Labor-saving inventions have a long and colorful history, but even in an era when travel technology changes faster than bed-sheets at a luxury hotel, Australian international wireless phone provider Ekit has come up with yet another new wrinkle: a leisure-saving device.
On May 13, Ekit was scheduled to launch VisitMyTravelJournal.com, a service that will employ global positioning technology, using cell phone towers around the world, to automatically update travel journals for travelers who are too busy (or too lazy) to write.
For those left behind, the service will offer a twist on the popular "Where's Waldo" kids' books by tracking the treks of participating travelers so that families and friends back home can check in via the Web site to see where their loved ones are in their globe-trotting.
John Diamond, CEO of Ekit, said the service was inspired by calls to the company's call center from parents whose world-trekking children had not phoned home.
Consistently, parents were asking if the company could determine if their children's cell phones had been used recently and from where. Parents, he said, were trying to avoid seeming overanxious by making calls themselves but wanted to check up on an errant son or daughter nonetheless.
Getting wrapped up in a trip and forgetting to make calls inspired him to think about automatic updates of a traveler's journal as well.
"My own attempts to keep a journal start out enthusiastically," Diamond said. "But I lose the energy after time. So we thought if we could provide a tool for the backbone of the trip, which was essentially where the traveler had been and the weather and those things, then had it update automatically a record of the trip, it would attract users."
For travel suppliers, TravelJournal is also offering new marketing opportunities by enabling Ekit's partners to send relevant messages, ranging from regionally tagged offers to advertising, to travelers who purchase Ekit's international cell phones or SIM card services.
"We have a lot of distribution partners from major travel organizations," Diamond said. "Many of them are in the student exchange area, often focused on where kids go on an exchange trip or language trip. That is a strong market for us."
Privacy was a concern that the company also addressed, giving the traveler complete control over who has passwords to access the traveler's journal and location information. Passwords can be changed by travelers at any time and shared with only those with whom they want to share information. Travelers can elect to make their journals accessible by the public or keep them private, Diamond said.
To contact reporter Dan Luzadder, send e-mail to [email protected].