Being the most tech-savvy of them all means going above and beyond. And so London hotel, Eccleston Square has done just that. Claiming to be the first hotel in Europe with an iPad2 in every room and offering what they call ’007-smart wizardry,’ Eccleston is allowing customers to easily manage every conceivable function, gadget and gizmo from one device. An app is available for guests’ mobile devices and includes tools like temperature, lights, curtain control, restaurant reservations, room service orders, spa reservations, housekeeping, along with helpful tips on the hotel and the city area.

The gadgetry doesn’t end there though. The rooms also come equipped with docking stations for iPhones & iPods, 46-inch 3D plasma televisions, Blu Ray DVD players, VoIP phones, HD television screens in the bathroom and ‘smart glass’ bathroom walls. WiFi is also free, which in many hotels can be an added expense.

Of course the hotel comes at a price and the price isn’t pretty. Rooms start at £250 a night. Even at this price, they should do a great job of enticing the tech-savvy bunch. And this could usher in a whole new crop of 21st Century high-tech boutique hotels.

Set to open August 1st

Do it the high-tech way & use mTrip’s London Travel Guide to get around!

Photos of Eccleston courtesy of Eccleston Square Hotel

These reporters had it right by really testing these products in action and following the suggested routes and itineraries. Performed in real conditions, the two reporters walked around Barcelona like two tourists discovering an unknown city. The test was based on several aspects such as: the trip planning, the content of tourist information, the tracking and guidance in the city as well as the price/quality ratio .

TEST RESULTS

mTrip Travel Guides: 11/12
Mobile app competitor: 3 / 12
Paper Guide: 4 / 12
Tourist Board Brochure: 4 / 12

So as it turns out, the mTrip Genius is indeed intelligent and the suggested itineraries are helpful and customized to the traveler. We hope you have the same success with the mTrip apps!

See the video! (in German)

There’s much to be said for serving as your own tour guide. Let’s say, for instance, that you’d like to plan a budget-friendly trip to the bay area. It’s not exactly a notoriously cheap destination, but you’ve found a great hotel deal in San Francisco and you’d like to explore the area outside the city as well. You could sign up for a day trip into Napa Valley from San Francisco, taking all the guesswork out of it and letting someone else take care of all the details. You’d probably have fun, and you wouldn’t get lost – but since doing a self-guided tour of California wine country is so easy, why not give it a go?

Driving in San Francisco may not be any fun, but driving through wine country certainly is – and with a few tools you can make it even more enjoyable. You can use GPS to plot out a route through the most famous vineyards and other sights with helpful apps. You can even follow a prescribed route – but by doing a self-guided tour, you’re free to stop along the way if you see something interesting, or skip something on the tour route if it doesn’t appeal to you. Not only that, as any road trip aficionado will tell you, the potential for getting lost is half the fun.

Once you’ve tackled wine country, there’s no reason you can’t design a self-guided tour back in San Francisco before heading home, too. Even if you didn’t plan ahead, you can easily download a smartphone app or look up an itinerary online for a walking tour.Doing a DIY tour can be very relaxed and save you quite a bit of cash as well.

By the way, if you’re planning a wine country tour that includes lots of wine tasting and there’s no designated driver, you should stick to a guided tour where someone else is doing all the driving – but if your tour is more about the sights and food than the vino, by all means take control and be your own guide.

- by Jessica from BootsnAll

photo by star5112

Download a San Francisco travel app

….that’s because today we are offering two travel guides for free in the Apple App Store. Budapest Travel Guide & Prague Travel Guide will be free on iPhone & iPod only today. If you are on Android, the two travel guides will be at 0.99, also a steal!

Grab a guide today because prices will go back to $5.99 tomorrow!

Greater Access to Digital Information

One simple action that is already being addressed is to provide free wireless access in more public spaces. Three New York parks began receiving wireless Internet last week, while 17 more parks across all five boroughs are due to receive it some time in 2011. Further plans include wireless connections on the subway; the experiment will begin with six stations. Hopefully this will increase quickly as there is really no particular target user; every single New York tourist and local would benefit from this. Lastly, the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program will grant funding for high speed Internet in public spaces such as libraries and recreation centers.

Government API Platform

Tim O’Reilly has envisioned ‘government as a platform.’ He believes that there is great potential to offer the cities’ information and services in a digital capacity. The idea is imagined through an API, which would allow the government to open up the information and services the city provides. This would create a platform for everyone to engage with the city, yet on their own terms, much like Facebook and Twitter do. The potential for travelers is definitely far-reaching.

Increase City Engagement

There are 33 million unique visitors to the nyc.gov website yearly and it is believed that the number will soon overtake physical visits to Central Park, which is at 35 million a year. This is why the city will aim to make digital public spaces welcoming and useful. This will certainly assist travelers as well, who visit the website for travel information on the city events and things to do in New York. The city will also aim to increase social media engagement. Look out for their soon-to-launch Foursquare page, which will reward visitors with a badge for visiting public spaces. They will also launch a Tumblr page that focuses on telling New York stories.

Nurture the NYC Tech Industry

Since New York City already has a thriving startup scene, the city’s digital initiatives will include further encouragement of innovation and entrepreneurship. NYC BigApps, developed by the New York City Economic Development Corporation supports innovative technology by allowing developers to access the NYC DataMine and build public apps with the data. An example from this competition is the popular app called DontEat.at, an app that integrates Foursquare and sends text messages when you check in to a place that scores low on its health inspection. Hopefully talented developers will continue to take part in the competition and develop some interesting NYC-localized apps that will be helpful for tourists and locals.

There is clearly a lot to be done on the initiative but as one of the most digitally-engaged cities, NYC tourists and locals can look forward to some exciting changes.

Get a New York Travel Guide to get around!

Image by: DoctorWho

One of the cities to adopt mTrip’s technology is Trondheim, Norway. They have customized the technology to their needs, which is part of mTrip’s offering: you may take the mTrip features and add on more to make the application unique to your city.

At the launch of the Trondheim Guide, the app took first place in travel in the Apple App Store. It’s success continues with positive promotion of its city and a fun way for visitors to get around.

“When the Trondheim Guide was launched early May 2011 we immediately got very good feedback from the app users and I think mTrip deserves most of that credit due to the quality of their software. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the app or working with mTrip to other tourism boards,” says Pål Sommerseth, Project Manager – City of Trondheim.

Trondheim White Label App

Here is what tourism offices get with mTrip

• Cutting edge technology to promote a city
• International exposure and greater visibility in social networks
• Forming great relationships with tourists
• Customizable application for each city, with ability to add new features
• Features like: mTrip Genius, Offline Routing, Augmented Reality, Sharing and more
• A new Web App, allowing travelers to publish & share their trips with friends online
• Simple & fast implementation
• Available on iPhone, iPod Touch & Android
• Eight languages included and the ability to add new ones

Trondheim guide on iPhone

Trondheim guide on Android

For more information on the white label app visit mTrip for Tourism Boards

For information on mTrip’s commercial app visit: www.mtrip.com

You can also see destinations that have non-stop flights from specific airports. For example, search ‘flights from New York’ and Google will return a number of routes from New York’s airports as well as which airlines fly from the airports. You can click ‘Show all non-stop routes’ to get a full list of destinations; from there you can click in to get more flight details.

What do you think of Google’s new flight search feature? Do you think it will be useful when you are searching for flights?

Google Flight Search

Image: preston.rhea

The industries evolution makes computer games such a unique experience for each generation. To younger generations, the appeal is to transport the player – a fictional world like a movie but with more interaction. To the older generations, gaming is a profound experience; with joysticks in hand, gamers moved spaceships through asteroid fields, or ran circles around mazes while being chased by ghosts.

The museum documents the development of computer games since 1951. It also incorporates future predictions, with experimental installation pieces that examine possibilities for the next generation of gaming. RaveSnake, an eight player game controlled by cell phones via Bluetooth is part of what they call the ‘party games for the sidewalk” genre.

Inside the museum you will find the Wall of Game Milestones, showcasing over 50 famous games that were integral to the evolution of gaming. On display you will see games like Pac-Man, Street Fighter and Sonic the Hedgehog. Another wall of the museum is devoted to computer hardware where more than 50 handheld games, video consoles and home computers are exhibited in chronological order from 1971 up to 2001.

Whether a trip down memory lane or a learning experience, The Computer Game Museum should prove to be interesting for tourists and locals alike.

Address: Computerspiele Museum, Karl-Marx-Allee 93a, 10243 Berlin

Phone (visitors’ service): +49-30-60988577

Download mTrip’s Berlin Travel Guide

Internet Week Europe is an open event, meaning anyone who wants to throw a function is permitted to do so. The many events taking place will focus on various subjects, from software development to advertising. Many of the events will feature panels, which will discuss issues of importance for the technology community. Others will primarily focus on interaction amongst the attendees. As the week will not focus on one technology domain alone, the festivities are expected to draw everyone from iPhone aficionados to diehard PC developers.

Furthermore, the unique structure of this conference means that unlike other events where attendees spend their day in one location, participants will be traveling across the city throughout the day. Each event will be outlined differently, and some will cost money to attend, while others will be free. Conference organizers have suggested plotting out a schedule for the events that one would like to attend, and making the necessary reservations in advance.

For individuals unfamiliar with London, there are several tools available for getting around the city in a timely fashion and staying up to date on what’s going on throughout the week. Twitter users can follow @internetweekeu for all of the latest updates. Attendees can also sign up for the newsletter on the official Internet Week Europe site where maps and addresses for the different locations are also available. Attendees navigating Europe with their smartphones may consider downloading the mTrip Travel Guide London iPhone application, which will provide updated information and travel planning tools for getting around London during your week stay.

For individuals hoping to get involved with Internet Week Europe, visiting internetweekeurope.com will provide all of the different avenues for doing so. Organizers hope that companies will take this opportunity to spread the word about their unique organizations, utilizing this week as a great PR opportunity. All of the events are being promoted equally by Internet Week Europe in an attempt to bring attention to companies both big and small.

The event has been organized by a varied group of individuals who make up the Executive Council of Internet Week Europe. From members of the mainstream media to technology developers, the many volunteers have contributed to make Internet Week Europe one of the prominent events for technology promotion in Europe. Organizers hope that Internet Week Europe will have the same success that the original continues to enjoy each year in New York City.

Sarah Danielson writes for Remote Desktop where you can read over the benefits of remote desktop software and receive a free 30 day trial.

We are excited to announce that after months and months of hard work, we finally submitted our application to Apple today!

We will offer nine US and European city guides in five languages.
We think we have a pretty unique product to offer so we can’t wait for you to check it out. We really hope you like it!