Posts from Blogging On The Road

We are staying at a Ryokan in the woods on a river and it is beautiful and peaceful and about as far away from NYC and work as can be. We had dinner in robes last night and slept on tatami mats. And I’ve been reading more and writing less. All of which is a very good thing for me and our family. I will upload a photo of this place if I can get a decent internet connection. That in and of itself is a feature and not a bug of this place.

So in the spirit of fun friday, where do you all go to find seclusion, peace, and solitude? Post a picture with your comment if you can.

It's 3am in the morning and I'm wide awake in a hotel room in Tokyo, having slept for about five hours. My head is pounding because I haven't had coffee in 30 hours. I'm fixing myself an espresso and getting out my Nexus 7 for some reading. Emily suggested I read A Visit From The Goon Squad so that's first up on my vacation reading list.

I struggle with jet lag. Whenever I talk to someone who travels frequently to Asia or some other far off destination, I always ask them how they deal with it. Most tell me drugs, which I refuse to take. I don't want to go there.

When our family traveled to Australia a few years ago, I was so knocked out by the jet lag that I felt physically ill for the first couple days of our trip. I think I'm in much better shape on this trip, but it's still a struggle for me to get out of my circadian rhythm and into another one.

The jet lag advice I have taken is to sleep as much on airplanes as possible. That makes sense to me but I don't sleep well on planes. I got about four hours on the thirteen hour flight from NYC to Tokyo. The Gotham Gal and the girls barely slept on the plane and I think they are doing better with the jet lag than I am. So I am questioning that advice a bit right now.

So, what do all of you in the AVC community have to advise me on this one? I'd like to get better at it because I love traveling to far flung parts of the world and plan to do a lot more of it in the coming years.

When I come to SF, I generally don't rent a car. I've used cabs and more recently Uber to get around. But many times I just walk from meeting to meeting around SOMA where most of the tech companies are.

This week I tried something different. The Gotham Gal is a seed investor in a company called Scoot Networks who has launched a service that is best described as "zipcar for scooters." My colleague Nick and I rented scooters yesterday and used them to get back and forth to our meetings. I have my scooter until tonight when I am going to return it.

Here's a photo of me on a Scoot:

The scooter is electric and very light. It is only 50 cc. It has enough speed and acceleration to get around SOMA easily. It is not as powerful as the 150 cc Vespa I ride around NYC, but I was totally comfortable on it and it worked great for me yesterday.

Your phone is your "key". You join Scoot Networks and use their web app (native apps are coming). You place your phone in a bracket on the handlebar and connect an iPhone or USB connector and that turns the bike on and off.

Then you can drive around from meeting to meeting, parking the bike on the street.

Scoot Networks is currently only operating in San Francisco, but they are planning a larger rollout in the future once they get San Francisco working well. If you like to ride a scooter and travel to SF frequently, I suggest you give it a try. I am really enjoying it.

Related articles

Scoot Launches Electric Scooter-Sharing Program in San Francisco!

S.F. startup offers scooter rentals

"Zipcar For Scooters" Startup Scoot Networks Launches To The Public In San Francisco

World's 1st 'Shared Electric Scooter Fleet' Unveiled In San Francisco

The Zipcar of electric scooters launches to the public

Smartphones + Shared Electric Scooters in San Francisco

Sometimes an app can be a feature that is missing from the OS, or a feature that isn't well implemented in the OS. Flashlight apps are a great example.

Another example are apps that track mobile data usage. If you have unlimited mobile data, you might not care how much mobile data you are using. That's my behavior when I am at home.

But when I travel, I am either using a prepaid mobile data card (which is what I am doing now – 1GB for 48 krone/$8US), or using a mobile roaming package from my US carrier (my wife and kids are on a 800MB roaming plan from ATT Mobile).

In either case, it is critical to know how much mobile data you are consuming, per day, per week, per trip, and per plan term.

My favorite app to do this is called My Data Manager and it is free and available for iOS and for Android.

My Data Manager has three tabs to show you how much data you are consuming on your carriers's mobile data network, how much data you are consuming by roaming on other networks, and how much data your are consuming on wifi. It also shows you what apps are consuming the most data for each tab.

You can set up your mobile plans in the app so you can see how you are doing for the current plan term.

I have been in europe since Monday morning (four days now) and I have consumed 128MB on my prepaid 1GB danish sim and I have consumed 155MB on wifi. I haven't had to roam since I have a local data sim. My wife and kids have similar data usage except that they are all roaming on other data networks and are well within their 800MB cap.

If you have a cap on your mobile data usage or if you are roaming on other data networks, I highly recommend getting My Data Manager to keep track. Mobile data is expensive when you go off plan or above plan. Keeping track gives you peace of mind and that's a valuable thing.

I had an epiphany today. I was in Storm, a cool store in Copenhagen, and I checked into Foursquare. In the result screen of that checkin, I saw a tip that there was another design store right around the corner called Hay. And that my friend Naveen had recommended Hay on his Copenhagen list.

I immediately saved Naveen's list to my phone and then saved a few other Copenhagen lists that were recommended to me.

Now every time I checkin somewhere in Copenhagen, I get a tip for another place that is nearby on one of the lists that I saved. No more thinking about where to go next. Foursquare will tell me based on suggestions from my friends and the lists I've saved.

I've tried every kind of travel guide out there. Some are great, like the Luxe guides and the Wallpaper guides. But an interactive, real time, geolocated travel guide built by my friends and likeminded travelers is way better.

So I'm going to create lists on Foursquare from now on so that others can benefit the same way that I am right now. Here's my list so far from a day or so in Copenhagen.

We just kicked off the start of a vacation in europe and I'm jetlagged and in vacation mode.

So I am taking a week off on MBA Mondays. We will start again next monday and we will cover the topic of retaining your employees.

I am spending the next few weeks with my family in europe. This week is all vacation and next week is a mix. I will be in Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, and France. I've got my kindle stocked with recommendations from last week's fun friday. I usually like to blog on vacation so I plan to do that. We'll see how that goes.

I've been in London all week.

When I arrived at Heathrow I bought a data only SIM in the vending machine in baggage claim.

My friend Simon suggested I set up a new Skype account and get a UK SkypeIn number.

I did that and I have been operating without a voice connection. I use skype for voice, Kik for text, and evrrything else works just fine on data.

It's a pretty sweet lifehack. Give it a try the next time you are on the road out of your home country.

Clayton Christensen says that the most disruptive things start out as "toys." I was reminded of that yesterday as I was standing at the counter of a bike store in Calistoga filling out a list of bikes I was renting for our family and a few others. I had guessed the heights of everyone on my list and I wanted to take a copy of the list back to our house and make sure I had guessed correctly.

With my phone in hand, I looked up at the young man helping me and said "can you make a photocopy of this page so I can take it home with me?" He looked straight at my phone and said "that has a camera in it, right?"

I felt silly and chuckled. My friends who were with me laughed at me and the irony of the situation. I snapped a picture of the sheet of paper and then when I got home I went over everyone's heights to make sure we were getting correctly sized bikes. The phone worked perfectly for that situation. The young man was right. No need for an expensive photocopier in the bike store when all of his customers are carrying smart phones.

For the past couple years, when I travel in europe I turn mobile data roaming off on my phone and grab wifi when I can. That's the best way to avoid ridiculous data roaming charges.

Last year, on the advice of readers of this blog, I started buying prepaid sim cards in countries where I planned on being for a few days or more. I did that in the UK last summer and it worked out well. I still have my prepaid sim card from that trip. I wonder if it still works.

When my daughter was getting ready to go to Paris for a month in mid June, I got an unlocked iPhone 4 directly from Apple (they had just started to sell it) and sent her to France with it instead of her US iPhone. I figured that our whole family could share that unlocked iPhone and use it whenever one of our iPhone users traveled outside the US.

I also DM'd a friend in Paris and asked him what prepaid plan to get. He suggested Orange's Mobicarte service. So my daughter arrived in Paris, went to an Orange store as I suggested, bought a Mobicarte sim and started using it. Within hours her phone was out of money. She emailed me and asked what was up. I suggested she go back to the Orange store and ask what was happening. Turns out she needed to get something called Internet Max on her Mobilcarte plan. Once she did that, she was in business.

Around the exact same time, my friend Brad Feld was having the exact same problem. He emailed me. I told him what I knew from my daughter's experience. But I didn't have all the details. He banged his head against the wall, broke his glasses, and finally figured it out. Thankfully, he blogged exactly how to do this so the rest of us won't have the same issues.

So I show up in Paris a few days later and confidently walk into an Orange store and buy two Mobicarte sims for the Gotham Gal and me. Armed with my daughter's experience and Brad's blog post, I figure no problem. Well not exactly. I started using mobile data on my Mobicarte sim before the Internet Max kicked in (it takes a while), and ran through all my prepaid money. I had to recharge at the local Tabac this morning and now I am set. Meanwhile the Gotham Gal's HTC G2 is apparently locked (who knew?) and we are waiting for T-Mobile to send an unlock code.

The point of all of this? It is damned hard to beat the man when it comes to mobile data in europe. I'm starting to think that turning it off and grabbing wifi here and there isn't such a bad solution. But if you want to do the local sim card thing, here are my suggestions:

1) Make sure you have a totally unlocked phone. The unlocked iPhone Apple sells online will work. So will the Nexus S. Beyond that, check before you leave home. If you need an unlock code from your carrier, plan ahead.

2) If you are coming to France, read Brad's blog post and print it out for safe measure. I used on O2 sim in the UK and it worked like a charm with no configuration needed.

3) Be prepared for stuff to go wrong. If you don't have the time and patience to deal with snafus while you are traveling, don't go down this path.

I was having lunch with a friend today who lives in Ljubiana Slovenia. We got to talking about mobile data in europe. We both felt that the EU really ought to require all the telcos operating in the region to open up to new providers so we can get a pan-european prepaid sim with a good mobile data plan. Then we'd only need to do this once and it would work everywhere in europe. And on top of that, Google should work to get Google Voice working over here as well. One can dream.