Leave digital breadcrumbs with DispoMaps

Ever wanted to leave a trail breadcrumbs through the city for your friends or to keep for later use? The folks over Urban Informatics have created an app for that: Dispomaps.

DispoMaps enables you to share your current location on an online map with anyone. The map is constantly updated as you go, using your iPhone’s GPS.

DispoMaps is easy to use. Launch the app, switch Location Sharing to “ON,” and decide how you want to share your location: via SMS, email, twitter, or facebook.

Your recipients will be sent a link to a unique web page displaying a map of your real-time location. Once you have arrived at your destination, you can easily dispose of your map by switching Location Sharing to “OFF.”

Lots of potential uses. Here are a couple that come to mind:

1 – Travel efficiencies/Mass Maps: Monitor your daily movement vs. others and then add efficiencies.

2 – Shared Explorations – Friends can literally follow in each other’s footsteps. Or, if meeting, they can easily locate each other, making meeting up easier than ever.

3 – “A night with [insert celebrity]” – Now Kim Kardashian can take her Twitter audience along with for a night on the town.

Foot note: One of the coolest features of the app is the disposability of the maps. Maps are made and can be shared and then easily deleted through the app. This could make for some very interesting time-sensitive, live events.

TagWhat: Social, Location-Based Augmented Reality Network

Released last week by Iryss, TagWhat is a web interface and mobile app that enables users to create their own AR networks:

Tagwhat users place digital tags anywhere on the Earth, from their street corner to another continent. By simply holding up the camera view of a mobile device (iPhone or Android), geo-contextual tags from pre-selected friends and community members become visible. Walk down the street and Tagwhat reveals a wealth of relevant information, discussions, and deals — such as a coupon for a nearby establishment, a discussion thread for a meet-up with friends, and a restaurant review about a sushi place around the corner.

At the heart of the Tagwhat network is its patent-pending augmented reality technology that lets users leave behind digital crumbs (tags) for any location, place or thing, anywhere in the world for friends and followers to discover. Each marker is an interactive social object, and can include direct action links to email, phone, SMS, photos, URL’s, cross-posting to Twitter, Facebook, and more.
(via PitchEngine)

It appears that the app is available now for iPhones and Android devices.

One effect of this technology for brands: it is becoming easier and easier to curate experiences of physical space (e.g. a tour or a scavenger hunt) using pre-existing tools; TagWhat maps can be created and dynamically amended with no outside assistance from developers. Awesome.

The Office + Tripadvisor

The fake listing for Dwight’s ‘Schrute Farms’ from the Office on TripAdvisor now has over 600 guest reviews.

Article from the NYT here.

Lost easter egg on Kayak.com

A great idea by Kayak.com to engage Lost fans anticipating the final season and drive traffic to their site. Search Kayak.com for a one way flight Sydney to LAX on 9/22/2010.  The Oceanic airlines flight is the plane that got ‘lost’, and the price of the flight 4815.16 references the number sequence in the opening titles of the show.

There’s also a second easter egg.  Search for a one way flight from LAX to Guam on Jan 21, 2011- and you’ll be taken to mythical airline site called AJIRIA.

Ebay Mobile Boutique

Nice idea for Ebay to take their brand offline with this traveling Ebay Holiday Mobile boutique.

Gliider – travel research tool

Gliider is research tool that lets you gather and save travel info from across the web.

Mobile Boarding passes

More airlines should do this! Check-in and board with your mobile phone. American Airlines have introduced paperless boarding on flights originating from some airports including: Chicago O’Hare (ORD), Los Angeles International (LAX), Santa Ana John Wayne/Orange County (SNA), Atlanta (ATL), Las Vegas (LAS), and Minneapolis/St. Paul (MSP).

Once a user books a flight from any of these airports online, they are emailed a barcode they can save to their phone and have scanned by security at flight check-in. According to Star-Telegram about 100,000 people a month already use paperless boarding.

Free WiFi for the holidays

If you’re traveling for holidays..
Google is offering free WiFi at 47 participating airports and on every Virgin America flight. From now through January 15, 2010.

- Turn on your WiFi (computer or handheld device)
- Connect to the ‘gogoinflight’ signal
- Launch your web browser and connect to airborne.gogoinflight.com

If you’re in Times square….
Yahoo, has partnered with Times Square Alliance to offer free Wi-Fi in Times Square, New York.
The Wi-Fi from Yahoo kicked off this morning at 8am EST and will continue throughout all of 2010.

Lufthansa MySkyStatus

Another great example of airlines using social media channels to connect with consumers. Lots of airlines are using social media like Twitter to interact with passengers and provide customer service.

Lufthansa has introduced an additional layer of utility to its flight confirmation service called ‘MySkyStatus’ which lautomatically updates FB and Twitter with your flight’s status, so your friends and family can keep track of if you’re delayed for example. I’d be interested to see if it automatically prompts you to use the service when you’re making a booking via the site, as that would be a small, but effective way to integrate and promote the service with their customers.

Visualizing the insanity

An interesting project by two people using Jet Blue’s ‘All you can fly’ for the month of September promotion. They will be posting an entry each day for 30 days about their experience. I love this!

In an airplane, hundreds of people with rich backgrounds and histories are crammed together for hours at a time. They have fascinating stories. We want to tell some of them. Our plan is to strike up conversations during our flights and see if maybe, after 30 days of constant flying, we can get a good understanding of the average jetBlue flier. We’re going to document our experiences at 30dayflight.com.