Mobile Boarding Passes

The ability to check in before you get to the airport is awesome, it saves so much time and speeds up getting through to the get hugely. Printing off a boarding pass at home is pretty straight forward, but the problem comes when you can’t yet check in for the return leg. You can only check in 24hrs before and that usually means checking in whilst your travelling. That’s OK if your in an office with a printer say your own company for example, but if it’s someone else’s office you’ve got to print to PDF transfer it to a USB memory stick and beg someone to print it out a right hassle.

Now, forget the printing, just have the boarding pass emailed to your smartphone. My recent trip with KLM to Vienna was mobile boarding pass enabled and made checking in at home and whilst travelling a breeze. No more thinking how am I going to get this printed or how much extra time will I need to leave to queue up at those self service machines, it’s just in your inbox.

If you get a chance to try it, I recommend it as it works great. Out of the 4 flights I made last week, 1 flight attendent grabbed my phone and scanned it, but most just asked me to place it on the scanner my self. The security guys at the scanners just wanted to check the date so there was no issue their either.

ipad in the enterprise part 2

I wrote a little while back about Apple’s expected success with iPad in the consumer space and I asked the question if it’d march into the enterprise as well.

The answer is yes; I for one have one and wrote this post on it using wiriting tool such as plaintext to write the post, which then syncs withdropbox which allows me to access my documents from the cloud.

I know of at least 5 other people with them in a reasonable sized office, which isn’t a huge amount, but we never saw the same traction with netbooks in the enterprise which was the last big change in computing.

The reason people are giving for adopting them is for when they travel, the MS Exchange capabilities allows them to read and reply to email on a decent sized screen with a battery life that’s way beyond any laptop. The upside is the same device allows users to read, listen to music or watch movies too.

Also posted at Orange Business Live

Back to Compton Pool, for the 5th time

We’re off to Compton Pool again for a long weekend at the Farmhouse, it’s turning into a bit of an annual Family event, we have to thank my Mum for that. This I think is our 5th visit to Compton Pool and I’m sure it’ll be great again.

Ann and John are always great to their guests and it’s an award winning destination. It even appeared on Sarah Beeny’s developer program as the model of how to develop a holiday home.

Anyway, as always we’ll look forward to it and it’ll all be over too quick!

digital nomad or ilife; it’s been around for a while now

There’s a post in the standard called living the iLife and picks up on people selling all thier worldly goods and living out of a laptop. But this isn’t new, it’s been around for a while (that post is from August 2009), but this is the second story on the topic in the last two weeks or so, so maybe it’s gaining traction finally.

One Bag – Travelling light

My bag obsession continues a pace and I’ve picked up a Patagonia MLC. There’s a review of the MLC in action at Patagonia’s own blog, the cleanest lines here

I’ve been using the two bags of late and have been forced to check my luggage in more and more frequently. Having an understanding of six sigma and knowing that 99% success rate of bag delivery still means millions will go missing, has prompted me to change my travel solution.

I’ve been reading up on onebag.com and getting some tips and I’m sure it’ll be a success. The MLC doesn’t get a great review on onebag but does get a mention which is good.

I’ve so far never lost or had a bag delayed while travelling, even when doing multi-hop trips, but I’m convinced it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. The other benefit is getting to the front of those taxi queues, Dublin and Copenhagen are both particularly bad, so a jump on the rest of the business travels can make a difference.

One day I’ll write up all the travel tips I’ve picked up..maybe I should start now…a tip I learnt in Dublin is if you are in a real rush, don’t go to the taxi queue at arrivals, drop down a level to departures and grab a cab off someone who’s just been dropped off. Frequently a driver will be happy to take the fare as it means they haven’t got to join a long queue back up at arrivals. Another tip, get the RER out to CDG, Paris taxi’s hate going out to CDG especially at rush hour, the RER costs 12 Euro’s, the Taxi can cost 70 Euro’s and be slower.

PS. my MLC is a more discreet and business-like black, but that green is nice

PPS I wrote this in 2008 and it got stuck in the Drafts folder

Fox and Barrel

Yesterday we had lunch in the Fox and Barrel Cotebrook and it was very nice indeed. I had the steak which was excellent, all the food was great, the pub layout is excellent too. We’ll be back for sure….

The Management is made up of;

Tony Steele – Chairman Fox & Barrel Limited, Chairman Tritech Group Limited he brings a depth of experience in business and finance.

 

Richard ‘Dickie’ Cotterill whose background is based in the kitchen. Has worked at the One Star Michelin Box Tree restaurant in Ilkely, then onto the One Star Michelin Chester Grosvenor Arkle restaurant with Simon Radley. Following a stint in Australia it was back to The Midland Crowne Plaza in Manchester where it was awarded 3 AA rosettes. Finally, for the last 8 years he was head chef at The Grosvenor Arms in Aldford, Chester. Here the pub was awarded The Good Pub Guide’s County Dining Pub of the year in 2007 and 2008.

 

Gary Kidd. Seventeen years ago opened up and ran The Grosvenor Arms at Aldford,Chester for Brunning and Price.The pub has featured for the last 16 years in The Good Pub Guide, winning County Dining Pub of the year on four occasions, along with winning Cheshire Life Dining Pub of the year. Previously to that was running pubs in the south of England for 10 years.

So if you’re in Cheshire and looking for a great place to eat then the Fox and Barrel is definitely worth a visit.

Flying woes continue

Just before Christmas I flew to Nice in the south of France for a day’s meeting, on the way down our plan was struck by lightening, a pretty interesting experience. I though that getting hit by lightening was a reasonably common occurrence, but it turns out not to be.

Yesterday morning I was due to leave Liverpool for Geneva for two days on the first Easyjet flight out of Liverpool. All was going well, we were traveling down the runway picking up speed when there was a strange knocking sound and vibration. The captain then obviously applied the brakes as everything and everyone flew forward, books, glasses cases all flew several rows down the plane. The plane then slewed to the side of the runway and just stopped, it only took a few seconds before the captain came on and informed us that we’d had a bird-strike.

At this point visions of the recent Hudson river crash flew through my minds eye, but this time it was the only slightly warmer River Mersey, that would be our watery runway. AS we moved off the main runway and returned to the apron, an engineer appeared and confirmed to the Captain that in fact it had been a bird strike in the engine.

So I guess we were pretty lucky that the captain did decide to pull up… anyway wish me luck as I’m about to jump back on a plane again….

Google latitude blip – I’m not in Liberia.

I was sat in Frankfurt airport late on Friday evening when I fired up Google’s latitude to see where folks were. When I fired the app up, i tend to use the network location feature as opposed to GPS to preserve battery, but I had a bit of a shock when it located me in Liberia, West Africa.

Apologies for the rather fuzzy pic, but I didn’t have a screenshot app installed so use the N95 to snap the E71.

London, Frankfurt and Geneva

The next 10 days or so are going to be pretty full on travelling, Tomorrow is down to Slough, then into London for a trip to a restaurant with the CFO of a major UK telco, then back home on Tuesday.  Thursday it’s the 7am flight out of Manchester to Frankfurt for two days coming back 10pm Friday night. Monday it’s off to Geneva for two days, this time with that hassle free airline easyjet. My Ticket to Geneva and this is return cost £39; in comparison a ticket to London on the train if you just rock up is £186, just nuts.

So the Patagonia MLC is getting more use with the one-bag travel system so much less hassle and worry and my other Christmas present the Fuji travel adaptor with USB charging will also get an outing too. I’ve debating whether to take the Asus as well as the work laptop, but I don’t think I’ll bother, one laptop will do, who do I think I am Jonathan Greene 😉

Truphone will also be coming along too as it always does, I’ve got a new gold number from them which is cool, but it’s not been enabled yet, so looking forward to getting that setup.

Where all this might go wrong is the weather, when I checked the BBC weather it said between 2-5cm’s of snow. Any amount seems to cause the UK to grind to a halt, so we’ll see what happens. Posts on twitter and indicating it’s started to snow in some parts already.

 

59 trips to 17 cities

I had a nice email from Dopplr today, indicating that I’ve made 59 trips to 17 cities and emitted way too much CO2 in 2008. My last trip was one of the more eventful ones, plane out to Nice struck by lightening and both flights back delayed in think fog. My OneBag solution worked like a dream tough, being delayed into Schiphol meant I could swap flights easily without any checked-in luggage. I’m sure 2009 will involve as many if not more trips, with a couple of new cities being planned too, Warsaw in Poland being one.

Once again Truphone helped with calls home over wi-fi from Valbonne being cristal clear on my E71, Joikuspot on my E61i saving the day when none of the wireless networks would let me on at Nice Airport and Email via Nokia’s Intellisync meant I was constantly manage the 150 daily work emails I recieve.The right tools make being a digital nomad a painless experience and makes any space your office.