you stumble across along the way. Lots of fun and very useful for memory lane!
See here for my stats and an example of this
The second surprise was the paperless check-in using the Air New Zealand mPass iPhone App. Simply check-in using the app and scan the 3D barcode at the airport and off you go. Neat.
Try some of these technologies out. They certainly made the trip easier and more fun!
