Tnooz has posted a preview of a survey on business travelers and their use of mobile as part of their trip planning. Not surprisingly, over 80% of business travelers use smartphones for business during travel. The article clarifies the mobile needs of a business traveler and points out the importance of focusing on their personal location and situation.
Read the full post here: http://www.tnooz.com/2011/11/14/mobile/survey-business-travelers-go-mobile-and-do-travel-planning-at-destination/
Matt Simmons and I attended the Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) conference this past July in New Orleans. During the "Everything Mobile Marketing Session," several DMOs shared their experiences with mobile websites, apps, games, including some helpful statistics for benchmarking and comparison.
Of particular interest was Visit Denver's experience with offering a mobile website alongside native iOS and Android apps. They found that the native apps generated much more usage than the mobile website, even though they have the same content and features.
I wrote a guest post for tnooz.com about the presentation, which you can read here:
Overview
Nomad Mobile Guides in Blacksburg, Virginia is a software company developing a platform to help travel publishers and marketers create mobile travel apps. We work with several national park organizations, magazine and book publishers, and non-profits like the Rails to Trails Conservancy.
Nomad has an immediate need for a Mobile developer to work both on our core platform and on custom mobile development for our clients. You'll work closely with developers from our parent company, NewCity, who are also involved in shaping Nomad.
Nomad Mobile Guides hires intellectually restless, boundary-challenging, pragmatic developers who seek the wide variety of coding challenges our clients provide.
Candidates must be able to:
The following skills are particularly exciting:
Nomad Mobile Guides is located in Blacksburg, Virginia near Virginia Tech, in the same office with our parent company NewCity. You'll work in a highly collaborative environment in close contact with people in different disciplines, so you are likely to learn a lot by osmosis from our accomplished designers and user experience architects. This job is on-site.
Nomad Mobile Guides is a Mac shop, but you get to choose your own tools.
We stock beer in the break room.
Nomad Mobile Guides offers a competitive compensation package based on skills and experience.
Send your resume (no phone calls please) to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
We're excited to announce the launch of a new app we have created for American Park Network. Oh, Ranger!® ParkFinder™ helps you find state and national parks across the US, based on location and the types of activities you would like to do. It's a whole new way to plan a trip or just find something to do on the weekend!
American Park Network has spent years developing this comprehensive database of every state and federal park (over 6,300) in the country. Each park has overview information, links to maps, websites and phone numbers, and is tagged with 20 major activity categories like Hiking, Fishing, History & Culture, and Golfing. Nomad Mobile Guides teamed up with the great folks at American Park Network to create the mobile experience for this rich resource.
Best of all, it's free, and all park information is stored on your phone for fast access with or without a cell signal!
Download ParkFinder free from the App Store.
Visit American Park Network at Ohranger.com.
As always, we'd love to hear your feedback. Please review the app after you've tried it out.
Nomad's app for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, created in collaboration with the Great Smoky Mountains Association, won the award for the best multimedia project at the 2011 Association of Partners for Public Lands (APPL) conference this past February. GSMA's app was selected from among multimedia projects across the entire national park service.
Congratulations to the Great Smoky Mountains Association, and thank you for your partnership with Nomad Mobile Guides!
Avalon Travel has selected Nomad Mobile Guides to publish four of their Moon Guide national park books on mobile for 2011. We'll be working with the team at Avalon to bring out these books on the iPhone and other mobile device platforms:
Follow Moon Guides on Twitter:
Keen Communications, the parent company of Menasha Ridge Press, Wilderness Press and Clerisy Press, has selected Nomad Mobile Guides as the platform to publish several of their books on mobile. Keen has a wide catalog of outdoor recreation titles perfect for mobile apps.
Travis Bryant, Keen's Director of Digital Products, said that Keen had evaluated a number of other solutions before selecting Nomad. “We just have so much great triple-checked [GPS-tagged content] locked up in books. I'm excited about the prospect of letting the content loose so easily on the iPhone.”
We're working together to bring these titles out initially on Nomad, with more to follow:
Follow Keen on Twitter:
Blacksburg, VA, September 9, 2010 – Nomad Mobile Guides, Inc, developer of a software platform for mobile travel guides, today announced the completion of its initial angel investment round.
“This year we established our platform as the easiest way to publish mobile travel guides,” said David Poteet, President of Nomad Mobile Guides, Inc. “This investment enables us to enhance our product, to acquire and publish additional guide titles, and to enter other markets.”
Nomad Mobile Guides published the first National Park Service-approved smart phone guide with the introduction of its Great Smoky Mountains iPhone app. It followed this with the official guide to The Grand Teton National Park, and is currently working on other park titles for publication later this year including Yellowstone National Park. In addition to the national parks, the company has also partnered with Keen Communications and Avalon Travel to publish travel books for mobile.
The angel investment round was led by 460 Angels a seed and early-stage angel investor group focused on funding and coaching hi-tech entrepreneurs with scalable business models based in the New River Valley and Roanoke region of Virginia. As part of this round, Nomad Mobile Guides was selected by DayOne Ventures, an invitation-only seed and early stage investment and mentorship program for technology-based startups, for its enhanced early stage program.
Kurt Repanshek of National Parks Traveler just published his review of the GSMA Nomad Mobile Guides content. The website, launched in 2005, covers America's National Park System and National Park Service news on a daily basis.
Kurt pointed out some of the great features in Nomad, like the quality NPS and Cooperating Association content, the easy-to-use interface, and the wealth of multimedia content.
Read Kurt's review and let us know what you think about the GSMA Nomad app.
Nomad Mobile Guides and the Yellowstone Association, the official non-profit partner of Yellowstone National Park, are teaming up to offer Nomad users a new way to use official park maps and guides while exploring Yellowstone.
Coming Summer 2010, Nomad users will be able to access official Yellowstone park maps, guides to natural and geothermal features, wildlife viewing information and park field guides.
Photo by Ann Froschauer
