WorldMate is huge in the mobile world -it first started as a Palm OS app back in 2000. Then, as today, they realized that “travel = mobile” and so it made sense to build a mobile application for travelers. WorldMate had an innovative approach and built what was the industry’s first on-device portal with a myriad of travel content for online/offline use. WorldMate was so successful that many PDA/Smartphone makers including Nokia, Palm, HP, and Sony Ericsson pre-installed it on their devices. More than 3 million people use WorldMate across the Symbian, BlackBerry, Palm OS and Windows Mobile platforms.
But that was then when making mobile apps meant being pre-installed on a pre-sale phone. The world has moved on since the launch of the iPhone to a new world of online application stores. Now with after the SDK 3.0 and right before the expected launch of iPhone 3.0, WorldMate has come to the iPhone app store.
In many ways this is a huge validation of the iPhone platform, it’s one of the first dedicated for business applications of the kind that are huge in the BlackBerry world to make the platform jump to an appstore full of shall we say “less serious” applications (you can see more of this attitude in the latest WorldMate Max video embedded below).
It’s easy to see why they are coming to iPhone, the potential market is huge; there about 40 million business travelers in the US that take over 200 million trips totaling $200 billion in sales. According to WorldMate these “road warriors” are continually jostled around with 30%+ of flights are delayed or cancelled, with meeting schedules change all the time, and because there’s a lot of stress trying to make split second decisions in unfamiliar environments with a lack of relevant information. What’s more, these travelers spend on average $1000 per trip. WorldMate is the only service to that can help by effectively aggregating this disparate information. But that is only half the battle. WorldMate further distinguishes itself in that it can take this information and turn it into solutions. For example, if your flight is delayed, WorldMate will let you know and then suggest all the alternative flights you can take instead to make it to your destination on time.
WorldMate in both its free and Gold versions have both shot to the top 20 apps in the travel category and it seems that not only is WorldMate ready for iPhone, iPhone is ready for WorldMate.
Next to being an Internet Entrepreneur I also consider myself a true mobile worker. I started my first company in a bar in Amsterdam and started my second company, HubHop – a WiFi hotspot provider – so I could work anywhere with WiFi.
Being a mobile worker requires good preparation. I bought a TUMI bag years ago to protect my Powerbook/MacBook Pro. As you might know the TUMI has lots of hidden pockets in which you can store stuff. I decided to compile a list of things that every Mobile Worker should have in his bag to turn any place into a temporary office. Built on years of experience I hope it is useful for you:
1: Gadget Kit
Laptop (with DVD player for long flights), iPhone/iPod, Digital Camera.
2: Emercency Back-up Kit
USB Stick, Spare Keys, Laptop Lock, Spare Batteries (laptop, phone + other stuff), one or two rewritable CDs or DVDs, Food (stuck in meeting, airport or traffic!), Original Laptop Installation CD/DVD.
3a: Cable Kit
Ethernet, Monitor/projector adapters, Airplane Power adapter, Adapters for Phone, Laptop and Other Gadgets, Spare iPod/iPhone Headset.
3b: Cable Kit
The most important cable you might want to pack is a cheap power extension cord. I have one that is almost 4 meters long and it is my most used gadget. Most places have wireless internet but the power sockets are always inconveniently hidden somewhere. A simple extension cord gives you a lot more freedom!
4: Medical First Aid Kit
Aspirin, Sleeping pills (lethal dose to escape boring meetings), Cough Suppress Pills (Mints/Drops/Anything that works for you), Bandages. (Optional: tampons and/or condoms).
5: Personal Hygiene Kit
Toothbrush and Toothpaste (Take mini set from plane or hotelroom) and/or Mints and/or Chewing Gum, Toothpick and Floss, Nail file and Nailclipper, Comb, Small Mirror.
6: Papers
Passport, Businesscards, 3 ballpoints, 1 Permanent Marker, Notebook (moleskine), Book or Magazine (for when batteries are empty (inevitable) and you are bored), 4 Paperclips (to eject disks, sim cards from iPhones or poke between teeth when bored).
7: Assorted Tools Kit
Leatherman/pocket knife, Screwdriver, Tie rips, Ziplock Bag (for storing liquids such as drinks, beauty products and vomit), small umbrella.
The title of this post is a quote from Wittgenstein which kept popping into my head as I was traveling through Europe these past weeks. I visited France on a ski trip, stopped over in Vienna by airplane and then traveled to Budapest by car.
I speak Dutch, some English, a little German and unfortunately only know one word in Hungarian. The conference I’m visiting only had 4 English presentations: my own, Ernst-Jan’s and two more. Unfortunately none of the other presentations used the only Hungarian word I know.
Hungary has a population of about 10 million people. After WW1 the country got split up and Hungary lost 72% of its land (a sensitive subject even now) which means that there are about 14.5 million people who still speak the language.
In Europe we tend to compare ourselves to the US regularly. We are jealous of the great start-up cultures in cities like San Francisco and the entrepreneurial spirit that so many Americans seem to have. But how much difference is there really between these two parts of the world? Lets take a good look at some statistics.
Population
The US has a population of more than 300 million. Compare that to Hungary and you aren’t too well off. Compare it to Europe as a whole and the figures look different. There are more than 700 million Europeans. That is twice as big an audience as the US?! Suddenly I don’t feel so alone anymore.
Language Those 700 million people are divided by language, right? They all speak different languages so it is too difficult to reach them? Well yeah, there are 23 official langauges in the European Union and 65 languages and/or dialects in total. That sure sounds fragmented.
Everybody in the United States at least speaks English, right? Well, almost. English is not the official language of the United States but more than 82% of the population speaks it as their native language.
Lets look at Europe again: 51% of all europeans speak English as a second or first language. That actually means that there are more people who speak English in Europe (357 million) than there are people in the United States, in total!
Money
It isn’t really about the language is it? It must be about the money. The United States is a richer market. But is that really true?
It looks like the GDP of the US was about USD 14,330,000 in 2008 and USD 18,930,000 in Europe (In millions of dollars).Yep, Europe is doing a lot better than the US when it comes to GDP. Maybe GPD growth? Is the US growing faster than we are? I don’t know what the results will be of the current economic crisis but when you look at from 2006 till 2007 the United States GDP grew 4.9% and our GDP grew 16%.
Maybe you say I’m making these numbers up as a biased European? Nope, they are from the CIA World Fact Book. Surely the CIA can be trusted on their own numbers?
The more I think about it the more interesting Europe becomes to me:
- There are more people in Europe
- More people speak English in Europe than there are people in the US
- We have more money in Europe than in the US
- We are growing faster
I have to admit, all these ‘facts’ are based on statistics. And we all know how trustworthy those are. But I do suggest you do your own research and look at what you can find out about the differences between Europe and the United States before you pack your bags and move to San Francisco.
Now all that is left for me to do is convince all the Internet Entrepreneurs in Hungary, and Europe, to actually start speaking English…
Yeah yeah, the credit crunch. I’m sure the travel industry suffers from it as well, but you wouldn’t say if you keep an eye on online travel services. They raise money, appoint new directors and keep launching new products. Like Tripwolf, the Austrian travel site that combines professional editorial travel tips with the usual user generated content – “OMG, you gotta eat at this restaurant! We had a lovely time and the owner was such a gentleman!!. Users can combine these different sorts of content in a free PDF travel guide. Plus there’s an iPhone app on its way.
Anyhow, these European entrepreneurs have raised $2.5 million in a funding round led by European travel publisher MairDumont Group along with investor Dieter von Holtzbrinck, a German entrepreneur who was chief of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group for more than two decades.
In a online world filled with travel sites, why would this one manage to get a few million dollars. According to tech blogger Jason Kincaid, Tripwolf only has attracted 15,000 members since it launched in June 2008. The design isn’t spectacular either and the site is stuffed with ads.
But a closer look shows there’s an incredible amount of content (250.000 locations, city guides, recommendations and travel reports) and that the community managers do a good job in keeping the site interesting. There’s for example a photo competition going on, co-organized with pop star Dido. Things like this show that Tripwolf has a soul, and combined with great plans (like the iPhone travel guide), the travel site might actually make a difference in the online travel scene.
Written on 12th January 2009
9 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
I am not a tour bus kind of guy, if I’m going to go on a tour I’ll hire a guide (and a big car) and see the place in comfort. With HearPlanet, an innovative new iPhone app I may not even need to do that.
HearPlanet will user your location to give you a good overview of items of interest around you. Similar to previously mentioned “Where to” in some respects, however HearPlanet also seems to offer information about the places rather than just links to locations. The “Hear” in HearPlanet stems from the fact that the application will actually dictate info about your location, making it possible to essentially start your own tourbus business and use this information plugged into the bus’ sound system! (That was a joke, please don’t try that.)
Most of the information dictated is grabbed from Wikipedia which, in my opinion, is pretty reliable a source (finish reading the sentence before you disagree!) when it comes to locational and cultural information.
As TUAW mention, HearPlanet has a way to go before becoming a fully featured travel companion; a map, more images, video and directions hopefully will come soon.
I almost forgot to mention, the application is free for one week so click this link (app store) and try it out (available everywhere I believe).
Written on 7th January 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
TVTrip is essentially a hotel search engine. Yawn right? Well not quite, it’s actually both interesting and informative. TV Trip focuses almost exclusively on video to showcase hotels from across the globe.
Working with hotels, they send you on a guided tour of the hotel (not virtual tour by the way) and do their best to show you interiors, exteriors and everything in between! Currently the hotels are mainly Europe focused, however they are expanding and fast, clearly with the goal to have covered hotels on every corner of the world by the end of it.
Launched in June 2007 with headquarters in Belgium, the startup is founded by four executives of Expedia Europe – clearly the experience is there. Plus, they have the backing of renown VCs in Partech and Balderton.
TVtrip’s features include member reviews, interactive maps, links to booking sites, average room rates, photos and detailed hotel descriptions. To book however you need to navigate to one of the sites partners which include Expedia and Booking.com, fortunately they’re just a click away.
One noticeable issue could be videos becoming out of date, when a hotel renovates for example. I’m certain the sites founders will have considered the issue but one other startup may have found the solution to that particular problem, TVtrip’s main competitor tripr.tv. Tripr.tv is a very similar concept but focuses on user generated content rather than hiring their own staff to record the videos, it then compensates users by paying 33% of their commissions for every booking made via their contributed video. Other competitors also include Trivop and Travelistic.
Unfortunately you can’t embed any of TVtrip’s videos on other sites, however, if you click on the image below it’ll direct you to a good example of their video tours.
Arjen, Ernst-Jan and me are on our way to Paris today to attend Le Web. It starts on Tuesday morning and ends on Wednesday evening. This evening we are having dinner with a large group of Dutch people but look forward to meeting a lot of local people too. Let us know if you are in town too!
Oh, since a large part of our team is in this car with only iPhones for connectivity (at €2 per MB) don’t expect too many posts today. We expect to make up for it tomorrow with live reports from LeWeb.
(Published after 6 attempts over 0.5G at €2 per MB)
Written on 3rd December 2008
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
An interesting site has popped on the scene which has put a spin on the ‘City Guide’ by basing recommendations depending on how you feel! Currently in beta, the site focuses on three cities; iFeelLondon, iFeelToronto and iFeelNew York.
How it Works
Visit your city of choice, mine being iFeelLondon, and click on the left menu depending on how you feel, in my case Romantic. You are then greeted with a Google Map with pin points of various things people in London enjoy doing when they feel Romantic. To add your ideas to the map, you’ll need to request an invite which also requires a Google account as you’ll need one to access Google Maps.
Created by London based Andy Whitlock the site is definitely something I can imagine myself using, as long as the map entries are carefully monitored of course. In time I can envisage a maps being filtered further by romantic hotels, romantic restaurants, romantic benches to watch the world go by…and so on. As you can tell, i’m a romantic at heart.
As you might have noticed, I wrote a post last week about my three-week stay in Kathmandu, Nepal. After describing the beautiful country and its not so beautiful political problems, I invited every reader to drop me a line if he or she knew somebody in Kathmandu. Two people did.
Kathmandu Koding
One of them was Mark Townsend. He introduced me to Ayush Bajracharya, a 26-year old PHP developer from Patan, a gorgeous satellite city of Kathmandu. Ayush works for Samma Ajiva Limited, a company involved in several outsourcing projects. When I told Ayush about my Dutch nationality, he told me he functions as a cupid in my country since he developed a dating site called Zullenwij.nl.
Alternative to India and China
After spending a week here I got to know a lot of people like Ayush who are working on outsourcing projects. So while Tim Ferriss advises you to give your developer work a spin in India and Chinese companies desperately try to catch up with the outsourcing giant – Nepal might be an interesting alternative. One minor side note, it seems like the best way of finding a developer is actually visiting the country (which is no punishment at all).
Meeting locals through blogging
If outsourcing doesn’t concern you, then please learn one thing from this post. Traveling and blogging is one fine combination. When I went to Berlin earlier this year, I met up with some great music 2.0 fellows thanks to a post on this blog. And now it turns out that this strategy also works in more exotic places like Nepal. I realized this when drinking tea with Ayush and his younger brother Raz in a house that doesn’t even look a bit like mine. Our languages, habits, and religious beliefs are all different, but it was blogging that connected us. Pretty cool, eh?
I just received a line from Sarah Kapoor. She’s a film editor and together with a friend who works as a developer for Autotext, she created the Dopplr for Facebook. Kapoor and her friend are both hardcore travelers and missed the opportunity to meet up with out-of-town friends simply and keep up with friends’ travel plans.
Where are you with New Year’s Eve?
With inTown, you can add trips and see which of your friends are in the same town. As Kapoor describes:
Going home for Thanksgiving? So is Jane, John and Joe. Planning a trip to New York for New Years? Looks like Jack will be there too. Jane saw you post your trip to New York and wants to go, too.
Dopplr app not as sophisticated
Dopplr has been built with a similar goal, though it’s more business-oriented. Their Facebook app works just fine for sharing trips, but isn’t that sophisticated when it comes to comparing your plans with those of your friends.
Moreover, inTown might be more suitable for the masses. People are used to installing Facebook apps, going through the Dopplr routine is a whole different ball-game though.
Start me up
InTown isn’t really interesting yet, as few people use the service. None of my friends have it installed yet so I can only use it to brag. Let’s see whether the app gets viral.
By the way, unlike Jack, I’m in London for New Year’s eve. Drop me a line if you want to meet up.
Written on 4th June 2009
2 COMMENTS 
WorldMate
is huge in the mobile world -it first started as a Palm OS app back in 2000. Then, as today, they realized that “travel = mobile” and so it made sense to build a mobile application for travelers. WorldMate had an innovative approach and built what was the industry’s first on-device portal with a myriad of travel content for online/offline use. WorldMate was so successful that many PDA/Smartphone makers including Nokia, Palm, HP, and Sony Ericsson pre-installed it on their devices. More than 3 million people use WorldMate across the Symbian, BlackBerry, Palm OS and Windows Mobile platforms.
AppStore, blackberry, business, iphone, itunes apppstore, markets, mobile application, Nokia, palm, smartphone, Smartphones, Symbian, travel, Windows, worldmate
Written on 8th May 2009
Written on 23rd January 2009
Written on 12th January 2009
I am not a tour bus kind of guy, if I’m going to go on a tour I’ll hire a guide (and a big car) and see the place in comfort. With 
With 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
