communicating while on the road just got easier

The ekit Travel Journal is a great way to share your trip but it’s even better to be able to hear from friends and family while you’re travelling. Friends and family have been able to leave comments in your journal, but you might not see them if you don’t visit the web site.  To help travellers better stay in touch with friends and family we have introduced some new features.

• You can now receive SMS notifications on your phone when someone leaves a comment. The text message will contain the first 120 characters of the comment and if it’s longer you can go to the web site to see the rest.
• friends and family can send you public or private messages. Private messages are just sent as an SMS to your phone. Public messages are added to your Message Stream where your friends and family can see them and a notification is sent to your phone.
• Your journal now has a Message Stream which contains messages you have sent, messages you have received, and comments. You can see all the messages, but friends and family can only see public messages and comments.
• You can reply to message and comment notifications from your phone and the reply is added to your Message stream.

The Messages page is an activity stream (a bit like the news feed in facebook) which shows messages and comments in date order. So if someone adds a comment to one of your entries, even if the entry was made two weeks ago, it will appear at the top of the message list. This makes it easier for you to see recent comments and messages and reply to them.

When a you receive a notification of a comment or public message, the SMS is sent from a number like +6001. You can reply to the SMS and, when we receive it, we link it to the associated comment or message. In other words, a friend comments on your journal, you receive an SMS with a snippet of the comment, and when you reply it is added as another comment on that journal entry. How easy is that?

adding photos more easily

One of the most requested improvements we have had is to make it easier to add photos. Recently we have added a number of improvements which help in this area.

When you edit and entry to add photos to a post, you can now add several at once. You select the photo to add and press the “add image” button and while it uploads you can select another, and another.

If you use a service like Flickr or Photobucket to store your photos, you can now just add a link to your photo and it will be displayed in your journal. This means you can avoid uploading the same photo more than once.

If you want to send photos from your phone, you can now email them into your travel journal. You need to have data enabled on your phone and email set up. Then visit your Travel Journal to get your unique email address (so only you can add photos), add it to your address book,  and you can snap a shot with your phone and send it into your journal.

ekit at PhoCusWright

ekit is demonstrating the Travel Journal at PhoCusWright in Hollywood November 17-20. There is lots of twittering from the conference.

CEO John Diamond and COO Andrew MacDonald are interviewed at the conference:

pre-paid roaming data

So you have a shiny new mobile phone that lets you read your email and browse the web and you take it overseas with you. But when you get home you get hit with a phone bill that costs more that your entire trip, in fact you could buy a new car as well and still have change.

Sadly, this is not uncommon so we have introduced pre-paid roaming data for all our global SIMs. Pre-paid data means that you never get a nasty surprise – we make sure you can’t spend more than than your credit balance and cut off the data when your balance reaches zero. Then you can decide if you want to spend more, or not.

More Travel Journal improvements

We continue to roll out new features and improvements to the Travel Journal based on our road map and feedback from customers.

We have improved the entry editor with a much easier location editor. You can now search for a location by name, or click on a map to set your location.

Our cell tracking and mapping has also been greatly improved and now the majority of phone activities will get mapped to a location – generally at the level of a small town or a suburb.

We have also added points of interest which cover areas such as cities so when your friends see that you are in “Quartiere Otto, Italy” they can see that you are in Milan. We are using these points of interest to better match photos to posts and provide links to information about those places.

We have also made it easier to reply to text messages that friends send from the web site. Now friends can enter their mobile phone number and the text message will appear on your phone with the sender set to their number.

Eating our own dog food

Eating one’s own dog food is a term used to refer to the practice of actually using the products you make. We certainly believe in doing that, and I had the opportunity recently to use my travel journal on a short holiday break.

I’m going to be biased so I won’t bore you with tales of how great it is. Instead I’ll describe how I used it. The first thing I wanted to do was add entries for the places we were going – hotel addresses and flight numbers. With a quick google search I found a photo from the hotel website to add to the entry.

The first couple of days we were away I had convenient access to the Internet, so I updated my journal through the website and added some photos from the day.  However I still use the phone to send text updates during the day – making a short note of interesting things we were doing, or the names of good restaurants or pubs we visited.

The rest of the trip I didn’t have Internet access so I used the phone exclusively and I found myself sending text posts when we did something interesting, and also used the posts as placeholders for photos. Later when I did have Internet access I added photos I had taken to those posts.

Other people at ekit are using the travel journal when they travel, and customers are telling us about their experience through the feedback form on the website. All of this feedback is feeding into our development process to to improve the way the travel journal works and to help us prioritize the new features we add.

Fire Eagle opens to the public

A couple of months ago I wrote about Fire Eagle, the location brokerage service from Yahoo!. Well it’s now been opened up to the public so you don’t need an invitation to join up.

What is exciting about this is that it will now become much easier for people to link together applications that use location information. So hopefully soon there will be lots of interesting services that can use the location information from your travel journal to provide useful information and functions.

new U.S. service

We haven’t just been working on the Travel Journal for our global roaming mobile service for the past few months, we have also been assembling our new United States service.

Our aim is to provide affordable international roaming (and with rates from US 29c a minute we think we’re saving lots of people plenty of money). However we haven’t been able to keep our rates low in the U.S. because the carriers there charge us a fortune when our customers roam there.

So we’ve built a new service for the U.S. (it will work in Canada as well shortly) which offers much better rates. All the other online features of our global roaming services are available as well – recharge, with optional automatic recharge when you balance falls low, instant access to billing records – and family and friends in six countries can call a toll-free number to call you at no cost to them.

The Travel Journal is available with this new service, but with more limited mobile features. Over the next few months we will be adding automatic tracking but for now you can post from the phone and you can send posts like “L: Boston” to set your location

Keep it simple

One of the changes mentioned in the last post was the simplification of the settings page. We want to make sure that people can control who has access to their journal content, particularly as there is location information in there. However one risk you always face when you make security settings very customizable is that no one bothers to use it, or doesn’t understand what the effect of the settings are.

As we discussed how to make things simpler, we realised that there are actually two main types of information in peoples’ journals – user posted content and automatic tracking information. When you post a message, either through the web, or from your phone, you choose the privacy level you want. On the web there are check buttons to choose between public, family and friends, or private. From the phone you can send to 8555 for public, 8888 for friends and family and 8000 for private.

As you get to decide what you are posting about and who should see it there isn’t any need to have other settings to control the access. If you want to say in your post that you are in London and you set it to public, there’s not much point in the journal only showing your location as “United Kingdom” as anyone reading the post can see that you’re in London.

On the other hand, the automatic tracking entries get posted by the system, so you do need a way to specify who gets to see them and how detailed they should be. So now there is one check box to let you turn tracking on or off, and one setting to make your tracked entries public, friends and family, or private. There are advanced settings if you do want finer control but these are now mostly to control what things people can do on your journal, such as posting a comment, calling you, or sending you a text message.

Release three – bells and whistles

Another month has passed and we’ve rolled out a new release. This release we have mainly focussed on improving usability, but also added a few bells and whistles to improve the look and content of your journal.

One area we have spent some time trying to improve is the settings page, and in particular managing the privacy settings. I’ll write another post about this, but we hope we have made this area a lot easier to understand and manage.

The journal page now clearly labels whether posts have been sent from the phone or the web, or if it is an automatic tracking entry. If there are several automatic entries in a row from the same place, we now only show one entry. We’ve also made it a lot clearer whether you’re looking at the public view of a journal, or the friends and family view, or your private view.

The entry editing page now lets you chose a place from a map as well as being able to just enter a name. There are also a lot more photos available for many more places to add to your post.

Our database that maps cell towers to places is getting better, but we don’t always get a city level location and can only identify the country you’re in. To make this clearer, when you view an entry for a country we show the whole country and highlight it. We have some big enhancements in the pipeline that will allow us to track to city level a lot more often.

As well as many more photos we have started to add links to information about places so the people reading your journal can learn a little more about the places you are visiting (and maybe you’ll find it interesting too).

To help you keep in touch with your friends and family, we’ve also added a ’share your travel journal’ link to the settings page so you can quickly send an email with your journal details to make sure people at home know what a great holiday you’re having.