On Message with Ben Gross

The Medis 24/7 XTREME Portable Charger (also known as the starter kit) is fuel cell-based portable power source designed for small consumer electronics such as cell phones, MP3 players and GPS units.

The fuel cell is relatively compact, it’s approximately the same width, slightly deeper and 2/3rds the length of the portable 2.5 inch hard disk I carry with me when I travel. The associated power pack cable plugs into the top of the charger, which adds approximately three inches in length. The total weight is just over a half a pound. This all leads up to something that is a too bulky to keep in your lap or next to you in the seat, but the cord is three feet long so you should be able to keep it by your feet without a problem.

Activating the fuel cell is simple. You remove a plastic strip, squeeze the charger together and you are done. According to Medis’ specifications (PDF), the charger will deliver 20-Watt hours, which equates to 30 hours of talk time or 60-80 hours of iPod use. Medis says the device outputs 3.8 to 5.4 volts, 4-Watt max and 1-Amp max. This means fuel cell should be good for between 3-6 charges on your smartphone, depending on how much charge is left on your battery. I did not test the unit with metering equipment, but I would say you should not plan that you will get more than three full charges from the fuel cell. The charging process is not instantaneous; it can take a minute or so before your device begins to receive a charge after activating the fuel cell. Also depending on the charge left on phone, you may need to let the internal battery charge for a bit before you are able to talk.

The charging cable that ships with the starter pack has a tip that works with standard Nokia phones. The starter kit includes four additional tips for USB, Mini USB, Micro USB and Palm Treo. Newer Nokia smart phones use a different tip. Tips for newer Nokia’s (E and N series) and others phones are available separately. Medis also sells a tip for iPhone/iPod, but the standard sync charger cable that came with my iPhone worked with the USB tip.

The fuel cell mid sized—it is small enough to throw in your travel bad, but too big to carry around in your pocket. Medis says fuel cell is should last for a year and half in the box and for three months after you activate it. These numbers are likely at the high end of the spectrum. Unless you have multiple trips in a relatively short time span, be careful about assuming the unit will still have a charge for subsequent trips. The starter kit box includes pre-addressed, but not prepaid, packaging to return the spent fuel cell back to the manufacturer for recycling. The fuel cell is CE and UL listed, RoHS compliant.

The Medis fuel cell is a potential solution for people who need to periodically recharge small electronics on an extended trip, but don’t have reliable access to power. Several online retailers carry the Medis fuel cell and refills. The starter kit retails for $50 and is available for around $38 street price and the replacement fuel cell retails for $30 and for around $24 street price. This means the Medis fuel cell is currently too expensive for regular use—an rechargeable extended alkaline battery pack would be more cost effective. The price of the fuel cell will likely drop over time and Medis says it is working on a refillable model, which should be more cost effective.

The 6th Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) will be held from July 16th to 17th, 2009 in Mountain View, California. The focus of CEAS is to present results from academic and industrial researchers that include the uses and abuses of email, instant messaging, text messaging (SMS), voice and video messaging, blogs and social networks.

I have attended CEAS for many of the previous years and I have found it to be of consistently high quality. I highly recommend CEAS as it is one of the only forums solely dedicated to presenting the results of research in messaging. The conference provides open access to all papers presented after the event. Research papers presented at CEAS in previous years may be found on the conference web site.

Researchers are encourage to submit to the CEAS call for papers until April 15th 2009.

The Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) invites the submission of papers for its sixth meeting. Papers are invited on all aspects of electronic communication including email, social networks, blogs, instant messaging, text messaging, and voice over internet protocol (VoIP). Topics of interest include novel applications and theoretical work in abuse filtering, security measures, automated assistance, reliability, economic issues, phishing, identity theft via messaging, fraud, evaluation measures, and benchmarks. Both academic and industrial research perspectives are encouraged.

Both full papers of up to 10 pages and poster papers of up to 2 pages will be considered. Papers will be peer-reviewed by a committee of experts from academic and industrial research centers.

Suggested topics:

• Message filtering, organization, and security
• Machine learning, natural language processing, and adversarial learning
• Message summarization, search, and automated routing
• Social networking security, privacy, and fraud prevention
• Corpus and benchmark creation, measures and methodologies
• Game-theoretic analysis of economics of spam and phishing
• Studies of abuse tactics and patterns
• Scalability, reliability, archiving, and retrieval
• Messaging protocols
• Messaging and abuse reporting standards
• Identity theft, freedom of speech, digital rights management

Who Protects The Internet?: James Geary writes about the crews and equipment used to repair undersea fiber optic cables for Popular Science. They story is a good read. It describes what is like to maneuver the undersea robots to find the cables, bring them to the surface and repair them all under adverse weather conditions and considerable time constraints as cable operators loose substantial amounts of money during cable downtime.

Photo Stalker program lets world peek at your Facebook photos: Gillian Shaw at the Vancouver Sun describes a Facebook application called “Photo Stalker” takes advantage of the fact that photo albums in Facebook are set to be visible to everyone by default and many users never change this default. There are actually two problems Facebook should correct. First, the default settings to personal information, especially user uploaded content like pictures should be set to a more restrictive setting. Second, the default setting is labeled “everyone” which is confusing as users might easily believe it only applied to everyone who was a friend or in a network, which is a more restrictive setting.

Can Cellphones Help Fight Identity Theft?: Saul Hansell from the New York Times Bits Blog writes about the use of cellphones and SMS as two-factor for adding a layer of security to transactions on the web. In addition to the extra security, two-factor authentication there is one significant additional benefit that Hansell does not mention. Increasingly people have multiple two-factor tokens because each financial institution and many workplaces require them. A single cell phone can replace multiple two-factor tokens.

TripIt is a free service that simplifies organizing travel plans. The service has done an excellent job of making it painless to aggregate the collection of email receipts that you receive from airlines, hotels, car rental companies and travel agencies into one master itinerary. In order to use TripIt, you simply forward any email receipts to plans [at] tripit [dot] com. The service extracts the reservation information from the message and assembles an attractive and very functional master itinerary from all the disparate documents. TripIt supplements the existing information with seating charts, information about local weather and events. Tripit supports a large number of travel-related vendors and regularly adds new ones based on demand.

I have been using TripIt for about a year and a half for both business and personal travel. TripIt provides many methods to access your travel information. There are three separate web-based interfaces–one for desktop browsers, one tuned specifically for the iPhone and one for other mobile web browsers. The service makes it possible to access your data via email, SMS, .ics calendar feeds and RSS feeds. TripIt recently added an Application Programming Interface (API) for developers that is rapidly expanding the number of options.

By default, trips are private. If you choose to add “connections” to other TripIt users, the service will then display trip basics including your destination and the dates you are traveling. You can choose to share trips and allow other individuals to view details such as flight and hotel information for a specific trip even if they are not TripIt users. You can also designate “collaborators” that make may changes or additions to an itinerary. While TripIt does have a number of social network features, these are not required to make the service useful for valuable.

Automatic account creation is one aspect of TripIt that illustrates how well email is integrated with the service. An account is created for you the first time you email TripIt a travel receipt. There is no need to go up through a separate sign up process, although you do have to assign a password the first time you log in.

One of my favorite talks from last year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco was “Making Email a Useful Web App” from Andy Denmark of TripIt. He made the argument that email is still interesting as an access point for web-based applications. He placed TripIt in a historical context of email driven applications such as the old email-based Internic domain registration forms. Denmark also mentioned TrackMyShipments, an online package tracking service, which is also email receipt-based. I like this service as well and will review it in the future.

The release of a TripIt developer API, immediately led to a number of useful connections to external service such as LinkedIn for sharing travel plans with business connections, Plaxo for integration with Plaxo Pulse and Plaxo Pulse, expens’d, which links with TripIt data to simplify travel expense reporting.

In some ways, TripIt competes with Dopplr, but in reality the services have minimal overlap and I think they are complimentary. Dopplr’s focus is on the social and visualization aspects of travel, while TripIt excels at many disparate travel documents and producing a useful master itinerary. I really look forward to the day when a developer connects these two services via their APIs.

I have very few complaints about TripIt, one is that it is difficult to retrieve older trips, which are sometimes useful when double checking records for expensing, etc. A brief history is available in the profile, otherwise you will need to find an old email from TripIt containing the URL from the trip to view the old itinerary.

The API connection potentially improves the situation for using your own historical TripIt records. That said, it would still be nice if TripIt created a way to easily view historical trips in the browser. This data is currently available in the calendar files and RSS feeds, but these are not convenient for most users to quickly look up a previous travel itinerary online. (Update: Thanks to a comment from TripIt’s Scott Hintz, I now see that the earlier trip history is available, just a little out-of-the-way. Thank you Scott.)

I have long wished that TripIt had a native iPhone application. The web-based iPhone interface is well done, but the master itinerary is also useful when I am without network connectivity such as on the plane or in a subway or when data is expensive such as on an international trip. This problem has effectively been solved with the release of the API as third party developers have begun to create applications that work with existing TripIt data.

There are now two travel applications for the iPhone that are able to sync with TripIt, FlightTrack Pro and TravelTracker. I have not yet seen applications for other mobile platforms such as BlackBerry or Android that will sync with TripIt data, but I would be surprised if the did not begin to appear up sooner than later.

The first application, FlightTrack Pro (iTunes Store link $9.99) is the big brother to the FlightTrack live flight tracking application. FlightTrack Pro can also synchronize flights with TripIt to automatically load upcoming trip information. The application includes features that appeal most to frequent fliers including arrival and departure times, aircraft type and flight maps. The application can download current information on flight status, any delays or cancellations and weather conditions over the air. FlightTrack Pro caches this information so you can review the details even after you are in the air and offline.

The second application, TravelTracker (iTunes Store link $1.99) is an iPhone application helps to track the large and small details related to travel such as airline, car and hotel reservations, frequent flyer account numbers. TravelTracker has a long heritage as it has been available for Palm OS since 1998. The application contains a number of internal databases including airports, Amtrak stations and a number of customizable shopping, packing and sightseeing list related to travel. TravelTracker includes the ability to keep track of expenses and includes a large number of default categories to select from. The application provides links to the internal browser to look up flight information, airport maps and seating charts.

TravelTracker provides several options for importing and exporting data. The application supports emailing itineraries as plain text, html or CSV. Users can independently backup or restore TravelTracker data via a desktop helper application. There were Windows and Mac OS9 desktop companion applications for the PalmOS version of TravelTracker. There is currently no stand-alone desktop applications that are compatible with the iPhone version.

The developer of TravelTracker makes a separate application called Flight Update ($5) that provides real-time flight information, which will hopefully also gain TripIt support in the future. If the user has them installed, TravelTracker would benefit from providing links to either Flight Update or FlightTrack as both are significantly more usable than switching to the built-in browser to look up information.

Third party iPhone applications are not allowed to access entries from the iPhone calendar, so neither FlightTrack Pro nor TravelTracker can place entries directly into your calendar on the iPhone. As a practical matter, this is not really a problem. TripIt provides its own .ics calendar feed that you can subscribe to from desktop calendars such as iCal or Outlook or from web-based calendars such as Google Calendar or the Hotmail Calendar.

* Minor corrections, URL, and pricing updates September, 13, 2010.

You should follow me on Twitter.