Ideas and reviews for websites, film, business, products, and designMicroblog your ideas and be discovered

Once upon a time, you had to bring travel guides, maps and paper tickets on every trip. Today, you can just take your smartphone and get access to all of this information without having to lug a couple of books and magazines around with you. Today, according to a new study by analytics firm Compete , 38% of smartphone users conduct travel research on their devices and 28% use their phones to book at least some of their trips and travel activities. Sponsor Compete found that the most popular travel-related activity for smartphone owners is finding more information about a destination while they are already traveling (34%). Close to a third of smartphone owners who responded to Compete’s survey also use their phones to check up on the status of their lodging and transportation reservations. For most smartphone owners, this probably means checking up on the status of their flights. A quarter of smartphone owners also use their phones to research lodging, destination and transportation options. Marketers will be happy to hear that 22% of users look for a specific transportation company’s or hotel’s website and 21% use their devices to do research on a specific travel agency’s site. Interestingly, though, while about a third of smartphone owners use their devices for travel-related activities, only one-fifth of all smartphone owners have installed travel apps on their devices yet. Those who haven’t installed travel apps yet are looking for comprehensive services that can notify their users of unplanned schedule changes (52%), notify users of rate changes (48%) and consolidate all travel reservations into one itinerary. While there are already numerous apps like WorldMate and TripIt that solve these problems, there is clearly an opportunity for these companies to market their apps to a wider audience that isn’t aware of them yet. Discuss

There are so many tools for editing PDFs online that you have your work cut out for you. Provided you know where to look, that’s it. It’s not like using a word processor, where every function you are bound to use is self-contained in the same package, but it is a matter of knowing which sites map out the range of basic operations. Read more Learn more about ILovePDF.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much ILovePDF.com is worth with Stimator.com

Patrick Hughes has been astonishing art lovers worldwide for decades with his unique illusionary style. If you’re into optical illusions, this painting by Patrick Hughes is a doozy. Most of two-dimensional painting in central perspective are designed to be viewed pretty much head on. Anamorphic art can make a two-dimensional surface appear to be three-dimensional and like a hologram, appear so true to life that one could read out to touch it, however it requires the viewer to be in a particular position in relation to the painting. This cool 3D painting is called “ Paradoxymoron “, and currently hangs in the basement of the British Library, in London. For those interested in having a look at other pieces by Mr. Hugues, be sure to visit his official website . Would you hang something like this on your wall ?

The Startup Bus is the kind of initiative that will be naturally funny and challenging to some, and quite pointless to others. You see, the basic premise is that of having 12 people board a bus in San Francisco and drive them all the way to Austin. In the 48 hours that will intervene, they are meant to have come up with 3 startups. Read more Learn more about TheStartupBus.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much TheStartupBus.com is worth with Stimator.com

One of the most accurate sayings I know is the one that goes “You keep your loved ones close, and you enemies even closer”. That is so because the eyes of those who dislike you are the first ones to spot your defects. However, I think that our truly loved ones can also do so – they can detect our biggest failings within seconds, but they will never, ever tell us about that directly. Read more Learn more about BetterMe.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much BetterMe.com is worth with Stimator.com