Making Trip Planning a Little Easier

As I have mentioned in other blog posts, I travel as part of my corporate job and as such spend too much time making travel plans and making sure each component of my trips are properly in my Outlook calendar and the appropriate folks know about my plans.

Recently a co-worker of mine told me about TripIT a very nice travel planning tool that consolidates your various travel plans (air, hotel, rental car, etc) into a nice travel package. TripIT not only provides you a nice web interface but it also updates your calendar and provides you a way to share your travel plans with the folks in your network.

You build your trip in TripIt by simply emailing each of your plans to plans@tripit.com. TripIt then consolidates it all into the package which can be distributed via URL, email, RSS, published to LinkedIn as well as other social networks.

There are few caveats to TripIt:

- While the free version offers a lot, TripIt continually tries to entice you to upgrade to the various pay options they offer (many of which seem quite valuable, if you need that functionality enough to pay for it).

- While it does use OpenID, so you won't to have yet another set of credentials it does have its own profile, which means another profile and network to maintain.

- This is another case where you are trading privacy for convenience, make sure you understand what you are sharing and with whom.

If you travel a lot, check out TripIt, you might a find another tool to add to your tool-kit.

Blow that water away

Previously I have talked about the new high efficiency hand dryers. Recently I got to use the Xlerator hand dryer and to say the they are an improvement over standard hand dryers would be an understatement.

They literally suck the water off of your hands in just a few seconds doing there job with just a minimum amount of energy.

Coming up in future postings, we will shift back to more traditional technology discussions, but it is nice to actually try new non-computer technology and see the benefits it can bring to the table.

Look Mom, No Hands

In past posts we have discussed leveraging Facebook, Twitter and Blogs (#ftb) for promoting your business. In my prior post I discussed using the same or similar content in all three places and simply creating links back to the blog entry.

Today I am going to provide a way to automatically create the Twitter entry just by publishing the posting to your blog. The trick is a nice third party app called Twitterfeed that I learned about thanks to a posting on Blogger.com.

You simply create an account on Twitterfeed (you can leverage any of the OpenID accounts you already have) and then supply Twitterfeed with information on your blog and its feed information. Provide preferences on how often Twitterfeed should check your blog and how you want the want the Twitter tweets created and you are done.

Once Twitterfeed is setup your blog postings will just flow to Twitter with no effort from you. This gives you more time to create some additional catchy tweets or other tasks for growing your business.

See and use the right size

I didn't think I would get three different blogs posts from attending one event this past weekend, but ideas keep coming to me long after I have returned home from the event.

Early in the event as people were just mingling around trying to remember names to go with the faces they were seeing, their gaze would wander down to the nicely produced name tags that people were wearing. Given this was a 30th reunion, the eyes trying to read the name tags were not as sharp as they used to be. Pretty soon the jokes about the size of the print on the name tags started flowing around the room.

Later in the evening, the DJ made an announcement that a professional photographer was at the event and was setting up to take pictures of the events attendees. Soon folks started wandering around putting copies of order forms onto the various tables where people were sitting. The order form had several packages listed with each of the packages including at least one 8 x 10 print. Now I am sure the photographer was a fine photographer, but in today's world with almost as many digital cameras as people at the event, most people just took their own pictures in their own groupings. I was not privy to how many sales the photographer made, but the large number of blank order forms left in the room and the number of pictures posted to Facebook after the event tells me he probably didn't sell too many packages.

In both the name tags and the photographers case not understanding the audience and the technology culture we live in today caused results that surely were not what the event's organizers had in mind.

The name tags could have just as easily been printed with larger type and the photographer could have offered to sell digital copies, but neither alternative was offered.

Is your business seeing the right options and choosing the right size for its products and services. I know most of us can't wait 5 years for the next reunion to figure it all out.

The Triangles of Life - Convenience

I am sure many of you have heard the project management mantra: time, quality, cost pick two. There are many variations on this theme which in essence means there is an elastic relationship between time, quality and cost so the faster you work, usually the lower the quality and the more the cost and so on.

In life there are many triangles that we manage in terms of trade-offs. In this posting we are going to talk about the convenience triangle. We all want things to be more convenient, but in technology we are paying a cost for all of this convenience in terms of quality and privacy.

This triangle came to mind this weekend when I whipped out my Blackberry to snap a picture at an event I am attending. The convenience of the Blackberry (I always have it with me) outweighs the fact the picture quality is nowhere near the quality of even my little Sony point and shoot digital camera. I won't even talk about my Nikon digital SLR camera which takes tremendous pictures. In addition to lower picture quality the Blackberries camera feature set is a small fraction of what a dedicated camera provides.

Of course once I take the picture, there is no way I want to wait and have it printed, I simply upload the ones I like directly from my Blackberry straight to a Facebook album. Here is the third leg of the triangle, privacy. I am willing to upload the picture over a wireless network to share with my friends on Facebook. Of course I tag the people in the picture with my Facebook friends names (as they do with the pictures they take) adding more information and context to the pictures, but giving up more privacy along the way.

At the end of the day I have made peace with this triangle of life's compromises, but it is important to understand these trade-offs and make informed choices when facing your triangles of life.