£1 to Use the Toilet on an Aircraft?

By Mark | Published: March 8, 2009

I missed this one last week, but AP are reporting a story that was widely picked up about Ryan Air boss Michael O’Leary’s comments that Ryan Air could consider charging passengers a fee of £1 to use the toiled on board it’s aircraft.

From AP’s release:

Politicians and analysts agreed that the man who pioneered charging airline customers to check bags, to use a check-in desk, and even to use a credit or debit card to make an on-line booking just might be serious about mile-high toilet extortion, too.

Indeed, I remember walking in to an airport some years ago to find a sea of open suitcases with people frantically trying to repack on the floor of the check-in area. On enquiring I was told that Ryan Air had suddenly introduced a new baggage charging scheme which passengers were desperately trying to circumvent.

Many people have reacted with indignation to O’Leary’s remarks, as they often do. But unfortunately Ryan Air’s ticket sales keep on proving him right – what people want above all is cheap travel, and they’ll likely fly with their legs crossed to get it.

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Travel News: The 10 Most Mispronounced Places

By Mark | Published: March 7, 2009

image Reuters brings us a list of the world’s most mispronounced places, reminding me of those occasionally confused conversations with local people on travels…

1. Phuket, Thailand

This is definitely not a good one to learn the hard way and to make it even more difficult, advice on the correct way to pronounce it can vary. To avoid scowls, general disdain, and possibly worse, go with "Pu-get."

2. Mooball, Australia

While Mooball may sound like a cute term of bovine endearment, it’s actually pronounced "Moo-bull."

3. La Jolla, California

What does the sport of boxing have in common with beautiful La Jolla, California? Not much except to get this one right, you need to rhyme it with the boxer, Oscar de la Hoya.

4. Oaxaca, Mexico

For non-Spanish speakers, the chances of mangling this one are pretty high. Just remember that there’s no "hoax" in Oaxaca and that Osaka is in Japan. The correct way to say it is "Wah-ha-ca."

5. Hjo, Sweden

The correct pronunciation of the town is "You."

6. Wauchope, Australia

If you want to give the locals a good laugh, refer to this as "War-choppy." The real pronunciation is actually "War-hope."

7. Cobh, Ireland

Even the simplest of names can be deceptive. Keep in mind that it’s on an island, not in a cornfield, so pronounce it "Cove," not "Cob."

8. Coxsackie, New York

When trying to pronounce Coxsackie, don’t think of Courteney Cox but what her character on "Friends" did for a living — cook. So in this part of the world, just think "Cook-sock-ee!"

9. Sequim, Washington

"Sqwim" is actually the correct pronunciation for the town known as the Lavender Capital of North America.

10. Ptuj, Slovenia

The residents of Ptuj must get tired of hearing the name of this pretty town get butchered over and over again. When pronounced correctly, it sounds like a dainty sneeze: "P-too-ee.

Have any more??

From Reuters. Image courtesy of Solar ikon at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence.

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Mark and Paul Join The Mapness Team

By Mark | Published: February 22, 2009

Mapness is going places, and we’ve just welcomed two new members on our team to help us get there.

Following a team meeting in London last week, we are happy to welcome two new faces to the Mapness team. After a day of getting to know each other better whilst discussing our awesome soon-to-be-released new version of Mapness we spent an evening touring some of London’s eating and drinking venues.

beer portrait Mark joins us from his previous position as Head of Product Development at Green Options Media, a successful online media firm. Mark will be helping us create the ‘buzz’ around Mapness as we continue to develop the product into the world’s best place for sharing and planning travel experiences. Look out for more news on the Mapness buzz on this blog in the coming weeks…

image Paul is already hard at work on amazing Mapness mobile applications (currently in alpha) that will help put Mapness everywhere and anywhere. More about Paul later when we release some of his awesome work to the world. For now, all we can reveal is that he is a beer loving volleyball addict who writes Symbian code in his sleep…

>> Follow our evening out with Mapness

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New Year’s Eve eve dev marathon

By Tom Sieron | Published: January 22, 2009

A great way to finish 2008.

A bit late, as the events described here took part between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I wanted to post about the latest Mapness development marathon.

We’ve met at Mike’s parent’s place on Sunday morning (just after Christmas) after shopping for coffee, energy drinks and snacks and started to crank out the code. We had the whole team working for over 48 hours (2,5 days), with only about 6 hours of sleep to regenerate. The marathon ended on Tuesday.

After all the Christmas laziness and the New Year’s party just around the corner, the dev marathon was a great way to end 2008, and we took the opportunity of the whole team coming back to Lublin for Christmas to kick-start Mapness development for 2009.

Marathon you say?

A development marathon is about meeting in one place and coding for hours and days without any distractions. Mapness dev marathons are a thing we used to do from time to time whenever we felt that our distributed line of work (Tom in Gdansk and then in Warsaw, Mike in Warsaw, Wojtek in London) has made the team too.. ..well.. distributed.

It’s a great motivator too – we literally see Mapness grow with every passing hour. Definitely a great thing to do from time to time when you’ve got a distributed team seeing each other mostly on Skype.

Without further ado, here are some pictures from the dev marathon. If you enjoy watching programmers work, then enjoy! ;)

developers developers developers developers
Wojtek and Mike discussing some programming related issues.

Le Chef
Mike had lots of food left after Christmas, so we kindly helped him with that. On Monday Chef Mike served delicious spicy onion soup with croutons and cheese and roasted turkey with pineapple and potatoes. On Tuesday we kinda of lost some of the kitchen bang and just ordered pizza - a traditional programmer’s nutriment.

cheers!
Tom and Mike enjoying their double espresso at 4:17 AM. Cheers!

Gear
Tom’s workstation. This basically sums up the whole party: lots of work, energy drinks, Pepsi, Coke and Coffee and the clock is ticking!

what was my name again?
Last night of the marathon, wee hours of the morning. As you can see by the look on Wojtek’s face at that moment we were definitely not the shiniest coins in the fountain, but still managed to crank out some more code so we kept going.

Finished!
Mike’s passed out and is dreaming of some object oriented things, while Tom and Wojtek are packing their stuff. It’s nearly 7AM and exhausted but happy we head home to get some rest before the New Years and the challenges of 2009.

In the next photo story episode: Wojtek dressed up as a Power Puff Girl on the New Year’s Eve party! (it was fun!) Stay tuned! :)

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Posted in Mapness, Mapness Team | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Bonjour travelers!

By Tom Sieron | Published: December 1, 2008

Bonjour! Qu’est-ce que c’est exactement?

We’ve just released French language version of Mapness. If you’re more comfortable communicating in French go ahead - visit Mapness and change your preferred language to French (use the flag in the top right corner). Greetings to all travelers from Quebec and France using Mapness!

If you’d like to see Mapness translated to your language, or even help us translate Mapness feel free to contact us and we’ll be more than happy to cooperate!

Better, faster & more secure!

In response to feedback from travelers using Mapness we’ve made quite a lot of improvements to the performance of our service, so it runs much more smoothly now! Some little glitches and bugs have also been fixed. Among others, we’ve enhanced our multiple images upload function to run flawlessly and we’ve improved the security of our service. If you find anything irritating or difficult while using Mapness just let us know and we’ll surely fix it.

Shape of things to come.

Next up we’ll be introducing more social features. The Mapness team will be quite busy during the holiday season. We’ll be introducing rich user profiles to Mapness so you can find interesting people easily and we’ll be adding a multitude of ways to explore journeys and places described by other travelers. Expect exciting features on Mapness in the beginning of 2009!

If you’re planning a winter trip don’t forget to use Mapness to show your friends and family where you’re going or where you’ve been.

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Another breathtaking, jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring release!

By EdgeCrusher | Published: August 25, 2008

We’re happy to announce another breathtaking, jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring release of Mapness. We’ve stayed away from conferences, bootcamps, open-coffee’s and sleeping;) for over a month to focus on coding and designing to bring you this one!

Image upload now 110% easier!

The most prominent change comes in the image upload. Now you can upload multiple photos just by holding ctrl (command for Mac users) or shift while selecting files. All of the selected images will be uploaded.
What’s more, now you don’t have to wait for the upload of images to continue pin pointing more stops along your journey. As soon as you’ve selected the files, you can continue describing your journey, while your images will keep uploading silently in the background (denoted by spinning arrows shown over the point number where the upload is still in progress).

Mapness supports KML format!

Another new feature, added after many requests from Mapness users, is the KML format support. This format is used by some PDA and GPS devices (eg. TomTom), and also supported by Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google Maps, Flickr, Google Mobile, ArcGIS and many more interesting applications. Now you can import data from your mobile GPS device to Mapness to easily create a Mapness travel journal or export your travel journal from Mapness to .kml and see it in GoogleEarth. Aware that not all of the devices support KML format, we’re also developing support for all other major geospatial formats like .gpx (used by Garmin), .gdb, .csv, .gdf, .txt and .asc. If you’re using a format that you’d like to see supported by Mapness contact the Mapness team and we will look into it.

Full Opera support and more!

Based on your requests and suggestions we’ve also did some changes in the look and feel of Mapness and fixed some bugs. Mapness now runs smoothly in Opera 9.5+. As for the look and feel, we’ve made the map a little bit bigger (because map is the most important part, right?) and introduced the slim white top menu that in future will hold more and more new functionality. A lot of little glitches have been fixed and if anything is still bugging you go ahead and tell us and we’ll do our best to come up with a solution.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”

We’re now 100% ready for new language versions! And as a matter of fact Mapness is being translated to French and Spanish as I write this post. Possibility of Esperanto (ESPERANTO!) language version is also quite viable. Oh and I should probably mention, that we’re also looking into the feasibility of translating to Arabic, though right-to-left writing direction poses some difficulties.

If you’d like to see Mapness translated to your language of choice or origin, or even help us translate Mapness please contact the Mapness team and we’ll be more than happy to cooperate and help you.

More coming soon..

The next release is due in 5-6 weeks and we have a lot of great new features lined up to make Mapness more fun and useful to you. We’ve just started setting up a feature request and voting site to make our development process more transparent to our users and to enable you to decide which Mapness features you’d like to see implemented next. Thanks for your support and feedback - it really means a world of a difference to us!

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Conferences! And lots of ‘em too!

By Tom Sieron | Published: June 5, 2008

Being Digital in London

On 10th June 2008 (this Tuesday!) we’ll be presenting Mapness at the main stage at the Being Digital conference in London. Wojtek and Tom(who’s going to London especially for this event …and the afterparty (and all the other parties;)! ) will be there all day showing Mapness in the demo area, so come by and say hi!

TMT Communities ‘08 Warsaw

We’ll be also attending the TMT Communities conference in Warsaw on 12th June (Mike and Tom this time). The conference looks interesting, among others Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK will be attending and giving a presentation on “Blogging, Twitting, Traveling, Meeting – an insider’s look at the European social media landscape“. Again - should you be there and spot us, don’t hesitate and come say hello.

Adobe onAIR Tour

Tomorrow (ie. 6th June) Tom will be hanging out at the Adobe onAIR Tour conference in Warsaw. A real conference is finally taking place here in Poland so it’d be a shame to miss it, plus we’re keen on Adobe technologies (have you seen Adobe Brio/ConnectNow? wow!) so it’ll be a blast!

..and more!

Almost forgot to mention - Mapness (Tom representing us again) will be also attending KreoAula (on 12th June) - the first sister edition of Aula (which is a monthly barcamp-like meeting), but with a creative/designer twist. Most probably we’ll also send Tom to the next Bootstrap in Warsaw on 14th June. Should you meet Tom anywhere don’t hesitate to say hi and tell him why you love/hate/what? Mapness and why!

See you there!

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MiniBar March

By Wojtek | Published: March 30, 2008

Last Friday I went to another MiniBar. I love those events. Free beer, interesting people, lots of ideas and ah did I mention free beer? :)

I already RSVPed for next one in April and I encourage every entrepreneur in London area to pop in at least once to one of those events.

Had a nice talk with Phillip from Snagsta. Great splash screen :) Just had a look at your alpha version - looks interesting. Talk more about it next time.

Posted in Mapness | 2 Comments

London Startup Camp and 3rd prize

By Wojtek | Published: March 28, 2008

Finally I have some spare time :)

As we have already written, I participated in the Startup Camp which took place on 7-8 March in London.

The Startup Camp has a form of an unconference which I was a bit skeptical about at first but when I saw how it works I just loved it.

As part of the agenda the Best Startup Contest was conducted. There was almost 300 people attending the conference and only 19 Best Startup Contest participants which means over an hour of explaining our vision to others. I’d like to thank everyone who voted for us as thanks to you we came third :)

Sun was the official sponsor of this event and for the 3rd place we received new and shiny iPod Touch witch will probably accompany us on our travels. Also I’d like to congratulate 1st prize winner Fav.or.it and 2nd place WebCanvas. All other participants can be seen here.

During the conference I was interviewed by Fritz Nelson from TechWeb TV.

Posted in Mapness | 1 Comment

Mapness at StartupCamp in London

By Tom Sieron | Published: March 4, 2008

Startup Camp logo

Wojtek on the catwalk!

Wojtek will be attending StartupCamp (a.k.a “The Unconference for the Startup Community”) in London on 7 and 8 March 2008. Mapness will take part in the Best Startup Contest there - Wojtek will give a presentation about Mapness, our business model and our plans for future world domination (of course).

If you happen to be anywhere around don’t hesitate to say “hi” - Wojtek will be more than happy to have a chat.

StartupCamp is..

As described on the StartupCamp wiki, it is “an unconference that makes use of the Open Space methodology — an approach to events that takes the best parts of regular conferences like the coffee breaks, after-hours events, and the 5 minutes of Q&A after those long sleepy presentations — and turns them into the event itself.” Sounds like lots of geek fun for Wojtek! See you there.

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