Yeah, you’d think a week would be good enough to catch up on WES stuff, but that’s clearly not the case. WorldMate Live announced a new “Connections” feature to their great BlackBerry travel app, allowing you to easily hook up with people that have overlapping travel plans. After requesting a connection with someone else, WorldMate Live will keep an eye on both of your accounts, and whenever it looks like you’ll both be heading to the same destination, you’ll get a notification. This is a really cool and easy way to keep in touch with business contacts who are on the move just as much as you are. On top of that, the WML handheld client also added calendar integration, so all of your itinerary information get shunted to your BlackBerry’s default calendar app. Oh, they also announced integration with Telmap’s mapping systems, so you can get GPS directions to all the destinations listed in your itinerary. If you’re interested in giving it a shot, there’s a free version available, but to get the good stuff, you’ll have to sign up for Gold service.
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WorldMate Live adds social networking
Nomadz is a new personal safety tool for businesses and travelers. If you’re going to a foreign country, you can simply fill out your itinerary and you will be alerted to any potentially dangerous situations you might be involved in, from terrorist threats to thunderstorms. You can contact the Nomadz team if anything untoward happens, such as a car accident or injury, and they will alert the authorities, as well as get maps and directions to business meetings or wherever you need to go. They mention that they are working on a new health service, which will give you information on drug interactions and remind you of dosage schedules, and even give a second opinion based on information your provide. Definitely something to look out for at WES.
We talked last month about some of the more idyllic travel destinations, and how BlackBerry helped you out in those exotic locales, but, as we’ve seen, sometimes things don’t go quite as planned. Everyone’s missed a flight, or at least came close to it, or botched hotel reservations, or got completely lost in a foreign city. Well, let’s hear your worst travel story, and how your BlackBerry helped (or ruined) everything. I always think of Max the Road Warrior when it comes to missing flights, and accordingly, we’re going to give away 6 months of WorldMate Live Gold for the best travel horror story, especially if it involves a plane full of zombies.
If WorldMate Live is a little too time-consuming for arranging your travel plans, TripIt offers something a little quicker. All you have to do is forward your booking e-mails to plans@tripit.com, and their robots will go off and scour the web for weather, maps, directions and all sorts of info to make your travelling all the more painless. With their recently-announced mobile site, you can access all that amassed information from your BlackBerry at m.tripit.com. You can also shoot off a command to that e-mail address to get a reply with all of your info, if you’d prefer to have it in e-mail format. I’d sooner stick to WorldMate Live if I’ve got the time to plan, but TripIt sounds like a great service for last minute trips.
Oanda, a company specializing in foreign exchange services, and SweetCaesar, who develop custom BlackBerry apps, have teamed up to release a mobile version of Oanda’s FXConverter. The software is used around the world to convert over 160 different currencies, from the Afghanistan Afghani to the Zambian Kwacha, usually with rates less than a minute old. FXConverter Mobile puts all the information at your thumbtips, with an easy interface that sorts currencies into alphabetical categories and remembers your recent conversions, and even tells you exactly how many seconds since the rates were updated. Easily used and usable by everyone from casual travelers to millionaire bigwigs.
If you’ve somehow missed WorldMate Live, we’ve got you covered with a review, a spotlight, and a podcast. The software is a must-have for any globetrotter, allowing you to create itineraries and check world clocks, flight status, weather and more. Their latest update adds support for reading travel confirmation emails from a number of web-based email services including Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail. Users can forward confirmations to WorldMate’s confirmation address to have them automatically added to their itinerary and pushed to their BlackBerry, or have their travel agents skip the middleman and send them directly to WorldMate. They’ve also added Safari support, so Mac users can jump in on the action as well. If you’d like to get 6 months of WML’s premium service, you should check out our Weekly Contest…
