Weighty world of wireless wonders
When you’re as connected as Doug Jensen, space can be as important a commodity as bandwidth. “It all gets a little cumbersome,” says the Boston computer scientist and self-described “gadget king.” “I have the RIM in my shirt pocket and the cell phone on my right pants waist and the pager on my left pants waist. I sometimes carry the Palm/Ominisky in a jacket pocket, but usually it’s in my briefcase.”
Ticked at seat kickers
Who owns the space between airline seats - you or the passenger in front of you? It’s not an academic question for a traveler like Dean Burri. At 6-foot-3 and 325 pounds, he can hardly debate the finer points of law with a passenger in front of him who leans back. “I make a quick yell when they recline and say something like, ‘Hey, that won’t work - those are my knees,’” he says. “They usually don’t argue.”
Rand McNally remaps online presence
This week’s re-launch of Randmcnally.com signals more than just a top-to-bottom revamp of the 144-year-old map publisher’s Web site. It’s also the culmination of a strategic shift within the Skokie, IL company that began last fall, when Mapquest.com co-founder Chris Heivly set about creating a “travel site on steroids.” Heivly, who is now president of Randmcnally.com, helped expand the online division’s staff from 3 employees to 55 (about 20% of which were formerly on the Mapquest.com payroll). His plans included the integration of a customized Broadvision platform to create dynamic HTML pages that would fuse driving directions, content and Rand McNally’s fiber media offerings.
Hardware leaves you with ’synching’ feeling
Can we talk? It all depends.
If I were, say, a PDA and you were a laptop, then probably not. If I were a cellular phone and you were a workstation, unlikely. In fact, if you were a PC and I were a PC, we might have trouble connecting. Whether it’s different hardware platforms or operating systems, getting two or more machines to communicate can be a challenge. I’m not even talking about the corporate networks that require a team of brain surgeons to be on call 24-and-7. I’m referring to simple machine-to-machine data transfer - an address book, a word processor file or a couple of e-mails.
Taxing question
Q: I recently rented a Hertz auto in Tucson and guess what I found on my bill? A charge quoted as “7.5% exc. tax on FF mi”. It amounted to a 29 cent charge for the rental car company to update the car renter’s frequent flier miles. I think this ranks right up there with [...]
When travel goes really wrong
Jeanne Moore is the kind of person who almost makes me regret the columns I’ve written about bland airline food, silly car rental surcharges or inadequate hotel amenities. The Bakersfield, California, teacher was the lone American on the Indian Airlines jet hijacked to Kandahar, Afghanistan, last Christmas Eve. The ordeal included being left in a freezing cabin overnight and the stabbing of a hostage who reportedly refused to wear a blindfold. “I’ve spent eight days in a plane, on a tarmac, with terrorists,” she says. And what did she get for the inconvenience? Nothing. Absolutely zip.
Is spinoff mania spinning out of control?
These are exciting times at United Airlines. Later this month, the company’s e-commerce unit moves into a new office building near its Elk Grove Village, IL, corporate headquarters. Little is known about the spin-off of UAL’s dot-com division. According to Rick Collins, director of e-commerce marketing for the carrier, the consolidation of strategic partnerships like Buytravel.com, a yet-to-be-launched Disney co-branded site, and, of course, Orbitz, will “improve United’s speed to market for its e-commerce efforts.” It’s still unclear what the new United unit will be called or how it will ultimately fit into UAL Corp.’s corporate structure. Or if it will even be a part of UAL Corp.
Thanks to microbrowsers, e-mail is cool
Regular readers of The Travel Technologist will notice a conspicuous absence of cellular phone topics lately. That’s because I had to promise my editor I would stop writing about portables for a few weeks while everyone cooled off. A series of controversial columns about driving with the gadgets had overloaded my mail server with flames from indignant business travelers. More than a few of them claimed they could safely steer a vehicle at 80 mph and dial a phone number at the same time.
Stolen PC
Q: I am an educator who attended a conference with a Chamber of Commerce representative from our city at a Hyatt in Indianapolis. After I worked on some reports one evening, I checked my laptop (which belongs to my school) into security at the hotel. As I was leaving for the airport, I went to [...]
The lowdown on high-altitude ‘news’
Ever wonder where the “news” programs on your airline flight come from? Neither did I, until I got a note from a company that creates the talk shows you listen to on your in-flight entertainment system. It was an invitation to participate in a “special dedication to cutting-edge companies” formatted as a “60-minute news report.” “This consists of candid interviews and lively discussions with your CEO and other company leaders,” the message continued.
Is cracking my tech vault worth the effort?
A recent Washington Post profile about technology critic Walt Mossberg caught my attention. In it, the Wall Street Journal columnist admits that he keeps a pile of gadgets he’s evaluating in a “locked space called The Vault.” I’ve never met Walt, although his tenure as a tech writer began about the same time I was hired at Dow Jones (I fled Wall Street in 1992 because I was bored of covering the stock market). But I know we’ve got at least one other thing in common: The Vault.
What a tangled web we weave
When the United Airlines Web site quoted Robert Elleman a round-trip fare of $813.31 for a flight between Cincinnati and Buenos Aires, the first thing he did was make a printout. That’s because it looked too good to be true. It was too good to be true. When he tried to book the ticket, the site returned an error message. Then it gave him another price for the flight to Argentina’s capital: $1,159. “I called their Web customer support and worked with a representative for more than an hour, to no avail,” he says. “After much haggling, I learned that the real problem involved them posting a price that they did not intend.”
Can purple demon avoid Orbitz errors?
An indignant e-mail about my last column on Orbitz criticized me for suggesting that “announcing your intentions almost a year before you’re prepared to take your first booking” is a mistake every online travel company ought to avoid. “You are assuming there was no strategic reason to do this,” quipped the reader. The note was signed, “Alex ‘the monopolist’ Zoghlin.” All of which brings us to last week’s news: the revelation that six major carriers have been toiling away in secret for the last year to form a Web site that will sell distressed airline inventory.