Silicon Valley draws me to it like a powerful magnet, with its Mediterranean climate, irresistible culture of innovation and iconic technology brands that have defined a generation. It pulls in my whole family, which, like many Americans, lives in a world defined by Apple, Facebook and Google.
Four years later. When David Sun needs a cheap ticket, he Googles it. When James Pillow wants to fly somewhere, he doesn’t.
No one seems to care that Michael Rudolf’s Google Nexus doesn’t work. Can this device be saved?
She had rescheduled a flight from Washington to Los Angeles on Virgin America to avoid superstorm Sandy, which was about to slam into the East Coast. But she’d forgotten to order a wheelchair.
Owen, who works for a nonprofit organization in Washington, had recently broken her foot, which was in a cast. “I had been on the phone on hold with Virgin America for well over an hour,” she remembers. Halfway to the airport, she decided to send Virgin America a tweet — a message on the microblogging service Twitter.
If you have a driver’s license, chances are that you also have an amusing story about GPS directions.
Here’s mine: A few weeks ago, my family and I were driving from Cayucos, Calif., to Prescott, Ariz., when I noticed that the needle on the fuel gauge was pointing to “empty.” Not a problem, I thought. There must be plenty of service stations between here and Bakersfield.
True story: US Airways, which has been in the news this week for announcing it will add first class service to its smallest planes, sent frequent flier Margery Wilson the following apology late yesterday.
Don’t you just love Google’s “autocomplete” — the feature that tries to guess what you want while you’re typing?
Autocomplete’s algorithm offers searches that might be similar to the one you’re entering. Here’s an explanation.
After seeing this clever map of autocompleted states, I wondered: What does it say about travel?
A lot, actually.
For airlines, the results are telling. Hotels and car rental companies? Not so much. The algorithm tries to pair you with a location in your own area, which makes it difficult to tell what others are typing.
