Published on Wednesday, October 24 2007
Via the TripIt Blog comes the announcement of their mobile (email, really) offering called Tripit To Me.
(Not that I’m old enough to have watched Laugh In, but I keep seeing (in my head) the video of Richard Nixon’s deadpan “sock it to me” in the name of this feature)
This is genius – simple, clean access to the info I need without having to launch a web browser, navigate, etc:
TripIt To Me is an email interface to the trip information in TripIt. (This is better known in the tech world as a “command line interface.”) When you email simple commands like “get flight tomorrow†or “get trip 10/15/07†to plans [at] tripit.com, TripIt will email you the information you need whenever you need it. For the absent minded like me, TripIt To Me will be a lifesaver as I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve dashed off to the airport without my itinerary and had to call someone to remember the airline I’m flying on, or the hotel I’m staying at. Also, it will be great when picking someone up at the airport to be able to email “get flight†and see which flight they’re on.
They also took the time to create a “Tripit to me Wallet card” (PDF) so that you don’t have to remember all the potential commands.
If you don’t travel a lot for business, it might seem strange that you could arrive at the airport and not know which airline you’re on, but the reality is I’ve had that experience myself.
Tripit just keeps getting better.
Published on Wednesday, October 3 2007
Ok, first off, I apologize for the Travel 2.0 title. I know we’re all a bit tired of the 2.0 meme by now, but you can bet that somewhere both of these have been described as Travel 2.0 companies.
I written before about both Dopplr and Tripit but never specifically to compare the two. Both track information about your travel as well as the travel of your friends, in order to let you know when you and your friends will be in the same place at the same time.
Well, next week I’m headed to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to compare the use of the two sites in relation to that trip. All the images below are thumbnails, click on them to see full size.
If you just want the conclusion?: The fight’s not over yet, but Tripit has become more consistently useful to me. Dopplr’s facebook app and existing userbase is all that keeps me there at the moment, and that is an advantage easily lost.
Read more…
Published on Tuesday, September 25 2007
As a consultant who travels a fair amount, this device gets my vote as the single most important discovery this year:
When you’re at a conference (I’ve been at both Ajax World West and Garnter Open Source / Web Innovation Summits in the last week) or in an airport, electrical outlets are at a premium. There are countless web 2.0 knowledge workers wandering the halls seeking power. (Ampires, or wherevolts).
This little device turns that moment of potential conflict – where you spot an outlet but all the available sockets are in use – into a moment of collaboration. (In case it isn’t possible to tell from my hotel room photograph, this translates a single three-prong outlet into three. Simply approach the user of one of the existing outlets and ask to unplug them for an instant – they get to stay plugged in, you get to plug in, and you get one bonus plug for a third person or a second device.)
It’s “just good enough” – carrying a real powerstrip with fault protection, etc. would be better, from the point of view of protecting your laptop – but hey, you were plugged directly into the socket already, so this doesn’t make things worse.
It’s small enough to put in your computer bag and travel without problems.
It’s cheap enough that if you leave it somewhere by accident you can just go buy another one.
It’s even in RSS orange.
Published on Tuesday, August 14 2007
Stowe Boyd’s detailed review of TripIT is well worth a read.
Sounds like TripIT provides some of the features I wish Dopplr had – including the ability to pull travel information out of the confirmation emails generated by the airlines, as well as more granular (hour by hour) info about overlaps in your travel with friends.
All they’re missing is the obligatory elided-vowel-of-web-2.0, which I think would make them TripT.
Will this be enough to push a switch to TripIt? I’ll let you know once I get my invite. ;)
Published on Sunday, July 22 2007
Lots of great conferences going on right now – wish I could be at all of them.
This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)
The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.
Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:
Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”
Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.
(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)
Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.
As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.
Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.
