We’re pretty excited about this and we are sure that all Mapness fans are going to like it.

In the meantime, here’s something to keep travel lovers amused:

The Daily Telegraph: 20 ridiculous complaints made by holidaymakers

Our favourite:

“No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled."

Thanks Leo!

Listen to Leo’s show

Englishman Paul Smith (aka The Twitchhiker) began a pioneering quest at the beginning of this month: To see how far around the world he can travel relying solely on the goodwill of people using Twitter.

Paul’s trip will raise money for charity: water for which he is seeking sponsorship as he travels from point to point by accepting offers of transport and accommodation from fellow Twitter users. There are a number of rules which keep things exciting:

• Paul can only accept offers of travel and accommodation on Twitter, from users who are following @twitchhiker
• Paul can’t make any plans further than three days in advance
  Paul can only spend money on food, drink and anything that might fit in my suitcase
• If there’s more than one offer on the table, Paul gets to choose which he takes. If there’s only one, he has to take it within 48 hours.
• If he’s unable to find a way to move on from a location within 48 hours, the challenge is over and he goes home.

How’s it going? Quite well it seems – at the time of writing Paul has already travelled from England, onto mainland Europe, across the Atlantic ocean to New York, and has now successfully made it across the United States to San Francisco.

You can see details of his trip so far on by looking at the Twitchhiker’s Mapness journey, by reading his blog, or for latest information by following Paul on Twitter.

You can sponsor Paul at justgiving

With busy lives, and a big world to explore many travellers operate on more of a time budget than a cost budget. Mapness Top Traveller Ben Robinson shows us where to go, what to do, and what to see if you want to do Guatemala in a week.

Follow Ben’s trip on Mapness to read the complete description and see dozens of stunning images, or check out some highlights from Ben’s journey, such as the Mayan ruins at Tikal:

This place will blow your mind! Built by the Mayans it is enormous. I have visited ruins in Honduras at Copan and Lago Jojya but this place is breathtaking. It is fully surrounded by rain forest (see note below). The trees envelope you and then suddenly you come out into a clearing and there is a 50m high pyramid in front of you.

And read about some of the challenges of getting around as Ben describes the route to Chichicastenango:

Although on this map the road looks like a main road it’s not. By any stretch of the imagination. This is 4wd country. We aimed to  get all the way to Chichicastenango but didn’t make it. This is probably the best drive I have ever done. The road winds along the sides of mountains, up and down through spectacular valleys. When I say road… well track is probably a better word. Despite being basically a mud track it was actually quite busy.

There were many trucks and buses as well a few brave motorcyclists. In places the road practical carves through the mountains. You have steep drop offs on one side and vertical cliffs on the other. All the way there were areas of landslides, the solution seems to be to just shove the fallen rocks off the side. When the road finally became paved again it was slightly more hazardous. Areas would just drop by 50cm or so like steps. I had to keep my wits about me to stop us from completely wrecking the car.

Editor’s note: Sorry you didn’t make it to Chichicastenango Ben, but you might like to look at Mark’s Chichicastenango trip on Mapness.

Follow the complete journey on Mapness

Been to Guatemala? What do you think?

Images courtesy of Ben Robinson

We are now approaching the final phases of launching the latest release of Mapness, which is going to bring some substantial improvements to the Mapness experience, along with a couple of nice surprises at the same time.

However, this next release will be just one step on the long roadmap that we have planned towards Mapness becoming every traveller’s best friend. Some of the things we have planned for the future are:

• A mobile version of Mapness, so you can record your travel experiences on the road
• Lots of additional social functions to help share your trips with others, and exchange travel ideas, tips and inspiration
• Search & planning functionality which allows Mapness to be used to plan new trips as well as record old ones
• Group travel journals, so you can share travel as a team

Let us know what you would like to see on Mapness?

Image courtesy of Link to ToastyKen’s photostream via Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

From AP’s release:

Politicians and analysts agreed that the man who pioneered charging airline customers to check bags, to use a check-in desk, and even to use a credit or debit card to make an on-line booking just might be serious about mile-high toilet extortion, too.

Indeed, I remember walking in to an airport some years ago to find a sea of open suitcases with people frantically trying to repack on the floor of the check-in area. On enquiring I was told that Ryan Air had suddenly introduced a new baggage charging scheme which passengers were desperately trying to circumvent.

Many people have reacted with indignation to O’Leary’s remarks, as they often do. But unfortunately Ryan Air’s ticket sales keep on proving him right – what people want above all is cheap travel, and they’ll likely fly with their legs crossed to get it.

1. Phuket, Thailand

This is definitely not a good one to learn the hard way and to make it even more difficult, advice on the correct way to pronounce it can vary. To avoid scowls, general disdain, and possibly worse, go with "Pu-get."

2. Mooball, Australia

While Mooball may sound like a cute term of bovine endearment, it’s actually pronounced "Moo-bull."

3. La Jolla, California

What does the sport of boxing have in common with beautiful La Jolla, California? Not much except to get this one right, you need to rhyme it with the boxer, Oscar de la Hoya.

4. Oaxaca, Mexico

For non-Spanish speakers, the chances of mangling this one are pretty high. Just remember that there’s no "hoax" in Oaxaca and that Osaka is in Japan. The correct way to say it is "Wah-ha-ca."

5. Hjo, Sweden

The correct pronunciation of the town is "You."

6. Wauchope, Australia

If you want to give the locals a good laugh, refer to this as "War-choppy." The real pronunciation is actually "War-hope."

7. Cobh, Ireland

Even the simplest of names can be deceptive. Keep in mind that it’s on an island, not in a cornfield, so pronounce it "Cove," not "Cob."

8. Coxsackie, New York

When trying to pronounce Coxsackie, don’t think of Courteney Cox but what her character on "Friends" did for a living — cook. So in this part of the world, just think "Cook-sock-ee!"

9. Sequim, Washington

"Sqwim" is actually the correct pronunciation for the town known as the Lavender Capital of North America.

10. Ptuj, Slovenia

The residents of Ptuj must get tired of hearing the name of this pretty town get butchered over and over again. When pronounced correctly, it sounds like a dainty sneeze: "P-too-ee.

Have any more??

From Reuters. Image courtesy of Solar ikon at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence.

Following a team meeting in London last week, we are happy to welcome two new faces to the Mapness team. After a day of getting to know each other better whilst discussing our awesome soon-to-be-released new version of Mapness we spent an evening touring some of London’s eating and drinking venues.

Mark joins us from his previous position as Head of Product Development at Green Options Media, a successful online media firm. Mark will be helping us create the ‘buzz’ around Mapness as we continue to develop the product into the world’s best place for sharing and planning travel experiences. Look out for more news on the Mapness buzz on this blog in the coming weeks…

Paul is already hard at work on amazing Mapness mobile applications (currently in alpha) that will help put Mapness everywhere and anywhere. More about Paul later when we release some of his awesome work to the world. For now, all we can reveal is that he is a beer loving volleyball addict who writes Symbian code in his sleep…

>> Follow our evening out with Mapness

A bit late, as the events described here took part between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I wanted to post about the latest Mapness development marathon.

We’ve met at Mike’s parent’s place on Sunday morning (just after Christmas) after shopping for coffee, energy drinks and snacks and started to crank out the code. We had the whole team working for over 48 hours (2,5 days), with only about 6 hours of sleep to regenerate. The marathon ended on Tuesday.

After all the Christmas laziness and the New Year’s party just around the corner, the dev marathon was a great way to end 2008, and we took the opportunity of the whole team coming back to Lublin for Christmas to kick-start Mapness development for 2009.

Marathon you say?

A development marathon is about meeting in one place and coding for hours and days without any distractions. Mapness dev marathons are a thing we used to do from time to time whenever we felt that our distributed line of work (Tom in Gdansk and then in Warsaw, Mike in Warsaw, Wojtek in London) has made the team too.. ..well.. distributed.

It’s a great motivator too – we literally see Mapness grow with every passing hour. Definitely a great thing to do from time to time when you’ve got a distributed team seeing each other mostly on Skype.

Without further ado, here are some pictures from the dev marathon. If you enjoy watching programmers work, then enjoy!

Wojtek and Mike discussing some programming related issues.

Mike had lots of food left after Christmas, so we kindly helped him with that. On Monday Chef Mike served delicious spicy onion soup with croutons and cheese and roasted turkey with pineapple and potatoes. On Tuesday we kinda of lost some of the kitchen bang and just ordered pizza - a traditional programmer’s nutriment.

Tom and Mike enjoying their double espresso at 4:17 AM. Cheers!

Tom’s workstation. This basically sums up the whole party: lots of work, energy drinks, Pepsi, Coke and Coffee and the clock is ticking!

Last night of the marathon, wee hours of the morning. As you can see by the look on Wojtek’s face at that moment we were definitely not the shiniest coins in the fountain, but still managed to crank out some more code so we kept going.

Mike’s passed out and is dreaming of some object oriented things, while Tom and Wojtek are packing their stuff. It’s nearly 7AM and exhausted but happy we head home to get some rest before the New Years and the challenges of 2009.

In the next photo story episode: Wojtek dressed up as a Power Puff Girl on the New Year’s Eve party! (it was fun!) Stay tuned!

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We’ve just released French language version of Mapness. If you’re more comfortable communicating in French go ahead - visit Mapness and change your preferred language to French (use the flag in the top right corner). Greetings to all travelers from Quebec and France using Mapness!

If you’d like to see Mapness translated to your language, or even help us translate Mapness feel free to contact us and we’ll be more than happy to cooperate!

Better, faster & more secure!

In response to feedback from travelers using Mapness we’ve made quite a lot of improvements to the performance of our service, so it runs much more smoothly now! Some little glitches and bugs have also been fixed. Among others, we’ve enhanced our multiple images upload function to run flawlessly and we’ve improved the security of our service. If you find anything irritating or difficult while using Mapness just let us know and we’ll surely fix it.

Shape of things to come.

Next up we’ll be introducing more social features. The Mapness team will be quite busy during the holiday season. We’ll be introducing rich user profiles to Mapness so you can find interesting people easily and we’ll be adding a multitude of ways to explore journeys and places described by other travelers. Expect exciting features on Mapness in the beginning of 2009!

If you’re planning a winter trip don’t forget to use Mapness to show your friends and family where you’re going or where you’ve been.

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