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Survey Says: Smartphones are Being Used for Travel

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Today’s smartphone will not be called as such if  it isn’t smart enough to perform day-to-day functions that affects our lives. One proof? – the plethora of mobile applications available on various platforms. These mobile apps vary from the most useful to the most absurd ones. One  app which smartphones are supposed to come in handy is for travel purposes.

There are various travel-related apps available on various smartphone platforms. But are these applications being maximized by users? Compete’s analysis of available data shows that indeed, smartphones are being used for travel purposes. The bad news is, the usage is not significant enough, leaving more room for, growth perhaps?

Compete’s study utilized behavioraly targeted surveys that asked smartphone users whether they use their smartphones for travel research and booking.  Surprisingly, 69% of the respondents to Compete’s survey said that they do not use their smartphone’s for travel purposes and 78% said they don’t use smartphones for travel booking as well.

Quite interestingly, the survey also revealed that respondents see their smartphone’s usage more for post-travel bookings. These pertain to following up room availability, check-in time and other travel-related activities that you need to do.

The survey thus revealed that smartphones are not replacement tool but rather additional tools that aid users in their travel-related needs. And smartphone’s usage to follow-up bookings and other travel-related purposes are still growing despite the relatively low usage.

The fact is smartphones can be used in various ways that we can possibly imagine. And one of these is for travel bookings and other related information.

via Compete

7 Reasons to Work in the Cloud

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The following is a guest post by Selena Narayanasamy. An avid lover of all things caffeine, Selena  currently does SEO and is a social media marketer/analyst as well as a writer. She has multiple degrees in business, marketing and finance. Along with all this, she also writes for Searchenginejournal.com and is growing Esvienne.com, her own personal social media and tech blog.  Twitter- @esvienne

The cloud is something that has been all around us for quite some time now, but we may not have noticed. Many of us didn’t think we needed to utilize the cloud; and we’re right. We have our own ways of managing tasks and information, from planners to our cell phones. There are certain markets that should be using the cloud, specifically small and large businesses. Since the cloud is ever-changing and nothing solid, it’s often confusing to a company who may be considering a work-flow overhaul and is looking at different options. There are 7 reasons in specific to use the cloud:

1. Employees are utilizing the same resources:

This can bog down your network and kill all chances of getting a good system flowing. Frustration with editing and slow resources can add stress to employees and hinder their abilities to work effectively and efficiently. Having many tools available in the cloud will allow there to be a place where everyone can work and collaborate freely. You won’t have to keep asking and waiting for someone to email you a document or a zip file. [Read more…] about 7 Reasons to Work in the Cloud

Twitter Announces New Features – Annotations, Places and User Streams

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Twitter made quite some noise today at its Chirp conference for developers. Aside from announcing that all public tweets will be archived by the Library of Congress starting with those publish as early as 2006, Twitter has also announced three new interesting features – Places, Annotations and User Streams. In brief, here’s what these three features are about.

Places – This is a new location feature which Twitter will implement to give developers a database of places around the world that will easily be associated with tweets corresponding to the location of the Twitter member who posted the tweet. Somehow, it works like location-based social tools such as Gowalla and Foursquare, although Twitter would not rather call it as a “check-in” facility.

Annotations – This is quite an interesting new feature as it will allow developers to incorporate arbitrary metadata to any tweet in the Twitter public timeline. These metada include information such as which tweet was a specific tweet made in reply to, the location where the tweet was posted, as well as the app used for posting/creating that tweet.

User Stream API – This will provide developers access to feed of user actions such as mentions, favoriting, and friending done by users on their individual Twitter accounts.

In addition to those three new features, Twitter is also launching a new site which will host various Twitter development resources. The site, dev.witter.com will feature documentations, and other information useful to developers.

Apple Approves Opera Mini for iPhone

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Opera continues its trip across various platforms as its Opera Mini browser app has just been approved by Apple. Expect the Opera Mini app to make its appearance in the Apps Store anytime now. Depending on your iTunes, setting the Opera Mini app will be available for free download within 24 hours.

It comes as a surprise that Apple approves the Opera Mini browser since it will definitely compete with Apple’s very own Safari browser on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But it just shows how open Apple is when it comes to competition, although I’m pretty sure that the Opera Mini is not the first approved app which directly competes with an Apple service.

So what does the Opera Mini app brings to the iPhone/iPod Touch table? A couple of good features actually topped by its fast mobile web browsing capability. Credit should be attributed of course to Opera Mini’s compression of web data by up to 90% before sending them to the iPhone/iPod Touch. This results to faster page loading.

Opera Mini will be most useful if your iPhone is running on slower networks such as 2G EDGE. It works great with iPhone 3G and 3GS models and would save you some precious data charges when browsing the web using your iPhone due to data compression.

“We are delighted to offer iPhone and iPod touch users a great browsing experience with the Opera Mini App,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. “This app is another step toward Opera’s goal of bringing the Web to more people in more places.”

Alright, I know that you’re probably grown tired of using the iPhone/iPod Touch’s Safari browser. Time for a cool change. Check out Opera Mini for iPhone/iPod Touch now.  You may also want to watch a short video demonstrating the features of the Opera Mini browser on iPhone (check out the video after the jump). [Read more…] about Apple Approves Opera Mini for iPhone

TweetDeck App Fully Optimized for the iPad

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With the large screen real-estate that the iPad offers, I wasn’t really quite surprised that the first adopters among application developers would be those with mobile Twitter client apps. If you checked the iTunes iPad App Store right now, you’d find several Twitter apps for the iPad – both new and old ones ported to the new platform. One of these Twitter apps which happens to be also my favorite on mobile phones is TweetDeck.

Thankfully, the TweetDeck folks didn’t just ported their mobile TweetDeck app to the iPad platform but build a new application instead. In fact they’ve build two new interfaces – for portrait and landscape modes. TweetDeck for iPad also takes full use of the device’s multi-gesture features.

Feature-wise, TweetDeck for iPad lets you do practically everything that you can with its mobile phone versions. The app lets you fully manage all your Twitter accounts, check web pages from within TweetDeck, use columns to manage your real-time feed, sync your data with the desktop and iphone client, iPad gesture based navigation, geolocation data and map interface, and of course all the basic Twitter functions such as composing tweets, retweeting and sending DMs.

And guess what? TweetDeck for iPad is a free download. Get it from the iTunes iPad App Store once you received your iPad.

Or watch this video showing the TweetDeck for iPad in action.

GoDaddy Will Stop Selling .CN Domains

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Looks like Google has gained an unexpected ally with its China boycott. Domain name registration and web hosting company GoDaddy.com has announced that it will  stop selling .CN domains.

According to the GoDaddy announcement, courtesy of the Search Engine Journal:

“We didn’t want to act as an agent of the Chinese government,” Jones said. “We can’t let them be strong and us be weak all the time. We just have to stop it, and then we’ll start offering .CN domain names again,” said Christine Jones, general counsel for Go Daddy.

This is in response to Chinese policies requiring every website owner to submit photographs, business information and individually signed forms including their physical address, email address and telephone numbers when registering a new .CN domain. These data will be forwarded to the China Internet Information Center (CNNIC), a quasi-governmental agency. GoDaddy does not usually require this information from its billions of domain registrants asking only name, address, telephone number and e-mail address before they register a domain.

According to Ms. Jones,   China was the first government to retroactively seek additional verification and documentation of registrants.  The Chinese government is implementing those policies to stop individual Chinese owned websites from getting attacked by spam.

Interestingly, Jones said that while Chinese domain name have been recently attacked most frequently, those sites however are mostly those “deemed not appropriate” for Beijing. Particularly sites containing information about  the Tiananmen Square uprising or human rights.

It would be interesting to see how this issue will unfold in the coming days. Will China feel the pressure from Google, GoDaddy and perhaps other Internet players and relax their internet policy a bit?