In an impressive presentation Steve Jobs introduced the world to the IPad.
What influence will it have on travel? Some preliminary thoughts:
In the preamble Steve explained that Apple is by now bigger than Nokia, Samsung and Sony profitability wise in mobile devices…It may be assumed that it will be rolled out big 60 or 90 days from now.
- My main question is: Will you be able to leave your laptop (or eee netbook) home for an Ipad? If so, it is a must have. You can e-mail, write, calculate and make key note presentations with it, browse the web, watch photos and videos with it and listen to your music library. It will depend on its touch screen typing capabilities, but even if that is substandard Apple has thought about a docking station with type pad.
- It seems that by its sheer browsing capability it will enable the travel community to forget about the hassle of adapting their websites to mobile devices with various operating systems.
- One aspect is that -as Steve Jobs puts it “standing on the shoulders of Amazone’s entry into reading e-books with its Kindle – It incorporates e-book reading. On the basis of the well known Itunes shop model, Apple has lined up 5 major book publishers to sell books through a new IBook shop. As of yesterday it will be start negotiating with many other book publishers. Hurray, back to downloading the good old travel guides onto your Ipad before you go. When I go on holiday, I usually take a couple of good books with me. Now I can carry those in my IPad, which will spare me a couple of kilos weight in my luggage: Poor Airlines who are just trying to get us used to surcharges for our luggage.
- Apparently Apple is also trying making a dent into the augmented reality scene. With a built in GPS and leaning on Google Maps, it will be amazing how fast you will get a bearing and will be able to collect tidbits in an efficient manner about the location where you are.
- First I published this photo on my significant other blog because it shows clearly you don’t have to sit at a desk to play/work with your computer properly anymore. I see it as the same sort of liberation the mobile phone brought us. No more desk sitting to await a telephone call. Now you can pute in the park – provided the park has WiFi off course:-)
- And you know what? No more need for a paper photo album anymore…you’ll now have a wedding album/slideshow/video on your IPad..and can carry it around the world with you.
- Less travel by it’s undoubted future video conferencing capabilities?…no more sitting in studios for those…
- No more need for hotels to provide papers to their guests…
Interesting times.
Added:
- Excellent tool for on the road board games! Via Rembuco
- Would it influence the way News is spread? See Nieman Lab
Last edited by Happy Hotelier on January 30, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Via Cribcandy I came across this vintage nested suitcase installation. Cribcandy found it on Mocoloco and Mocoloco found it at Design*Sponge. It made me wonder what designers do nowady with this perfectly pratical idea. If you travel you can’t have enough suitcases, but at home those darn suitcases take a lot of space…what better than to nest them in storage?
I did a quick image search on Nested Suitcases, but couldn’t find any eye candy design. Did I overlook something or is the idea obsolete and am I only nostalgic?
I like to share this design by
Yu Hun Kim with you, because a cuppa java with something to read is an ultimate moment of luxury relaxation. With this tray you can have both pleasures at once, even in your hotel bed!
No, this has nothing to do with a diaper- or hair pin, although it looks like it.
Helsinki, Finland, based designer Lincoln Kayiwa has designed the sterling silver Tukaani, a hand made connected set of chopsticks for the clumsy among us. A killer tool for the Sushi aficionado.
The loop is the key element: It holds and let you manipulate the chopsticks and can also be used to hang, store and display the Tukaani.
Lincoln Kayiwa was born in an architectural family in Kampala, Uganda in 1979. He graduated as a Master of Arts from the University of Art and Design Helsinki UIAH in 2008. Upon graduating he started his own brand product design company Kayiwa. He currently lives and works in Helsinki, Töölö.
Via Design Boom.
A “Patatje Met” or “Frietje Met”, the Dutch version of the chips that go with the British fish, Is a portion of French Fries with …. Mayonnaise and not with Ketchup. The mayonnaise part is so typically Dutch a habit, that foreigners usually look with raised eyebrows when Dutch order their fries met (=with). This very luxurious Fries holder is a have to have:-)
In this era of healthy living a warm plate of chips has become something of a luxury. So I’m not surprised to find these national favourites are now being given a bit of glamour. Maxwell & Williams have taken inspiration from the traditional chippy paper cone and created a sculptural French Fry Cup. The tall sweeping cup is available in a pure white or a newsprint pattern and comes with a matching dip cup. An eye-catching side dish for your next fish or burger, the Newsprint pattern is available from PotsandPans.co.uk while the White is available from Havens.
Newsprint French Fry Cup – £7.50
White French Fry Cup – £6.00
Kitchen Critic – French Fry Cups by Maxwell & Williams
If you’ve upgraded the hard drive in your laptop or desktop machine, then you’ve got a naked, homeless hard drive sitting around in one of your drawers. Put that puppy to use by plugging it into ThinkGeek’s External USB SATA Drive Dock and boom, you’ve got extra storage without the enclosure.
A professional photographer buddy of ours (who requires massive amounts of storage) uses the Drive Dock the way we used to use floppy drives: He’s got dozens of hard drives lying around, and he plugs them into the dock as needed.
At $39.99, buying a Drive Dock (and naked hard drives to go into it) is way cheaper than going the conventional enclosure-bound route, and it takes up less space on your desk.
Drive Dock: turn bare drives into “floppies” – Core77
You might wonder why I regurgitated this post of Core 77
Well it instantly hit a button in my mind, because I have a sort of museum here in my office of outdated unused gadgets. Among which these:
My first “Laptop”…..a Sharp that was kept in quarantine in Marseille, because of some anti Japan import regulations en vogue those days (20 years ago) for six months. I was able to negotiate some rebate with the seller…but it cost me the equivalent of Euro 8,000 those days… among a couple of Hard Disk drives that I would love to run in this HD docking station….and some stale nokias.
Without fluids man is doomed to die. Why not treat our basic necessity with the respect it deserves? Fort Knox is a luxurious wine rack reserved for a single bottle, a gilded cage for the most precious bubbly.
A unique design, as each object is numbered by hand. The hammered-in digits adorn the golden halter like a beautiful scar, playfully flirting with the logo’s engraved letters. Its simple structure, bearing resemblance to the basic wooden archetype, is just a trick to fool the over-stimulated mind.
Fort Knox doesn’t need to scream for attention with ornamental curls and provocative patterns; its decadence and weight show off just by being there – or by an attempt to lift the five hefty kilos for that matter. Beauty is ensconced in the perfect finish, precise inscription and frugal make-up. It’s the peach at each banquet, the pièce de resistance at every table, the icing on the metaphorical cake. Eat as much cake you like, since gold will never lose its value.
Fort Knox (2008) | Sietze Kalkwijk
When, after a long flight, you are awaiting a bit groggily at the airport luggage check out for your luggage to appear, it can happen that your suitcase travels three times the carousel without you noticing it. At least that has happened to me. That won’t happen anymore when you apply the “Pop Top personalize your luggage idea” of Public, a British design studio working in a range of fields from graphic design to product design.:
PopTop is a new type of hard-shell luggage. Using a matrix of multi-coloured dots to create a glossy surface graphic, the further one gets away from the piece, the clearer the image becomes. Lines will initially be limited to a few designs, but PopTop hope to make a web-based design-it-yourself range in the future. Public was charged with delivering the concept as well as a PDF presentation to take to retailers.
Love the idea.
It was Lorelle VanFossen (from her Family name I guess she or her hubby has Dutch ancestry), avid WordPress advocate, who drew my attention to Woopra with her post Whooping Woopra Blog Statistics Program, starting as follows:
I’m rarely totally and completely blown away by anything, and yesterday at Dallas WordCamp, John Pozadzides of One Man’s Blog, who works together on this project with Elie El Khoury [italics added by HH], who blew the whole crowd away with his new blog statistics program, Woopra.
I now fully concur with Lorella’s observation. I am not such a stats lover that I write for my stats. I blog because I find blogging a reasonable orderly way of cataloging my work / life / interests / finds for myself and sharing them with my readers. I use my stats mainly out of curiosity, because it shows me how people land on my site and what they are interested in. It always gives me (too) many ideas what to write about.
What is Woopra?
Woopra is not just another stats program, it is the re invention of the blog stats program.
Still a Private Beta
It was launched recently. Is still in private Beta. It is a small 4 man operation. You can sign in on their site. Then it takes quite some time before they let you in, because the demo at Dallas WordCamp drew so much attention that they can’t handle all requests in a timely way.
My short experience
I signed up shortly after Lorella’s post dated March 30, 2008. My patience was honored and I was let in on April 27.
I am in the process of installing several new workstations and a new server. Especially for Woopra I now have installed a second screen that constantly features Woopra. It is fascinating to see readers check in real life. You can see where they landed from, which search terms they used, where they land and which posts or pages or categories they read. It is almost too addictive and together with Twitter makes me forget Face book entirely.
Woopra has a built in chat functionality. I have tried it out with some of my readers and it works. I presume it scares the hell out of a reader when he gets a pop up screen out of nowhere and there are some concerns about the safety of the chat function. I take it that has to be ironed out yet. Also they have a plug in for WordPress that I haven’t even downloaded yet. You can tag your readers, so you can really start communicating with them if you wish via the Chat box. Twitter or mail.
For me the biggest surprise is that Woopra shows me that from all my posts here the two posts that draw the most readers are almost totally unrelated with my main subjects.
I suggest you check it out!
Update
If you want to see other peoples raves on Twitter, just check out Tweet Scan on Woopra. A link I found through a visitor just a few minutes ago.
