Archive for April, 2008

Travel Journal beta

Published April 29, 2008 releases Leave a Comment
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A bit more about our first release. We’ve built a lot of functionality that you’ll find in many travel journals. You can create entries through a web interface, with fields to enter where you are, and you can add photos as well. People can comment on your posts and see your journal as a list of posts, or as a map.

As we have integrated the journal with our mobile service we can populate your journal with location entries automatically as you use your phone. To make it a bit more interesting we show a photo of the place where you are and the weather there too. Of course, you may not want to share your location with other people, so you can turn the tracking off, or restrict who can see it.

The idea is that you can buy one of our SIMs, take in on your holiday and when you get back you have an attractive record of the places you have been to without doing anything. When you travel there are often times when you have time to kill, like sitting on a bus or waiting at an airport. This is a great time to send a text message to your journal with an update. To make it as easy as possible you can send the text message to a short code like ‘888′.

Of course, you may want to share your journal, particularly with family and friends, so we let you set your posts for private viewing, friend and family viewing or public viewing. If it’s private, only you can see it when you sign in. You can set a visitor password to give to family and friends so they can see the family and friend view. Or if you post to you public journal, anyone can see it. If you want to get sophisticated there’s an advanced settings page that lets you get even more flexibility about what type of information is shown.

One of the other problems when you travel is that you may be in a different timezone which means that you only get a small window to call home each day. Posting to the journal is a great way to let people at home know what you’re up to without having to find that window. If you do want to get in touch, we’ve built a ‘get in touch’ page that lets people call you or send you a text from the website. On that page we show where you are and, very soon, the time there, so Mum and Dad don’t call you at 3am.

We will be updating the service with lots more features in the coming months and I’ll post more about that next time.

About ekit

Published April 29, 2008 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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This is a blog about ekit and our products. We are a communications provider to international travellers which is a fancy way of saying that we make products that make it easier and cheaper to stay in touch with friends and family when you’re travelling overseas.

In 1999 we launched our first product, a virtual calling card with integrated email and voicemail that you could buy online and use in dozens of countries. In 2004 we started selling SIMs and mobile phones and last year we launched our own global mobile service that uses callback to reduce roaming costs.

All our services help people share their travels with their friends and family through phone calls, text messages, emails and voicemails. So last year we started thinking about ways to use our services to build an application that would allow people to share their trip with others. We wanted to create a service that could be useful to people who don’t want to do much and also to people who want to actively create content.

The first version of what we call the Travel Journal has just been released as a beta. It’s a travel journal that you can use to keep a record of your trip, adding descriptions and photos of where you have been and what you have done. What we have done, though, is integrate the Travel Journal with our mobile service. This means that we can automatically add entries whenever you use the phone – we’ll know what country you are in so we can bill your calls, but sometimes we can match the cell you are in to a city or better. You can also post entries to your journal from your phone, and if you want to allow it, people can call your mobile from the web.