Taking a road trip ain’t what it used to be. Gone are the days of fumbling for directions, settling for McDonalds or searching desperately for a gas station while riding on fumes.The iPhone revolution and Apps Store are upon us, streamlining and civilizing the process.
Mashable’s Ben Parr has a selection of iPhone apps that are particularly suited to customizing your trip. For purposes of this blog, you could replace “road trip” with “business trip” – these apps would do nicely while you are navigating uncharted territory looking for hotels, food or other services. There are apps to track mileage and expenses (Road Trip), weather apps (The Weather Channel), wi-fi hotspot finders (WiFiTrack), food finders (Urban Spoon), recommendations (Yelp), simpler mapping (MapsBuddy), hotel finders (SimulTravel GPS), and places of interest (Where To?). I have used Urban Spoon to find food to good effect, but haven’t personally used the other services mentioned. I would add another app that I use to this list: “Call A Cab” is a free app that finds the local cab services based on your location and gives a quick link to their phone number.
Happy Travels!

Another tip from Lifehacker, Zamzar offers a text to speech service that converts files or URLs to various audio formats, delivered to your email. This includes TXT, PDF, Word, Works, WordPerfect and OpenOffice documents. Although the delivery is not “silky smooth” per Lifehackers’ review, it does sound better than a robot (what do they have against robots?). Zamzar also offers other conversion combinations and is free, with a 100MB file size limit.

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Simple. Easy to use. Graphic. Nice features for a service that offers event creation and coordination. WhichDateWorks provides all of that without the need for a sign-up process. Simply pick a date range, enter the email addresses of the desired attendees and wait. The recipients follow a link to the site and place their votes for the best dates for them.
I got the tip from Lifehacker, which also mentions another, similar service, When Is Good, with greater granularity as to time selection.

I have raved on prior occasions about JD Supra and what a great concept it is for on-line document sharing and marketing. But when I was first introduced to it, I was unsure of what and how to post to the service.

Adrian Lurssen has a great post on the blog about what to share and how to share it here. The short answer, according to Lurssen, is whatever showcases your expertise. The long answer is nicely set out in numbered paragraphs with examples. These include court filings, legal analysis, legal forms, legal documents of interest, repurposed blog posts and subject-specific PDF e-books, press mentions, law school papers, print publications, articles and other documents.

If you are contemplating broadening your sphere of influence on the internet, check out the post and check out the service. It is a win-win for practitioners looking for knowledge and looking to trumpet their knowledge.