Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Snowpocalypse? Good Thing There’s an App for That.

The recent winter storms have sent a flood of mobile traffic to travel-related Web sites as those stranded scramble to reschedule flights and book hotel rooms from their phones.

Usablenet, a company that powers the mobile Web sites of various airlines, hotel chains and Amtrak, said that traffic to its travel-related sites was up 200 percent over the past two days.

Also of note, Usablenet said the most traffic came from iPhones and Android devices, marking the first time that more business travelers were using Android-powered phones than were on BlackBerry devices.

“As travelers away from home are searching for the most up-to-date information regarding their itineraries, many of them are depending on mobile websites,” Usablenet President Nick Taylor said in a statement. The company’s clients include American Airlines, British Airways, Delta, JetBlue, US Airways and Amtrak, as well as the Hilton, Omni, Starwood and Wyndham hotel chains.

Meanwhile, those who have managed to stay high and dry have been enjoying some schadenfreude with time-lapse blizzard videos, such as this one.

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald