Some useful advice for travelers, from the National Post:

If you go away on holiday this year, don’t end up like Calgary resident Jason Boutang. He used an application on his phone to translate phrases into French when he visited France last month. He also streamed a Calgary radio station for five hours.

The result? A cellphone bill of $7,763.70, according to [the] telecomblog.com. It’s easy to rack up huge roaming fees when you travel overseas because cellphone companies charge astronomical surcharges just to cross the border. But if you make a few preparations before you leave, you can keep your costs at a reasonable level.

“I recommend that if you go away and you want to use your phone, that you call your cell provider and get a travel package,” said Stephen Joyce, the CEO of the tourism technology company Rezgo.com.

Travel packages are a relatively new feature offered by cellphone companies. They charge different rates depending on the region. While the per-minute rate is still significantly higher than using your phone locally, it will offer travellers some savings. Otherwise, it could cost as much as $4 per minute for calls and $50 per megabyte for data usage, depending on where in the world you are. Text messages are also more expensive overseas, at about 60 cents per message.

Via story-mentioned @stephenjoyce and this topic has been previously covered here. Just as a general rule, even if you have a roaming package, don’t do streaming radio, watch videos and other bandwidth-intensive things on your smartphone unless you’re really sure you’re not going to be paying through the nose for it.

Todd Lucier of Tourism Keys explores the impact of the fact that 30% of cell phone users are now browsing the web (and that’s going to massively increase over the next few years) on the tourism industry. Read more here.

We noticed last week at the WACVB Destination Marketing Tech Summit that there were a lot of Androids amongst DMO attendees – not as many as iPhones, but still a remarkable number.

The latest AdMob numbers tell the story:

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US.

Given the trend lines, the Android’s probably in the #1 position by now and is likely to maintain it, at least until Apple introduces a version of the iPhone that’s not dependent on the somewhat flaky AT&T cellular network.

An FYI post for what’s happening outside the tourism industry. DAM believes the first place visitors who own smartphones – in a few short years, e.g. “everybody” – will look there first for information about places they’re visiting. As a DMO/CVB, it’s imperative that you stake your claim here ASAP.

When will location-based services stop being fads and start getting real?

Sponsored by Wired, the talk featured panelists who all work on projects where users share information online, whether it be their location or answers posed by online users. And while gaming and social aspects have driven user rates to date, wider adoption dependson utility.

Chris Dixon, CEO and cofouner of Hunch, thinks it all comes down to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma:

“One of the key characteristic of new disruptive technology is that it starts out looking like a toy. That’s so often why big companies ignore and dismiss it.”

But the big hurdle for start-ups is to get users play with and use their tools on a daily basis. Dixon divides people into two groups for these purposes: “techies” and “normals.” Many new digital tools are quickly adopted by techies, but “when it becomes critical infrastructure is when it crosses over to the normals,” he says.

With adoption of location-based tools, things are just getting started. The tipping point will be when people start depending on the store of information they provide on a daily basis.

Tony Jebara, associate professor of Computer Science at Columbia University & Chief Scientist at Sense Networks, puts it this way:

“When you’re in a new city, you have to start from scratch. And you realize how much better off you are with these tools.“

It’s exactly then, when services become personally useful, that people start saying “maybe my phone should be tracking me,” says Dennis Crowley, co-founder of mobile check-in service Foursquare.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

Discover Anywhere Mobile was in Montreal last week at the Online Revealed Canada and Canada-e-Connect conferences. We’d like to say “hi” to all the people we met, especially the event organizers and Canadian DMO folks from coast-to-coast-to-coast. We’re excited that you’re excited about what we’re doing, and we’ll be in touch soon. And as Phillip Wolf of PhoCusWright says “don’t miss mobile opportunity“.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what DAM does, have a look around the website and give us a call for a demo. We have the first, the most compelling and the best priced mobile solution for getting CVB/DMOs mobile in the market.

The Globe and Mail reports:

Demonstrating the intense fluctuations coming to Canada’s wireless industry in 2010, new research suggests the next six months will see 55 per cent of Canadians buying a new handset, likely a smart phone.

[...]

Of those who said they would buy a handset, 28 per cent wanted a touch-screen smart phone and 19 per cent wanted a Qwerty-keyboard, likely for easy texting, the study showed. Both of these growing habits – texting and data use – have gradually eroded the time spent talking on phones, analysts said, in part to the detriment of large wireless carriers.

Canadians are increasingly using smart phones and laptop data sticks to connect to the Web, according to data collected by Toronto’s Convergence Consulting Inc., which estimates 30 per cent of wireless subscribers will be using such devices by the end of 2010 and around 50 per cent by the start of 2014.

Emphasis by me. We believe they’re massively underestimating smartphone penetration by the start of 2014, as that’s 4 years away – forever in an industry where things get cheaper and better every quarter.

Via Alec Saunders.

Just to tip our hand on where our long term thinking is, wouldn’t it be great if people could buy tours, book hotels, plays or theatres, and make reservations within a single app as a single basket transaction.

Here’s an interesting report – Smartphone Owners Now Spending More from Handset, but Poor Site Functionality Is a Turn-off (all emphasis added by us):

Key findings from Compete’s Q3 2009 Smartphone Intelligence survey include:

• 37 percent of smartphone owners have purchased something non-mobile with their handset in the past 6 months.
• 19 percent of total smartphone owners have purchased music from their device, 14 percent have purchased books, DVDs, or video games and 12 percent have purchased movie tickets.
• The most popular mobile shopping-related activities are still research related – 41 percent of iPhone users and 43 percent of Android users are most likely to check sale prices at alternative locations from their mobile phones while they are shopping.
• The second most likely activity is accessing consumer reviews, with 39 percent of iPhone owners and 31 percent of Android owners investigating reviews from their handset before they purchase.

While m-commerce is poised for explosive growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment in the early days of e-commerce. Compete’s Q3 Smartphone Intelligence survey found that eight percent of smartphone owners that tried to purchase a product on their device were unable to do so. 45 percent of those that abandoned the process reported that they did so because the site would not load, and an additional 38 percent left the site because it was not developed specifically for smartphone users.

That is grim and probably totally unnecessary – purchasing products from your mobile tourism product should be as simple as buying music in iTunes. If you’re doing something interesting in this space, we’d like to hear from you.

Link via David Eads.

From Marshall Kirkpatrick on Read/WriteWeb:

Dell Computers announced today that it has now sold more than $6.5 million in product through links broadcast out to its Twitter followers. The company has more than 1 million followers on Twitter, a handy gift from Twitter Inc. via prominent placement of Dell on the Suggested Users List shown to all new Twitter users.

Alas, there’s a number of caveats that follow but still a very interesting read. Done correctly, customers are though engaged by social media.

Discover Anywhere Mobile is proud to be a sponsor for HoHoTO, raising funds for Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank.

If you’re interested in attending, it’s December 16th at The Mod Club; if you can’t, you can give a donation here.

I actually don’t believe this is true, at least within the context of Western world. 5 years is a long ways away and the combination of Moore’s Law and the fact that smartphones are also pretty damned good game machines makes me believe they will be market dominate in less than 3 years. From Mobile Tech Today:

Smartphones will overtake regular handsets in terms of sales by 2015, according to a report, “Global Smartphone Market,” published by Telecom Trends International. The report says that sales of smartphones will constitute 2/3rd of total mobile handset sales by 2016.We are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way people use the mobile phone, said Naqi Jaffery, the report author. The smartphone is becoming the primary mobile device, he said.

Smartphones sales will show a robust growth of over 28 percent through 2016 the report said. This is in contrast to regular handsets whose sales will continue to decline, it said.

Smartphones will no longer be confined to a niche market, Mr. Jaffery said. Their falling prices and attractive features are contributing their transformation into a mass market device, he said.

Via Mobile Crunch.

Last week we did a brief “background” interview with Nora Young of CBC Spark about Discover Anywhere Mobile’s Transit app and Augmented Reality. You can listen here:

• Full CBC Podcast (with notes, etc)
• Our segment (as an MP3, about 2:15 long)

Thank you very much to Nora and the gang at Spark!

Beth Kormanik in Hotel Interactive writes:

You may be right if you think the apps for smartphones like the iPhone or Android are passing phases. But that doesn’t mean you can afford to sit this one out.

PhoCusWright’s senior corporate and technology analyst, Norm Rose, said the market is only growing for consumers who use smartphones, and they want to use them to make travel decisions. Rose presented his conclusions in a Webinar this week called “The iPhone and the Future of Mobile Travel Applications.” He also is co-author of PhoCusWright’s Mobile: The Next Platform for Travel.

Rose predicted that the craze over apps may last only four or five years, but they will be crucial. Hotels and other hospitality-related industries need to plan a smart mobile strategy that will bridge the near- and long-term. Part of that is cementing your mobile brand in the minds of consumers so they stay loyal to your brand in the future.

…

PhoCusWright found a direct correlation between smartphone owners and frequent travelers. Its most recent consumer technology survey, released in May, showed that people who take more than four leisure trips annually are more likely to have a smartphone. Similarly, people who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter also tend to be on the cutting edge of mobile technology and take an average of 4.7 trips a year.

Meeting these travelers on their own technology terms can be the key to capturing their business.

All emphasis added. Note that we don’t think apps are a passing phase – we’ll just get to the point where we don’t think about them anymore. Originally from HotelMarketing.com.

Discover Anywhere Mobile got a write-up today in the Halifax Chronicle about our Central Nova Scotia iPhone app:

TOURISM INFORMATION ABOUT CENTRAL NOVA is now as close as your iPhone. The local tourism association has signed on to provide information to Discover Anywhere Mobile, an iPhone destination application aimed at North American travellers. Central Nova Tourism Association marketing manager Devin Trefry said the application provides travellers with direct access to visitor information on Central Nova Scotia that can be downloaded directly to their mobile phone.

“We recognized the trend and opportunity of using mobile phones to help visitors to access information, and make travel within our region easier. We were fortunate enough to strike up an innovative partnership with Discover Anywhere Mobile to become the first destination in North America,” he said. “The use of technology with travel is definitely the way of the future and we’re excited to be on the forefront of this trend.”

Discover Anywhere Mobile Inc. is a Toronto-based software development company focused on mobile solutions for the travel industry. Applications created by Discover Anywhere Mobile include traveller-centered listings with photographs and text for popular sites and attractions, hotels, restaurants, businesses and tourism offices within a destination.

Some interesting news today from Fierce Mobile Content.

One-fifth of Americans accessing mobile web each day

Nineteen percent of Americans now access the mobile web on a typical day according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, representing 73 percent growth over from the 11 percent level recorded in December 2007. In addition, the Pew study reports that 32 percent of Americans have now used a mobile device to access the Internet for email, IM or information seeking, up from 24 percent in late 2007. In all, 56 percent of Americans have now accessed the web via wireless means, whether laptop, mobile device, game console or MP3 player–laptops are the most prevalent alternative, accounting for 39 percent of wireless Internet access.

Report: iPhone accounts for two thirds of all mobile web traffic

Apple’s iPhone now represents 66.61 percent of all mobile web traffic according to a new study issued by web solutions provider NetApplications. The Java ME platform follows a distant second at 9.06 percent, trailed by Windows Mobile at 6.91 percent. NetApplications notes that despite the iPhone’s commanding lead in mobile browsing share, both Android (6.15 percent, tied with Symbian) and BlackBerry (2.24 percent) are rapidly gaining market share–however, the report notes increases by Apple’s rivals does not mean that iPhone web browsing is shrinking, as the overall market continues to grow rapidly.

Half of iPhone users rely more on mobile web than newspapers

Five in 10 iPhone and iPod touch users say they use the mobile web more frequently than they read newspapers according to a new consumer survey released by mobile advertising platform AdMob. In addition, more than 40 percent of respondents report accessing the mobile web more often than browsing the Internet from their computers or listening to the radio.

Mark Evans of ME Consulting (and Mesh Conference fame) writes about social media and the travel sector:

[...] One thing that struck me during their presentations is how travel is such a personal experience, and how the best travel experiences don’t come from guidebooks but, instead, the people you meet along the way that suggest places you’d never otherwise have discovered.

This makes recommendation services such as Twitter a natural way for people to get travel advice from an extensive network of people who have real insight into what to see, do and hear, and a willingness to share it.

The question is how online travel services can effectively integrate Twitter into their offerings as opposed to having it exist as a standalone. Traveller, for example, has a way to ask questions that can be published on Twitter but there’s current no way to integrate the replies from Twitter users into Travellr’s database so Traveller users can benefit from what people are saying on Twitter.

My sense is the tighter integration of Twitter into online services will be a powerful and effective way to enhance the information available while extending the overall community. In some respects, Facebook is working on it with Facebook Connect but the reality is we’re just scratching the surface.

To comment on a personal note, when I was on vacation earlier this year in Florida I was happy to discover that some friends from Toronto were also down there via Facebook.

To reiterate and expand on one of Evans’ points, I believe the integration question is broader and potentially very technological difficult. It’s fine to get social recommendations, but how do we “keep” that recommendation in a useful form. That I have a Twitter recommendation to go to (say) the Distillery District while in Toronto needs to easily be integrated into whatever tool – e.g. Travellr – I’m using online, but then also be seamlessly transferable to whatever other travel services I’m using: TripIt, Google City Tours, and of course, whatever it is I’m using on my handheld. And of course, in a few short years the handheld is where all the action is going to be once in-destination.

Given the difficultly we see today in pleasantly presenting options to add calendar items, add business cards, subscribe to syndication feeds, and so forth – I suspect a more general solution will need to be found.

Google Labs has introduced a new technology called Google City Tours which has gathered quite a bit of attention over the last few days, most likely because it’s Google doing the announcement rather than anything novel or inherently interesting in the product. Internet produce profiling site TechCrunch’s description seems sufficient:

Getting started is incredibly easy — just type in where you’re visiting (say, San Francisco or London), and Google will present a suggested itinerary spanning a three day trip, with around a dozen attractions per day depending on the city. From there you can change the number of days you’ll be staying (Google will show more attractions the longer you stay), and you can also manually adjust the list of places you’d like to visit. You can add a new attraction by entering its name in a text field, and Google will try to find it in its database. All attractions include a star rating, along with its hours operation and location.

My personal opinion is that this is a typical Google Labs product – without significant improvement, we will likely see this product fade from site fairly quickly. The core of the application is simply Day 1, I go to these locations in this order, Day 2 I go to (etc.). The interface is plain but still relatively non-intuitive, the routes do not take advantage of Google’s map route features, and the tours are relatively random. Bizarrely, there seems to be no way to actually link to a tour so that it can be mailed or shared with somewhere else, or even used on a different computer — every page is more or less http://citytours.googlelabs.com/.

There are other sites that provide not unsimilar ideas. Planet Eye has travel packs for exploration ideas. The awesome TripIt offers a personalized itinerary based on the data you feed it via e-mails or manual entry, though it’s missing the “what should I be doing” (as opposed “what am I doing”) component.

Todd Lucier says “Google is no threat to DMO’s and Visitor and Convention Bureaus” but notes that is shoes what DMO’s should be doing. I agree and in fact at some level this is what Discover Anywhere Mobile is trying to accomplish, though obviously we’re targeting more the mobile space.

What’s really going to be needed in the long run is some form of data portability between different sources of tourism information. Every person should be able to select a restaurant from TripAdvisor, an itinerary from TripIt, perhaps even information directly from a museum’s web page and then be able display it in a tool like Google City Tours or Bing Maps and also seamlessly view on their mobile phone. It’ll be exciting to see how this goes over the next few years.

Tech, Price, Family Drive US Vacationers (from TravelTrade magazine, via Hotel Marketing):

Yesawich gave an overview of the National Travel Monitor, the yearly survey conducted by the Ypartnership that tracks the travel habits, preferences and intentions of Americans.

Technology and social values are the biggest influencers of American travelers, said Yesawich.

Technology is especially influential with 61% of active travelers saying they use the Internet exclusively for travel research. In the 2009 Monitor, 56% of travelers said they book their travel online as well.

Although this survey doesn’t cover mobile, it’s worth noting that a clear majority of Americans want the immediacy of the technology they have in front of them to plan travel. We believe the smartphone is the next logical step in this progression, especially when in comes to in-destination rapid decision making: where am I going tonight, where am I going to eat afterward, etc….

Thanks for waiting for this page to appear! Let’s just start off by quoting our home page:

Discovery Anywhere Mobile creates customizable mobile travel guide applications for Destination Management Organizations. Discover Anywhere Mobile can quickly and cost effectively compile your DMO’s event and listing information into mobile applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry and mobile web browsers. Applications created with Discover Anywhere Mobile’s services will meet traveler’s need for concise, relevant, timely destination information at the exact time and place they need it most – at your destination.

We have a very clear vision of what we want this product to be, what it’s going to become. We believe that over the next 2-3 years hand-held applications are going to be the way tourists (and other travelers in general) are going to consume information in general when they’re at a destination. Why would one need to carry a guide book when you have a device in your pocket that can hold everything you need – maps, GPS, recommendations, events?

Over the weekend past, Apple sold over 1 million new iPhones, each costing several hundred dollars and committing the owner to several thousand dollars of phone bills over the next two to three years. Palm introduced it’s new Pre product to reasonable success for a brand new platform. Numerous devices based on Google’s “Android” software have been announced or sold. RIM sold almost 4 million BlackBerries in 2009Q1.

What’s this leading up to? At least one member of each tourist family is going to have a smartphone when traveling. Every business traveler – BlackBerries and iPhones almost now being ubiquitous – will have a smartphone when on business. Hip, young (and young-at-heart) explorers will have the latest and coolest device with them in your destination.

These people want to have great experiences in your destination, they want to know where to go, why to go there, and what’s going on. Not only can Discover Anywhere Mobile provide the software and services to make this happen, we can make it happen now, quickly, cost efficiently and with your data.

Give us a call and we’ll start talking about what we can do together.