Are you one of those travelers that must bring a laptop, iPod, and digital camera with you at all times? Then you must have experienced what I like to call the “low-battery woes.” Power outlets are often scarce in out-of-the-way places. Even in the electronic heaven of Tokyo, Japan, I often couldn’t find an outlet when I needed one. To help solve this, the AirPower Wiki is dedicated to finding outlets in airports across the globe. It’s a good start.

[Via Geeky Traveller]

This should really go without saying, but there are many angles that I can attack here. First off, you should always pay your employees. Even if you don’t like the end result of their work, the questions you should ask yourself are: did the person do the job to their best ability? And, if the work wasn’t finished on time, did you yourself hold up the process? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then pay the person; and if there should ever be a conflict of how much to pay the worker then ask yourself, is the difference enough to not pay and potentially ruin the relationship and soil the name of your business to them and their colleagues? If not, then pay more. It’s that simple.

I’ve recently been involved in another business, no need to name names. From my experience with work there, I’ve decided to recount some of the lessons learned in terms of business decisions I thought were handled badly by one of the owners. This thread is not meant to be negative in any sort of way, it’s just sharing what I’ve learned. So here goes:

Bad Business Decision #1: Being a backseat designer. I’ve stolen this one from Seth Godin’s post: How to live happily with a great designer. Essentially what this means is that if you want to be a part of the process of design, you need to have some experience in design. You need to be able to provide valuable feedback. Otherwise, you are simply setting up roadblocks for your designer. Seth says it best: “You don’t know a lot about accounting so you don’t backseat drive your accountant. You hired a great designer, please don’t backseat drive here, either.” Marketing experience does not mean design experience.

Brand. I think a great example of a successful brand is NBC, the television station. It just makes you feel good. And how do you know when to feel good? It’s those darned NBC chimes! Those chimes are an audible brand that have evolved over the years. I wanted something like that for TripTie. Lucky for me, my cousin Derek Kan is a musician, a rapper, a hip hop artist, and a sound technician. You could say that he’s pretty darn talented. So I asked him to make a few sound-bites for TripTie’s audible brand, something that makes you feel TripTie-ish. Here’s a couple of my favorites that he and his roommates Alex Shen and Judy Tuan came up with. Thanks Derek, Alex and Judy! Which one do you like best?

TT SoundBite 1
TT SoundBite 2
TT SoundBite 3
TT SoundBite 4
TT SoundBite 5
TT SoundBite 6
TT SoundBite 7

Here’s the second installment in the TripTie screencast series. As you can see, they are evolving a bit: Adding Items to Your Trip Plans (6 mins, 9 megs)

We launched the alpha version of TripTie about a week ago to roughly 15 or so users and have already begun receiving a lot of good feedback: on what people don’t understand, how to improve things, and most importantly, all the bugs we have yet to fix. One thing that was immediately apparent was that users didn’t grasp TripTie from the get-go. They didn’t exactly understand what it was about. After playing around with it for a while and figuring out all that they could accomplish with the site, they liked it a lot. One user even commented, “I initially didn’t think it was a great idea, but now that I’m actually planning a trip, this is exactly what I need. I just didn’t know it at the time.” Getting to this basic understanding will be a challenge. So what I decided to do, was start to put together a collection of short video screencasts, describing how you can use TripTie. Here is the first of hopefully many short, informative videos: “Creating Trip Plans on TripTie” - (4 mins, 15.7mb)

I’m sorry that for the moment, this blog has fallen a bit to the wayside. It’s not that I don’t care for it, I really do. Sometimes life takes those unexpected spills; it’s really like that board game Chutes and Ladders. And sometimes life brings you those “ladders,” where you feel a bit of accomplishment. The image above really explains it all, or you can just go to TripTie.com and see for yourself (we’ve launched our alpha!). Either way, we’ve been busy with feedback, fixing bugs, and trying to get this application in tip-top shape.