The Connected Traveler Technology Showcase

In 1992 I was commissioned to produce a documentary on the future of travel. I talked to a Stanford futurist who predicted the effects of globalization and the danger of tribalization: read that fringe groups and terrorists. So far, dead on. A man from NASA predicted routine sub-orbital airline flights. Well...not quite yet (but there is some suggestion that the rings of Saturn are, in reality, particles of lost luggage).

I made a pilgrimage to Sri Lanka and spent a day with the late Arthur C. Clarke. I brought my primitive laptop and a new animation program called 3D Studio (Its newest release was used to design some of the virtual 3D worlds of Avatar). I had managed, during some 30 hours of flying, to create a ball and make it roll down a ramp.We were like a little boys exclaiming "mine is bigger than yours." Clarke took me on a tour of a terraformed Mars that he had created on his Amiga. Remember the Commodore Amiga?

Clarke later published it in picture book form. We talked about the future of labor, about how robots might someday do most of the real work and make our main profession "entertaining one-another." Hmm, that may be happening. And we chatted about computer networking. He said he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick via modem to complete "2001: A Space Odyssey" but that he wasn't really into this new mode of information overload, except for email. "Like drinking from a waterfall," he said.

Just after that, I established this web site, The Connected Traveler, on The Well, an acronym for "The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link,"a pioneering computer network that hosted an eclectic mix of nerds, academics and Dead Heads. Wellite Howard Rheingold chronicled the future of "Virtual Communities" in his 1993 book -- years before Facebook. The Connected Traveler was the second or third travel site on the web and an early "Cool Site of the Day," which brought a whopping 250 thousand page reads in a few hours, almost matching a rogue porn site also served on The Well. It was my playpen for writing, ranting, photography and playing with this new technology, grabbing the attention of Time Magazine, USA Today, the Times of London and many others, and winning several best of the web awards in a very uncrowded field.

Looking at one of The Connected Traveler's first navigation menus, I now realize why I found this new medium so exciting. It was far more more fun than the rigid Content Management System, festooned with social networking gottahaves, we use today.

My wife Pat and I posted some of the early travel and tech videos in tiny, blurry RealVideo windows. Real Networks sponsored our live tech show, streamed from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas over a regular telephone line. I scanned photos with a two thousand dollar scanner, schlepped suitcases full of heavy cameras and tapes through jungles, finished videos at a $300 per hour editing suite. I can do better now with a pocket Flip camera and the free Windows Movie Maker or iMovie that comes with most computers. For quality's sake, I now use what some call a "Frankencamera" an off-the-shelf camera that has been souped up by hackers to produce movie-like images. Last year I edited HDTV video in the middle of the Mojave Desert and uploaded it to YouTube with a Verizon wireless card.

Now, niche tour operators, small B&Bs and people who open up their homes to travelers have been discovered on the web and are making a living, bypassing the middlemen and keeping all of their profits in their own villages. We can aim our smartphone at a landmark and get a description of it, a review of and route to the nearest saloon, and even details of the muggings that have happened in the neighborhood that very day. And of course REAL friends from all over the world (I don't friend strangers) now share knowledge and trivia with me almost daily on Facebook which, of course, existed in another form in the 1980s and early 90s when I first fell into The Well.

Everything old is new again. The good old days are now.

With that, Pat and I have launched The Connected Traveler Technology Showcase, showing off travel gear and accessories, mobile devices and apps, cameras, telecommunications, audio gear, social media and review sites, netbooks, business software for road warriors, interactive travel guides, cloud-based computing, devices to track your kids, baggage or traveling pet...I am running out of breath. Sorry, this is for the travel, technology and business media only. But the rest of you will be reading about it in blogs, magazines, newspapers and seeing it on TV afterward. And you can always watch this space for our video blog.