GigaOM » Amsterdam

Have iPhone, will travel: A tale of two trips and many apps

Laura Hazard Owen — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 17:00:40 +0000

In October, my husband and I took two big trips. One of them — a week in Berlin and Amsterdam following the Frankfurt Book Fair — was planned. The other — a 21-hour drive back to New York City when Hurricane Sandy canceled our flight home from a Florida wedding — was unplanned. Here are the apps I found most (and least) useful on these two very different journeys.

The fun Europe trip

The good:

myTaxi (iOS/Android/Windows, free)

I was amazed when our Airbnb host told us about myTaxi, which lets passengers hail a nearby cab, book it and track its approach on their phones. (There’s now a web booking option, too.) You can pay through a credit card linked to the app, or with cash or a credit card in the cab. And you can save your favorite drivers, make advance bookings and request cabs with certain features like credit card machines or hybrid cars. Unlike Uber, myTaxi works with regular city cab drivers so you just pay a regular cab fare. It’s basically street-hailing made easier. MyTaxi operates primarily in 30 cities worldwide, most of them in Germany, and just entered the U.S. for the first time with its launch in Washington, DC. I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival in New York, though considering the difficulties Uber has faced here, that could be a long time coming.

Tripit (iOS/Android/Blackberry/Windows/web, free for basic version)

I forwarded all our travel plans and email confirmations — hotel reservations, flight details, etc. — to Tripit. The app makes a custom itinerary for you and keeps all your stuff in one place.

Google Maps (on iOS 5) + data roaming

Apple released iOS 6 a couple weeks before I left for Europe, and as the terrible reviews of Apple Maps rolled in, I chose not to upgrade so that I’d be able to keep the Google Maps iPhone app on our trip. I was so glad I did. On our first few days in Europe, I was insistent that I wouldn’t shell out for an international data plan — I decided I’d stick to Wi-Fi and downloaded a few offline map apps. But the offline maps I tried were clunky and hard to use. So I paid for a small roaming package and from then on, wherever we walked, we used Google Maps to guide us. It worked perfectly and was a total lifesaver when we got lost after a visit to a coffee shop in Amsterdam.

TripAdvisor (iOS/Android/Nokia/Windows/web, free)

Using Trip Advisor for international travel seems roughly as cool as using a Rick Steves guide. I wondered if we were missing out by not using some cool local source — and it’s true that all of the recommendations we got from local folks (like our Airbnb hosts in Frankfurt) were great. Yet TripAdvisor surpassed my expectations. Before we left, I tested its restaurant recommendations for my own neighborhood in Manhattan and they were, indeed, some of my favorite local places to eat, not total tourist traps. Abroad, TripAdvisor continued to serve us well and didn’t steer us to any duds. We also found that it had many, many more reviews than Yelp, at least in the cities we visited.

The bad:

Lonely Planet Berlin & Amsterdam Travel Guide apps (iOS, $3.99)

Despite our good experience with TripAdvisor, I was also looking for a more traditional guidebook experience — we weren’t in any city for very long and wanted to get a good basic overview so we could decide what to do. So I bought Lonely Planet app guides to Berlin and Amsterdam. At $3.99 each, they were cheaper than print guidebooks and, I figured, would give us the highlights.

They were better than nothing. Rather than taking a print guidebook and enhancing it through technology, though, the app guides were much more frustrating than a handful of paper would have been. I expected that the guides I bought would correspond with the most recent print editions. Instead, they were out of date, referring to museums that would re-open in 2010 and once or twice steering us to restaurants that no longer existed. The maps included with the apps were outrageously bad, and in general, none of the things that a digital guidebook can actually do better than a print book — reader reviews, up-to-the-minute (or at least up-to-the-year) updates, GPS integration, etc. — were included.

The unplanned road trip

The good:

Priceline Negotiator (iOS/Android)

This app came in handy when we needed to find motels outside Savannah, Ga. (after our first day of driving) and Washington, D.C. (after our second day of driving). We weren’t looking for fun boutique-y features in cool neighborhoods, just clean places right off the highway. Priceline has tons of user reviews and aggregated “guest scores” even for boring chain motels like that, so we knew we should choose the Comfort Suites in Richmond Hill, Ga. ($70) over the Travelodge ($30, “it was nasty roaches”) down the street. And you can book hotels directly through the app. Priceline Negotiator also recently added “tonight-only” hotel deals to compete with the Hotel Tonight app.

One limitation: We needed a one-way car rental from Tampa to New York, but the app doesn’t support one-way trips, so we had to book the car through Priceline’s website.

MotionX GPS Drive (iOS, $0.99)

By the time our unplanned road trip rolled around, I’d upgraded to iOS 6. I kept hearing that Apple Maps is not terrible for drivers, so it should have worked for the journey from Florida to New York. Yet while Apple Maps had a lovely interface and turn-by-turn directions, it kept giving us different — and longer — routes than Google Maps’ mobile site (I compared the sets of directions from the passenger seat). We would have just used Google Maps’ mobile site, but it kept getting glitchy and wouldn’t toggle between a map and text directions without requiring me to retype our destination each time. So we turned to MotionX GPS Drive, which is $0.99 and then costs an additional $2.99 per month (or $9.99 per year) for real-time live voice guidance.

MotionX GPS Drive got us safely back to a drenched Manhattan. I realized that over the past three days, the biggest problem I’d had was a few glitches on a fancy smartphone, and I felt grateful. There’s not an app for that. Instead, I texted money to the Red Cross.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Danny Smythe

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Getting to grips with big data’s challenges

David Meyer — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:38:39 +0000

“Big data” is a big thing right now, but what’s being done with it and why? This was the subject of a wide-ranging panel discussion at Structure Europe 2012 on Wednesday. GigaOM senior writer Derrick Harris moderated, and the panellists included King.com data warehousing director Mats-Olov Eriksson, IBM big data product management VP Phil Francisco and GoodData platform VP Zdenek Svoboda.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

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What the shift to the software-defined datacenter means

David Meyer — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 09:37:19 +0000

When the network gets virtualized, which part of the organization owns it? That’s one of several key questions that were addressed on Wednesday in a panel discussion about the rise of the software-defined datacenter at Structure Europe 2012 in Amsterdam. Techalpha Partners principal and GigaOM Pro analyst George Gilbert moderated Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen and Embrane CEO Dante Malagrino – you can watch the video below.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

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For big data, does cloud beat business-class fabric?

David Meyer — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:52:36 +0000

There’s a huge amount the cloud can do, but is it there yet for big data? On Tuesday at GigaOM’s Structure Europe, Equinix CTO Lane Patterson joined business and technology journalist Stephen Pritchard to explain why he thinks there’s still a big advantage to having a private Hadoop cloud. A video of that conversation appears below.

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Inside Apple’s museum-like Amsterdam store

Erica Ogg — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:11:17 +0000

Credit: Thomas Schlijper

It’s no see-through glass exterior, but Apple’s new Amsterdam Apple Store is still offering some pretty good retail eye-candy. The overall motif, with white walls and classic, ornate architectural details, seems to call for marble statues rather than electronics on display. But you’ve still got the Apple design mainstays that let you know exactly where you are: the marble floors, modern wood tables and — of course — the clear-glass spiral staircase.

The Amsterdam location, which opens Saturday, is the first Apple Store in The Netherlands, which means Apple now has stores in 12 countries.

Fore more pictures, see Thomas Schlijper’s website.

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Gidsy goes to Hollywood with its Airbnb for activities

David Meyer — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:00:06 +0000

When your most high-profile investor is a Hollywood star, it makes sense to branch out to LA. And that’s what Gidsy, one of the most intriguing companies in Berlin’s current crop of startups, is just about to do by launching a service for Los Angelinos on Wednesday.

Ashton Kutcher may be playing an internet entrepreneur on TV at the moment, but in real life he’s also one of the backers of Gidsy — a platform for hooking up consumers with people offering real-world experiences.

What does that mean? In practice, it’s a place where people sell their time giving tours, teaching, and much more. In Amsterdam, for example, a retired cop offers red light district tours. A London cab driver promises a tour of Harry Potter locations, and a course in Berlin offers to help people create their own sock monkeys. New York options range from walking tours to a lesson in “getting shit made in the USA.”

Basically, almost anything goes, and people seem to be lapping it up: the company only started operations in Berlin and Amsterdam around three months ago, and it’s already rolled out to San Francisco, London and New York.

Trust is crucial

Gidsy has a very simple business model, taking a 10 percent cut of what customers pay for their experiences. The rest goes to the person who’s offering up the activity, making Gidsy something of a micro-employment platform.

Like Airbnb and other services that bridge the divide between online and offline, Gidsy is largely based on trust. The service plugs into Facebook, making it reasonably identity-driven and the company holds fees in escrow — only releasing them to the seller after checking the customers got what they paid for. The flipside is that Gidsy also makes sure the vendor doesn’t have to collect the fees at the event. In theory, everyone’s protected.

The moneymen seem to be impressed. Kutcher’s involvement came along with seed funding from Sunstone Capital, Index Ventures, former Nielsen Entertainment CEO Peter Read and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, all in all totaling $1.2m.

Gidsy’s Dutch CEO, Edial Dekker, told GigaOM on Tuesday that experiences lined up for the LA launch will include a Cirque du Soleil veteran teaching you how to breathe fire.

“We’re super excited to be launching in LA and can’t wait to see for which activities Gidsy will be used. It’s really interesting to see that every city has unique offerings that show a glimpse of what the city itself is like,” Dekker said.

In the future, he added, Gidsy aims to go as global as possible, taking in whole regions and branching out to support more currencies. The company also wants to add geo-search capabilities, to make it easier for people to find interesting local experiences.

“Next to the city launches, we’ve been working on a new way for organizers to offer activities through Gidsy, and we’re incredibly excited about this one,” he said. “Launching in LA brings us one step closer to a global community.”

Other LA Gidsy experiences will include a Hollywood sign hike and a course in how to avoid buying processed condiments ever again. Would it be too much to ask to have Kutcher giving a $15 studio tour?

Photograph of Edial Dekker used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Opendata Network

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