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“The danger of relying too much on travel tips from mobile devices and websites”, says Spotted By Locals founder, Bart Van Poll, “is that you close your eyes to what else is around you. I sometimes deliberately disconnect from my mobile, and love to just walk around in a city aimlessly.”

Considering that Spotted by Locals, just launched a series of mobile city guides for Android, it’s a rather surprising view. There is a twist, however. The guides are all offline. That’s not just to encourage aimless wandering. Roaming charges are high in Europe and using maps on mobile devices consumes large amounts of data.

Spotted By Locals offers a website and mobile apps listing travel tips from the local residents of 42 European cities. Dutch husband and wife team Bart and Sanne van Poll have created a network of local “spotters” in each city, all of whom they meet and vet in person. What makes Spotted By Locals different is the insider feel of the information. 30 percent of Spotted by Locals users are locals themselves.

The typical user is a frequent traveller who is more interested in experiencing the culture of a city than hitting all the “must-see” sites. “For me, eating a simple local dish in an ugly former communist neighborhood in Zagreb served by a waiter who can’t speak English but is so happy I’ve come to his restaurant” says Van Poll, “has meant so much more to me than visiting the Eiffel tower in Paris.” In general, though, services like Spotted By Locals are complementary to, rather than competing directly with, the mainstream travel guides.

The mobile guides for Barcelona, Paris, London are most downloaded but smaller cities like Ljubjana, Zagreb, Hamburg and Sofia, which travel guide publishers often do not cover, are also popular. There’s a free trial version wile the full iPhone or Android version costs 3.99 EUR ($4.93) and is updated with new tips for “life”.

Van Poll’s top travel tip? “Get lost deliberately. Hop on a bus or tram, and just get out where it looks interesting. Or follow that cool guy or girl to see where he or she is going. Trust your own judgement and forget about the guidebooks.”

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

It’s often the small details that give good hotels a memorable quality – perhaps a particular lampshade, or the softness of the bed sheets. Isabel Rutland, is the founder of Discover&Deliver, a start-up with a focus on luxury, picking out beautiful design in hotels across the globe and giving visitors to the site the chance to purchase particular items or décor spotted on their travels.

Isabel’s previous job as an investment principal at a private equity firm meant she spent a lot of time in hotels and this is where the idea for Discover&Deliver first began to take shape. Having experienced identikit décor the world over, any unique item or touch of design flair in a hotel room stood out and this observation was cemented in her mind while honeymooning in New York. She loved the design of her hotel room and wanted to replicate the look in her own bedroom back in London but had no idea how to go about it, and felt that this must be a common feeling amongst hotel guests. She spent the next two years researching interior and product decorators to find the best sources for hotel design and launched the Discover&Deliver site in March of this year. We got in touch with Isabel to find out how the business is going post-launch.

1. Where did the idea for Discover&Deliver come from?

On holiday with my husband in 2009. My husband and I had just bought a small house and needed some furniture. Not having quite the budget for a full interior design service and also having the desire to stamp the house with our own taste, we set about trying to furnish it ourselves. We realised that much of our inspiration came from some of the wonderful hotels we had stayed in through the course of the past two to three years. We set about trying to find individual pieces. We talked to friends and colleagues. We soon realised that there were lots of people, like ourselves, who had been similarly inspired. These hotels are like the catwalks for the furniture industry, but there isn’t a Net-a-Porter equivalent yet. That is what we want to be, in a very broad sense. We want to enfranchise people in design generally and give them colour on some of the very talented interior designers who have put together these looks, as well as the forward thinking hotels and restaurants which invest in high quality design.

2. Can you describe a typical working day?

There is no such thing as a typical day. We come across new things and we do new things each day. That is one of the pleasures of a start up and why I seem to have so much more energy than ever before.

3. How do you unwind or relax when you are not working on Discover&Deliver?

Not easily. As any person who has set up a business, or simply has had a good idea, knows the hours when you are not working on your project you are haunted by the fear that someone else is going to get there before you! However, if you were to pin me down on the point, I would say hanging out with my lovely husband and my black labrador are pretty high up there.

4. What is the secret ingredient to success as an entrepreneur?

I’ll let you know when I get there!

5. What drove you crazy when building your business?

I cannot bear rejection. If people reject Discover&Deliver and belonging to it for any reason (of which, I might add, there have been very few) it sends me into a frenzied overdrive to prove them wrong.

6. What motivates you to keep going?

I believe I can change the way people buy design. Having an opportunity to make a visible / tangible difference to something is extraordinarily motivating.

7. If you were to start again, what would you do differently?

Oh, a lot of things. I have made so many mistakes along the way, but then I am the sort of person that needs to make the mistakes myself in order to learn. I am not very good at learning from other people’s mistakes – a roundabout way I suppose of saying I don’t like taking advice, which drives my husband nuts.

8. Where do you see your business in five years and how will you get there?

The Net-a-Porter of furniture and lighting.

9. If you were not working on Discover&Deliver, what would you be doing?

Another start up of some sort; I have some other ideas. In fact when you immerse yourself in a sector you see lots of new opportunities and areas for improvement that could form the basis of clever little businesses.

10. Tell Springwise a secret…

What so you can tell all your readers! I suppose this is the opportunity for some misinformation to steer the competition in the wrong direction, but I am not clever enough for such devious things.

11. Any final words for aspiring entrepreneurs?

There is no single bit of advice that is more important than any other, but I would say believe in yourself and inject everything you do with energy and enthusiasm. People pick up on passion.

Thanks Isabel!

You can read more about Discover & Deliver here or visit the Discover & Deliver website here.

This article is by Dian Crawford, a parter at Tilt Agency in Portland, Oregon. She and her husband also own and operate Urban Grind, a coffee shop in Portland’s Pearl District (and a favorite spot for many of the city’s tech workers).

I’m not a developer. I’ve written some lines of code in my past, but not enough to allow me to say that I have any real skills. Still, I want to know a bit about how the websites I work with are made and how the tools translate to mobile and tablet.

For years developers have used HTML, along with CSS, JavaScript, Flash and other tools to create websites. But Apple’s refusal to adopt Flash on the iOS platforms has had a negative impact on the usage of Flash and caused brand publishers to rethink the tools they use to develop websites. While Flash is great for delivering video and other interactive content on a computer, it struggles to perform on mobile. And without Apple’s support, developers have looked to other tools for website development.

Enter HTML5, which is helping to address some of the shortcomings found in Flash. For instance, HTML5 can deliver rich content across all platforms and devices via the browser. This allows developers to develop a single site that will deliver a compelling interactive experience on any device, including video, audio and location services.

The downside to HTML5 is that it’s not standardized yet. The WC3 (World Wide Web Consortium – internet standards organization) hopes to have it ratified by 2014. This means that its capabilities and the tools to achieve those are changing. But, it seems like the changes will be more additive and not require changes to existing sites.

In talking with Bob Duffy, a Software Community Manager at Intel, he said, “At the moment HTML5 is showing a lot of promise. It’s still young, and developers are just starting to embrace it, as we see more features and tools for them to leverage.”

Even with lack of finalization of standards, it seems that the current level of adoption along with support for vendors, including Adobe, is helping HTML5 take off. And the increased usage of mobile/tablet devices to access content means that mobile-friendly standards are key for site owners and developers alike.

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Ever hear of Hofmann hot dogs? They’re from Syracuse (where I was born and raised) and they are possibly the best ever made.

The first time I took my husband to Syracuse, he asked me what the city was known for, in terms of food. Hoffmann hot dogs, of course!

So whenever we go there, we HAVE to bring home hot dogs.

Well, the other day, my mom sent me a link: Hofmann’s is going national. Soon you’ll be able to buy their hot dogs anywhere. She thought I’d be excited. Instead I thought, “There goes Hofmann.”

I get it. Businesses have to scale in order to continue to grow and make a profit and show their investors a return-on-investment.

But from a consumer standpoint, you sacrifice two things:

1. Experience
2. Relationships

I wrote about this last year when I compared Facebook to the Walmart of social media. Getting my Hoffman hot dogs in any store in the country loses it’s appeal; it’s specialness. Eventually what will happen in the attempt to mass produce and keep up with the demand, the experience will deteriorate and so will the quality of the product.

I’m looking at you, Facebook and everyone in your footsteps.

I’ve been spending less time on Facebook and more on Instagram and Foursquare lately. Me! The Facebook addict.

You know why? Because I like going to small shops, and I’d rather spend more hours visiting four small boutiques tailored to me exactly, than to go to one big box and get everything. So I’d rather skip from one app to another because I know exactly what I’m getting when I visit each one.

We go to the big box store to save money and time, right? Not because we want to stroll about in a warehouse with concrete floors and fluorescent lighting.

Remember when each social network started out with a very single, simple functionality? Before it started to try and take over the social world? The biggest thing I remember is that was when we were cherry picking our audience. Soon, it starts to get out of control and we find we have hundreds if not thousands of “friends.”

We are now trying to mass produce friendships and it’s not working. 

I already have a false sense of relationship with, say, my morning radio personality or news anchor. For example,  Scott Simon comes into my home every Saturday morning while we over a steaming mug of coffee. That’s an intimate time, one which I haven’t shared with some of my closest friends. He has no idea who I am.

That false sense of intimacy is happening in our regular online “friendships.”

The definition of friend has suddenly loosened. Who do you call a friend now? We have friends we’ve never met in real life! Or have known far longer online than offline. You know what happens when you have hundreds if not thousands of “friends?” You forget they aren’t really friends, and you hold them to the same standards and expectations you would a real friend. And you get let down. Way too often.

I’m not trying to be Debbie Downer here. There is no denying my life (and, no doubt, yours) is FAR richer from the relationships we’ve created online. The same holds true for brands, and the relationships you are building there.

We suddenly have a lot more on our plate as we add relationship management to our digital strategies. The real goal is to build a brand be it corporate or personal. The icing is, we made a few really awesome and deep relationships. Let’s not one-stop shop our relationships, and start allowing more forgiveness and openness.

In Gyro's commercial for ad-targeting firm Turn that debuted during last night's Mad Men season finale, an angry brunette with a gun bursts into an office and opens fire on her apparently philandering husband and a blonde bombshell. (The shooter in the '60s-noir sendup looks like a cross between Jackie Kennedy and Teri Hatcher. Truly the stuff of nightmares—or an erotic fantasy—depending on your point of view.) The bullet moves in super slo-o-o-ow motion, accompanied on its journey by a voiceover: "In 10 milliseconds, Turn delivers your ad to all the right online audiences with deadly accuracy. Never second-guess a decision—at least, not a business one." We never see who, if anyone, eats lead, but there's a microsite that features different outcomes for those with nothing better to do than visit microsites. That said, I guess plenty of advertising pros—the target audience for the product, after all—will probably check it out. If only to steal the idea. Kidding, of course. That kind of thing never happens in this business.
 

Today’s #FollowFriday needs no introduction. And I’m cheating a little bit because I wrote about her this time last year.

But it’s her birthday today so I figured you wouldn’t mind.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LISA!!

Lisa Gerber is our chief content officer. She runs all of the guest posts here at Spin Sucks, which is no small job. She also began doing client work in January and now leads three of our biggest accounts.

About 18 months ago, I was shopping at Nordstrom (and then Sephora) and I called Lisa. I was venting that I needed some help with content on both Spin Sucks and this new project I wanted to launch (which you now know as Spin Sucks Pro). I told her I needed someone who I really trusted. As I stood on the corner of Michigan and Grand, in the dark, she said, “I’ll do it.”

Um, what? The job was in Chicago and she lives in Idaho.

I’ll do it.

So she packed up and moved to Chicago for nine months. Every month she flew back to Idaho for a week. And I watched her put on her happy face the week she came back from home.

It began to kill me inside a little bit every month. After all, she was my friend first and colleague second.

And then our circumstances changed. I went in to the office one day, after a week of traveling, and found Patti Knight (my work husband) was the only one sitting in our 2,500 square foot space. I decided right then and there some things were going to change.

We went completely virtual and Lisa got to move back home to her husband and dogs. And skiing and ice skating and mountain biking and hiking (lucky girl!).

Now she’s flipped her time. She spends a week a month in Chicago and the rest of the time at home. But, other than missing the occasional glass of wine together, it’s as if she’s still sitting in the office next to mine.

If you don’t already know Lisa, she blogs here every other Wednesday, and you can find her on Twitter, Google+, and she manages (with Molli Megasko) our company Facebook page.

Stop by and tell her happy birthday. It is today!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LISA!!

P.S. Every time I see this photo of Lisa, it makes me laugh. Props to Sean McGinnis for taking it. And that’s our good friend Joe Hackman in the background. Hi Joe!

Did anyone see the story of the 80-year-old woman who landed a plane after her husband died while flying?

She and her husband were flying home to Sturgeon Bay, Wis., from Florida, when he slumped over the controls and died. A family friend, and pilot, got in another plane, flew up to her, and guided her through landing the plane.

She ended up with a few broken ribs, but she landed the plane on the runway.

They released the audio of the conversation and she was calm and collected and even joking by saying things such as, “This is a hell of a place to get stuck.”

You think?

Freaking amazing!

I know it’s a holiday, but thought you’d like some videos to watch, if only to give you conversation while hanging out with family.

5. Test Your Awareness.  This is a cycling ad, but it’s pretty cool to see how aware you are of your surroundings, when you’re told to focus on one thing. Check it out!

4. Amazing Bike Crash. It’s a cycling day! Rusty Speidel sent this to me and it’s pretty freaking amazing. Watch the cyclist in yellow. I’m impressed he maneuvered that way.

3. Woman Makes Rainbow with Shot Gun. Oh yes. This is amazing. A woman shoots a shot gun, over and over, into a creek in order to make a rainbow. Wow. Just wow. Thanks to Mark Wohlschlegel for sending it to me!

2. ADmented Reality. By now you’ve probably seen the very cool new Google spectacles. Well, someone took the promo video and added Google ads.  I present you with the best of both worlds, via Michael Schechter.

1. The Why and How of the PinPal Story. When I landed in Boston last Friday, direct from London and before that Oslo, I turned on my phone to see tweets and Facebook updates about Jimmy Addison and PinPal. By now you probably know it was an elaborate April Fool’s joke by some of my more creative friends who thought it would be funny to combine online dating with Pinterest. When they finally came clean, Danny Brown wrote a blog post about how organizations such as Klout are collecting data from our kids.

Happy Easter and Passover and weekend!

“

A friend’s father was sick while I was in Ireland. The idea came of inscribing to him the copy of Synge’s works I brought with me on this trip and leaving it in the little library on Aran. The librarian wasn’t there — she only works certain days of the week — but a very pleasant lady, when I told her what I wanted to do, opened the door for me and loaned me a pen and let me sit there in a sunny corner.

I can’t say that I enjoyed parting with this book, which was partly why it felt right to leave it. “The Complete Works of John M. Synge,” 1935 Random House edition, the only one-volume edition I’ve seen that has all of his stuff — it’s worth finding, not just for the sake of having all the plays in one place, but because it reveals a lesser-known Synge — Synge the writer of powerful nonfiction pieces, “The Vagrants of Wicklow” and “In the Congested Districts.” He wrote some of the best Irish walking journals ever, and that’s not a narrow genre; perhaps only Heinrich Böll’s are as good. Before handing over the book, I re-read a favorite paragraph from “The Aran Islands,” where Synge describes men bringing horses ashore in their small sailing craft: “The storm of Gaelic that rises the moment a horse is shoved from the pier, till it is safely in its place, is indescribable.”

The other nice thing about a collected Synge is that you can read the rest of his plays, the ones that didn’t become as famous, but all of which have moments that are on a level with his best writing. The night before, after Chris had excused himself to do some work — it turned out he did have some duties, as night manager, it wasn’t all sleeping and pint-pulling — I walked down to the dock, which glowed eerily in the orange lights they keep on constantly there and read some of “The Shadow of the Glen,” the plot of which came from yet another tale Synge heard on the Aran Islands. A husband decides to fake his own death, in order to test the loyalty of his wife — he’ll spy on her from his slab, see how she behaves with the men who come to pay their respects. A tramp shows up by chance, and the woman takes a liking to him. During a brief, magical, cursed night, she sits talking to her new friend while the falsely dead husband lies there listening (multiple vectors of betrayal converging: take note, budding playwrights). The woman allows herself to dream about the life she’ll have with the money her old man has left her in a sock — not a grand life, but less boring and awful than the one she was living with him. When at last he sits up, revealing his ghastly trick, she’s so horrified that she doesn’t know what to do except prepare herself for death. But the tramp won’t let her think that way. “You’ll not be getting your death with myself, lady of the house,” he says, “and I knowing all the ways a man can put food in his mouth… . We’ll be going now, I’m telling you, and the time you’ll be feeling the cold, and the frost, and the great rain, and the sun again, and the south wind blowing in the glens, you’ll not be sitting up on a wet ditch, the way you’re after sitting in the place, making yourself old with looking on each day, and it passing you by. You’ll be saying one time, ‘It’s a grand evening, by the grace of God,’ and another time, ‘It’s a wild night, God help us, but it’ll pass surely.’ ”

It was reminiscent of Christy’s speech from the ending of “Playboy,” and of countless other passages in Synge. It’s the great discovery he made in his study of the Irish character — the idea of survival as an act of imagination. Against the unacceptability of the void, he pits the howl of irrational humor and the keen. He was too dignified to apologize much for his work to hostile critics, but he might have said, in response to the charge that he was aloof from the true rural Irish, that he shared their unforgotten paganism.

People said he made clowns of the peasants — there are still writers who complain that his dialogue wasn’t always true to real Irish folk speech, a criticism that manages to be correct while driving past his achievement, which was to go beneath them, into something even older and deeper, the Greeks. He possessed the mercenary instinct of the artist and sought not to capture the Irish language but to mine it for his English sentences. He had in him something of Gabriel, from “The Dead,” who when chastised for not wanting to visit the Aran Islands and learn his own native tongue, answers sourly, “Irish is not my language.” In his room here at the inn, they say, Synge lay on the floor with his ear to the boards, listening to the talk of the people below, making notes. Out of that stuff he made plays that caused riots in multiple countries.

Whatever comes next, after the crash, Ireland will make itself anew. If it’s smart, that is — if it doesn’t insist, like us, on desperately trying to crawl back to the conditions that made the bubble. A century after Synge’s last works were published, he may be the writer Ireland needs.

”

–

- John Jeremiah Sullivan, My Debt to Ireland

It’s been awhile since Antoine Dodson serenaded us with his amazing words, “Hide your kids; hide your wife; and hide your husband.”  But the time has come—Dodson is now working on his own album, 2012 AD, and this week his first single is going viral.
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