Untangling airports using open source tools on Microsoft Azure

Scientists from the Universities of Stirling and Nottingham in the United Kingdom tackled the knotty problem of delays on airport taxiways, where planes are entering or leaving runways. Sandy Brownlee, PhD, and Jason Atkin, PhD, collaborated with Manchester Airport to use cloud computing to model the complex data from many airports worldwide. The team created open-source tools using Linux on Microsoft Azure to expand these insights and create new algorithms, sharing these on Github. The team is helping Manchester Airport to reduce delays, save money and lessen any environmental impact.

Tim Walmsley helps the third-largest airport in the United Kingdom – Manchester - manage an estimated 23 million passengers per year. To successfully plan airport operations and growth, he asked for data science help from university researchers, who specifically sought to gain insights from modeling the movements on taxiways, to and from the runways. “Aviation is an industry that’s growing. So there are lots of ways that the industry is trying to tackle the impacts that that growth could bring. The Airport Optimization Project feeds into that,” Walmsley, Environment Manager for Manchester, explained.

Sandy Brownlee, a senior research assistant at the University of Stirling, began helping Manchester Airport by searching for specific data on what is sometimes called “ground movement” or taxiing to populate a model. At first, he was frustrated because individual airports did not want to share everything with him. What he discovered, however, is that he could access public data using Flight Radar 24 and Open Street Map for dozens of airports worldwide. Jason Atkin, PhD, of the University of Nottingham, partnered with Brownlee to help model how taxiways can be leveraged to make airports more efficient.

Taxiways connect everything
The time aircraft spend getting to and from runways is one of the understudied choke points at airports. “Taxiing is a really critical problem because it connects everything else,” Brownlee explained. Many are familiar with strategies for aligning takeoffs or landings to improve safety or efficiency but that slow crawl toward the gate (called a stand in the UK) can be a crucial link in the chain of events.

“The computing power we’ve got now allows us to understand and analyze data in different ways and pull out different information so we can better understand the true uncertainty in taxiing. We can understand which aircraft take a long time to get there, which aircraft get there quickly, and under what circumstances this is happening,” Atkin said.

Public data sources
Using Microsoft Azure, Brownlee could use Linux virtual machines and develop methods using OpenJDK. By leveraging these open source tools on Azure he completed his work in about one-tenth the time he might if he’d used just his desktop computer. “So rather than spending several months waiting for my data to be ready so that I could get on and do things, I had it within a couple of weeks,” he said.

There were three main tools that the team created to share on Github. TaxiGen reads taxiway and runway information from Open Street Map and then automatically writes it out in a usable format. SnapTracks reads raw GPS coordinates with timings and adds them to TaxiGen material. GM2KML generates helpful visualizations from the other two tools.

“Researchers rely on open tools and platforms to be able to develop and share their work. The ability to use the cloud for access to computing power not available on the desktop can act like a time machine, shrinking the time to results from months to weeks. This is a transformational way of thinking about research computing,” explained Kenji Takeda from Microsoft Research, who was supporting the project. Brownlee’s work on analysis of ground movement was funded by the Sandpit for Integrating and Automating Airport Operations and DAASE grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

“By getting better predictions, you can start improving the rest of the airport system,” Atkin said. One pilot can take longer than another to cover the same ground, traffic congestion can be heavy at busy times, and mechanical delays of any sort can throw off predictions. Taxiing delays ripple through the entire system. Modeling and predicting that taxi time helps airports change when and where they direct planes and can yield big savings. Brownlee estimates modeling could help cut bottlenecks at Manchester in half.

Open source benefits
Because the tools created by the team are available to anyone, both Brownlee and Atkin foresee that other airports around the world will use them. “The work that Sandy’s doing is going to provide a lot of public domain data and the ability to analyze this for a lot of different airports. And we should be able to see these multi-million-pound savings at airports worldwide,” Atkin said.

Brownlee also hopes models will help guide decisions in weather emergencies or when a runway must be closed. Airports worldwide can use the modeling to understand what to do about a sudden change. “By getting more researchers worldwide involved … we could get a lot more benefit from different areas of knowledge all coming from the same problem,” he said.

No matter what the world does with the open-source tools, for Walmsley the great impact is at Manchester, where he expects “a much better experience for the customer and for the airlines using the airport.”

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You send and receive a lot of emails, and it’s natural to make mistakes along the way—you forget how to spell someone’s name, leave someone out of a group email or forget to add a flight to your calendar. We’re bringing new people and calendar features to Outlook on the web to help you avoid these common mistakes and get things done faster. These changes are coming to Office 365 users beginning in a few weeks.

Outlook on the web learns from you

Do you spend extra time trying to add the right recipients to your email? Ever struggle to find someone because of the spelling of their name—is it John or Jon? Have you ever sent an email only to realize that you forgot to add someone? Outlook now helps you avoid these problems.

First, Outlook will save you time when choosing recipients. Just place your cursor in the To: or Cc: line and Outlook will bring up suggested contacts in a drop-down list based on your usage. These are the people you’re most likely to email based on who you’ve been communicating with recently and most frequently.

Suggested contacts learns from you to make reaching the right people easier.

Outlook has long had a spell checker for the body of an email, but what about common variations on the spellings of names? Outlook can help. Outlook will now show you names of people you email most frequently—even if you spell their name wrong. For example, if you occasionally write to “Kathryn,” her name will appear as a suggestion even if you typed “Catherine.”

Finally, forgetting to include people in an email is common. Now, Outlook has help for that too. If you frequently send emails to the same set of people—say, Steve, Anna and Bob—then whenever you email only Steve and Anna together, we’ll ask, “Do you also want to include Bob?” This prompt will not get in your way and will only show when Outlook is highly confident you want to add Bob.

Flying somewhere? Let Outlook make sure it’s in your calendar

Have you ever struggled to find your flight information because you forgot to copy/paste it into your calendar? Moving forward, Outlook will take care of this for you. When you receive a flight confirmation via email from a supported provider, Outlook will gather key information and automatically add it in your calendar—no extra clicks, no copy/paste, no drag and drop.

In addition, Outlook will block out the time of your flight and show the flight number, destination and airport. You will receive an automatic reminder three hours before your flight that includes the original email in the calendar event, so you have all the details handy.

Outlook will automatically add a calendar event for flights detailed in an email.

To find “Events from email” in Outlook on the web, click the Settings icon (gear icon), Options and then Calendar. It’s on by default, but you can turn it off if you want.

Great, you say, but what about other types of events? We like the way you think! That is why we won’t stop with just flights. In addition to supporting more providers, future Outlook updates will support event types beyond flights.

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United Airlines Boosts IT Efficiency, Business Resiliency with Private Cloud Solution Case Study

To reduce operating costs and find more effective ways to attract and retain customers in the hyper-competitive airline industry, United Airlines is working with Microsoft to expand private cloud computing to the enterprise. United Airlines uses Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Replica and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery to expedite the migration and consolidation of virtual machines and mission critical services to its new data center in Chicago and provide high availability services when hardware fails.

“To build an eight-node cluster in cooperation with the storage and networking teams used to take three to five days. Now the operations team can do it all themselves in a half-day.” Richard Wilson, Principle Architect United Airlines

Situation

Following its 2010 merger with Continental Airlines, United Airlines is reaching new levels of customer satisfaction. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, the company was rated the world’s most admired airline on Fortune magazine’s 2012 airline-industry list of the World’s Most Admired Companies.

Behind the accolades, the United IT team works to keep the underlying reservation system, baggage-handling system, public website, aircraft maintenance records, database servers, and countless other computer systems running flawlessly around the clock. It is hard work and it means that the IT team is constantly looking for ways to deliver new services faster and to streamline both its capital outlay on servers and the operational expenses involved in running them.

“The airline industry in incredibly competitive,” says Eric Craig, Managing Director of Enterprise Architecture at United Airlines. “We have the most comprehensive network on earth, but that’s not enough. We have to earn our customers’ business on each and every flight with the great on-time performance, excellent customer service, and innovative features our customers want. Our IT infrastructure needs to be reliable, cost effective, and highly adaptive so we can invest more capital into our customer facing products rather than data center servers.”

Early Virtualization Projects

In 2008, United made significant progress in building a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable IT infrastructure by virtualizing its data center infrastructure. Virtualization not only helped United to reduce IT costs but also to improve business agility—the ability to respond to business needs faster by deploying virtual machines in hours rather than weeks.

United even virtualized its business-critical United.com website and reservation system, which was running on physical servers. “United.com is an incredibly important channel for us,” Craig says. “Between 30 and 40 percent of the airline’s revenue comes from United.com—in excess of [US]$10 billion annually—so it needs to be running on a resilient, adaptive, and scalable infrastructure.”

At around the same time prior to the merger, Continental had virtualized about half of its Houston infrastructure, using the Hyper-V technology in the Windows Server Datacenter operating system.

Merger Provides Incentive for Cloud Computing

Following the 2010 merger with Continental Airlines, United Airlines determined that the airline should continue along the virtualization path and adopt private cloud computing, which encompasses reliable, scalable, on-demand compute, storage, and networking services and offers point-and-click resource provisioning for business units and self-service provisioning for the software development organization.

“With the automated management capabilities of private cloud computing, we are responding to business needs to increase compute capabilities, or to improve performance to minutes instead of days,” Craig says. “The ability to move applications from one server to another without disrupting your business, or to roll back an installation when you deploy a product that didn’t quite work out—that kind of adaptability and manageability is a great cost reducer and business enabler. Private cloud computing is the only way to get from 50 servers per administrator to 1,000 servers per administrator.”

United.com IT staff wanted to ensure its infrastructure had the resilience, scalability, and manageability required to boost the airline’s competitive position in the aviation industry. The IT team also wanted to have high availability as a foundational feature of its new data center to minimize downtime for its business-critical systems.

“We can’t afford any service outages, so it was important to pick the right high availability and disaster recovery (DR) solution: resilient, flexible, easy-to-use, and cost-effective,” says Richard Wilson, Principle Architect, Microsoft Private Cloud and Windows Server at United Airlines. “Our existing manual failover scenarios and expensive storage arrays were from multiple vendors and they were complex to manage.”

At the same time, United wanted to consolidate its data centers. It decided to close its Houston, Texas-data center facility and it needed an efficient, automated method to migrate its virtualized Microsoft infrastructure in Houston to its new, more cost-effective data center in Chicago. Each of these scenarios would benefit from a cloud computing solution.

“To exploit the power of cloud computing, we needed a partner that offered more than just a powerful hypervisor,” says Wilson. “We also needed a comprehensive management tool that we could use to manage the cloud fabric, from the physical servers to the virtual machines, storage, and networking environments.”

Solution

United Airlines is using the Windows Server 2012 operating system, including Hyper-V virtualization technologies, as part of the technology stack for the private cloud. “Microsoft technologies are easy to work with, interoperable, flexible, and cost-effective,” says Wilson. “As such, we see the Microsoft private cloud as a strategic enabler to streamline our integration efforts, and as a way to reduce the cost and complexity of the merger.”

Microsoft System Center 2012 data center solutions serve critical roles in United’s private cloud strategy and work well with other management tools. “United Airlines is a large, technically heterogeneous and complicated enterprise. No one tool can provide everything we need,” says Craig. “System Center is an important component of our management stack, providing orchestration, provisioning, migration, and automated recovery services throughout a large portion of our IT landscape. Microsoft recognizes the management challenges of large enterprises and has ensured that System Center interoperates well with the rest of our tool stack.”

Working with Microsoft

Part of the decision to choose Microsoft technologies lies in the close working relationship that has developed between United and Microsoft. Before the merger, both Continental and United had participated in many Microsoft Rapid Deployment and Technology Adoption Programs. Post-merger, United joined the Technology Adoption Program for System Center 2012.

“This was a great opportunity to work with the product team and gain early access to the features, the ability to have input and shape what the product will look like, and to get features that we really needed,” says Wilson. “Over the last couple of years, we have been extremely happy with the support and knowledge of Microsoft Services Consulting, which has yielded some IT highlights post-merger.”

Migrating United.com to a Hyper-V Private Cloud Environment

One of these highlights is a joint Microsoft and United project to accomplish the migration of United.com to a Hyper-V private cloud environment. In March 2012, with the private cloud up and running, the United IT team pulled off what Craig calls “one of the most complicated, massive cutovers in transportation history”— which included moving the business-critical United.com website from a physical server environment to a Hyper-V cloud environment.

“We did continuous system testing prior to the cutover date—both scale and functionality testing,” Craig says. “We also worked with our business partners to ascertain all the scenarios that were likely to drive traffic patterns up or down during the migration.”

As the Microsoft and United team members were modeling those scenarios, they discovered that they didn’t have enough servers supporting United.com to respond to worst-case scenarios. They quickly solved this issue by taking advantage of automated build development.

“Just two or three days before this incredibly important event, we deployed enough Hyper-V virtual machines to support the site, and we did it in hours using automated server builds and application deployment,” says Craig. “Physical host builds used to take days to complete and a 30-page manual document. We reduced this to 2.5 hours with automation. We would not have been able to respond in such a short time without the private cloud technologies we had in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012.”

Building a Disaster Recovery Solution

To address the need for an enterprise-ready disaster recovery solution, in June 2013 United Airlines joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows Server 2012 R2. “Now that we are more virtualized, we are looking at a whole new approach to DR, where flexibility and cloud computing combine to provide a resilient solution that we can tailor to meet our needs,” says Wilson. “It made sense to continue on our cloud journey with a Microsoft DR solution.”

Hyper-V Replica offers a data replication solution that replicates virtual machines within a site or to a remote site. The latest version of Hyper-V Replica provides the flexibility that United is looking for, with variable replication frequency—from 30 seconds up to 15 minutes—and support for extended replication to a third site. And the new DR management service, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, answers the airline’s need for a highly available DR solution because it is delivered as a cloud service running in the Microsoft Azure environment. Azure Site Recovery offers orchestration at scale delivered via recovery plans, so United IT staff can bring up applications in a desired manner at a low recovery time objective. While Azure Site Recovery is a feature of Windows Server 2012 R2, it supports backwards compatibility with all versions of Hyper-V Replica.

Enabling Data Center Migrations
During the RDP, the IT team realized it could use Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery for the migration of virtual machines from Houston to Chicago. “We were excited by this unusual use-case scenario, which underlies the flexibility of Microsoft technologies,” says Wilson. “Being able to take advantage of these technologies to migrate services sets a DR solution from Microsoft apart from other solutions available in the market.”

In Houston, the IT team deployed servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 as a pre-migration environment and installed a 1-gigabit circuit between Houston and Chicago for the replications. “We’ll use Azure Site Recovery to initiate the failover so that the virtual machines will become live in Chicago,” says Wilson. “When we complete the Houston migration, we’ll use the same solution to replicate non-production systems from our data center in Charlotte, North Carolina, to our center in Chicago. Then, we plan on using Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery as a cost-effective DR infrastructure between our data centers.”

Benefits

United Airlines is using Microsoft virtualization technologies to streamline its integration efforts, reducing the resources required to consolidate its IT environment following the merger. At the same time, the company is creating an agile, responsive, cloud-based IT environment that will help build long-term adaptability and resilience in the highly competitive aviation industry.

Improves Business Agility, Customer Service

Even when it comes to the vagaries of the global airline system, United is using private cloud computing to accommodate fluctuations in site traffic on United.com and keep its customers happy. “The airline industry must respond to unpredictable global events in real time—natural disasters, security threats, changes in travel demand caused by other transportation sectors—all sorts of things will happen all over the earth that can send customers to our site, and we won’t be able to predict the traffic patterns,” says Craig. “We also have to accommodate predictable events, such as marketing campaigns or fare sales. The point is, we need to scale United.com quickly and dynamically. With System Center 2012, we can automatically match computing power to website traffic. That’s IT that truly supports the business.”

The key to winning sales and driving consumer loyalty is the ability to offer more competitive online services for customers. United Airlines intends to use System Center 2012 R2 in its development environment to improve business agility by reducing time-to-market and introducing competitive online services before other airlines. “What’s the duty of an infrastructure team to the rest of the business? It’s to provide a resilient, scalable, rich, flexible infrastructure so that when the business comes to you and says, ‘I want to implement a brand new application,’ you can roll out those new technologies quickly, easily, and cost-effectively,” Craig says.

Reduces IT Costs

United Airlines stands to save millions of dollars in data center costs through private cloud computing. Aiming for 100 percent reliability of United.com, the company used to buy more computing capacity than it needed to have capacity in reserve. However, availability through redundancy was expensive. With cloud computing, the cloud fabric flexes to absorb traffic bursts, and workloads move around the cloud dynamically to make maximum use of resources.

Cloud computing also lowers the cost of rolling out new services. “We had all these physical servers, and before we deployed anything new, we would take some of them out of service, deploy the new application on them, wait a couple of days to see if it was OK, and then bring the service online,” Craig says. “This was inefficient from a capital allocation perspective. We needed something less expensive and more dynamic. Using private cloud computing is a far smarter approach.”

The engineering team that is using System Center to develop applications for Microsoft SharePoint is saving labor, power, and rack space costs by building out the collaboration environment in the cloud. “To build an eight-node cluster in cooperation with the storage and networking teams used to take three to five days,” says Wilson. “Now the operations team can do it all themselves in a half-day. That’s just one small group; when this development approach spreads across the company, efficiencies and cost savings will increase exponentially.”

Supports Business Continuity

Deploying the latest business continuity solution is the airline’s most recent step forward in its cloud computing journey with Microsoft. United is using its new disaster recovery solution to achieve the following benefits:

Multipurpose solution provides extra value. While peace of mind is a significant benefit, a DR solution can represent a lot of IT resources sitting in readiness on the shelf. This is not the case with United today. “We’re using our Microsoft DR solution to expedite a key operational project—migrating our Hyper-V virtualized environment from Houston to Chicago—while reducing risk and management overhead,” says Wilson. “The faster we get our workloads to run in the more efficient Chicago facility, the faster we can start to reduce our data center overhead.”

Resilient disaster recovery reduces downtime. On-premises DR software is susceptible to the disasters that can hit a data center. But no matter what happens on the ground, United IT staff can always access their Azure Site Recovery panel through an Internet connection. “With Azure Site Recovery, we have an always available management panel to enact our DR plans as soon as possible, reducing downtime,” says Wilson.

Reduced costs. United had already shipped several sophisticated storage arrays to Houston to use for the replication, but now it can repurpose that investment for other purposes. “Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery will allow us to use lower-cost storage platforms and still get the resiliency we need. This solution will save us a lot of money,” says Wilson.

Simplified recovery orchestration reduces IT management. The IT team is confident that the new high availability and DR solution won’t be a drain on their time. “From what we have seen, this isn’t going to be a system that will be difficult to set up and support,” says Wilson.

Increased flexibility saves bandwidth. “With flexible replication intervals, we can reduce replication times for critical systems, such as reservations, and save bandwidth by allotting longer replication intervals to a system that isn’t used as frequently,” says Wilson. “We are excited to put our new solution from Microsoft into production.”

Concludes Craig, “Because our industry is so incredibly cost-sensitive, it’s essential that we’re getting every penny’s worth of value out of every IT asset we have in our enterprise. We can’t waste money on spare server capacity or data center costs. With a Microsoft private cloud solution, we are able to reduce our IT costs dramatically.”

Transform the data center

The hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the data center by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Microsoft Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs.

Source: https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=11155

About Managed Solution

We're technology enthusiasts with a people-first approach. For over two decades, we've witnessed the profound impact that the right technology and support can have on businesses and individuals. Success, to us, is seeing our clients, partners, and team conquer challenges to achieve their greatest goals and build lasting connections. This relentless pursuit of inspiration drives us forward, pushing us to deliver innovative solutions that empower growth and lasting success.

View Services. 

 

Microsoft announced new Bing Maps preview with all new design. The new Bing Maps is designed so you can search, view and share multiple places at one time, see trusted reviews and photos from Yelp and others, get access to a rich set of visuals and information on the places you plan to visit, make it easy to plan your travel times and more. Bing Maps Preview is currently available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa, and will be available to more markets in the near future. Read about the new features from the list below.

Beautiful and intuitive design

• View information for multiple destinations with the new results cards: The Bing Maps Preview organizes your search results into “cards” that are displayed to the left of the map. The cards allow multiple destinations in a single view and each card displays relevant information, such as hours of operation, and similar businesses and services nearby. With every stop on your trip in one view, planning a night out is much easier.
• Explore and plan using the new layout: The new Bing Maps Preview is touch-friendly and designed to be more intuitive. For example, choose your preferred map style (Aerial, Road) by clicking the button to the right of the map. Or, perform actions such as “save as favorite,” “add to route,” and “view streetside” by right-clicking on your screen.

Improved Search and Directions

• Plan travel times with enhanced directions: Nobody wants to be stuck in traffic. Using predictive routing, Bing Maps Preview includes the option to input the day and time you plan to travel so you can view the estimated drive time. Now you can easily adjust plans if the roads look crowded.
• Discover venues using Along the Route: Need to know where hotels, restaurants and gas stations are located on the way to your destination? Along the Route is the new feature that helps you find places you might want to stop at during your trip. Many have suggested this via Bing Listens, and we thank you for your feedback.
• Easily explore with improved Streetside views: The new split screen layout gives a great street-side view of your destination while displaying the map directly below it. Take a 360-degree tour of the area or drag your mouse along the map to view a new location.

Personalized

• Save your destinations in My Places: We’ve heard from many of our users that it’s important to have a quick way to access their most-visited and most-loved destinations. We made this easy with My Places. In one click you can save a location under work, home or favorite. It will even sync with Cortana and the Windows Maps app.
• Share travel plans with others: Once you’ve planned your outing, share it with those who will be joining you. Your travel companions will receive an email with the set of results cards, which they can view on their desktop or from a mobile device. And speaking of mobile, stay tuned for updates coming to the Bing Maps mobile experience.

To start using the Bing Maps Preview, just go to www.bing.com/mapspreview.

Source: http://microsoft.com

About Managed Solution

We're technology enthusiasts with a people-first approach. For over two decades, we've witnessed the profound impact that the right technology and support can have on businesses and individuals. Success, to us, is seeing our clients, partners, and team conquer challenges to achieve their greatest goals and build lasting connections. This relentless pursuit of inspiration drives us forward, pushing us to deliver innovative solutions that empower growth and lasting success.

View Services. 

If you’re hitting the road for business this summer, you’re going to want to arm yourself with some must have travel apps and tech for your devices.

That’s right, thanks to new and useful travel apps, as well as the latest tech for your devices, you can get more work done on the road than ever.

Must Have Travel Apps for Your Devices

Whether you’re planning your trip, packing your bags, arranging for local ground travel, or looking for a the best spots to eat, work out and shop, there’s an app to help.

Start Here …

If you’re looking for a few good apps to make travel simpler and easier, this post is a great place to start. Apps covered include:

• TripIt: a free app that allows you to easily keep all of your travel information in one place;

• FlightTrack: an app that keeps you up to date on every detail of your flights; and

• Curb (formerly Taxi Magic): an app that lets you book a nearby taxi with just the tap of a button.

… then Check Out The Latest Travel Apps

When you’re traveling for business, use:

Hopper for Cheap Flights

When you work for a small business, getting the best price on a flight is pretty important. Hopper enables you to do just that by providing two important pieces of information: the best time for you to fly and the best time to buy the cheapest tickets for that flight.

Roomlia and Hotel Tonight to Find Cheap Accommodations at the Last Minute

Both Roomlia and Hotel Tonight enable you to find and book accommodations within 7 days of your stay, making it much easier to plan affordable spur-of-the-moment business tips. Both apps offer travelers and hotels a win-win: travelers receive special discounts and hotels fill empty rooms.

PackPoint to Figure Out What You Need to Bring Along

Like a personal concierge, PackPoint will organize what you need to pack based on length of travel, weather at your destination, and any activities planned during your trip. Now that’s handy!

LoungeBuddy to Find a Place to Work or Take a Breather While You Travel

Airport lounges are comfortable oases in the stress and frustration of business travel. While they used to be closed to the general public, many have recently opened their doors to those who wish to buy access. That’s where LoungeBuddy comes in. The app helps you discover available lounges near you and then enables you to purchase access directly from their app.

Uber to Find a Local Ride

Uber has grown into one of the leading apps for ground transportation. Whether you want a taxi, a limousine or some other mode of transportation, you can find and arrange all the details in minutes using this handy app.

TripLingo to Navigate a Foreign Culture

If you’re traveling to an unfamiliar country, then TripLingo is bound to become your new best friend. This versatile app offers a whole host of features including:

• Over 2,000 phrases per language in 13 languages;

• An instant voice translator in 19 languages;

• An intelligent tip calculator & currency converter;

• A “culture crash course” to get familiar with local customs and etiquette; and

• A “Wi-Fi Dialer” that allows you to call any international phone number.

Localeur to Discover the Spots that Locals Love

Whether you’re looking for someplace to eat, work out or shop, Localeur will dish on the spots that the locals love most. Though it’s not in every city yet, this app can make travel to many major metro areas feel like you’ve never left home.

Must Have Travel Tech for Your Devices

Back in the day, business travelers kept a close eye on their devices’ power level, strained their eyes trying to use small screens and shut their eyes in frustration when trying to get work done in noisy spots like airports.

Thanks to the latest must have travel tech however those days are long gone.

When you’re traveling for business, use:

Globalgig Mobile Wi-Fi Hotspot to Stay Online

Sometimes the most frustrating part of business travel can be connecting your devices to the Internet. Well, if you’re traveling through the US, Europe, China or Northern Africa, that frustration is a thing of the past thanks to the Globalgig mobile Wi-Fi Hotspot.

A Travel Monitor for Collaboration and Presentations

While screen sizes have grown, certain types of professionals such as designers, presenters, video editors and photographers can’t always work on their smartphones, tablets or laptops. In addition, it’s hard to gather everyone around a laptop screen when you want to share information.

That’s why you might want to look into a travel monitor. Both lighter and smaller in size than the monster screens most of us have on our desktops these days, a portable monitor such as this one is the way to solve both of the issues above.

A Micro Projector for Making Larger-than-Life Presentations

If a monitor’s not your thing, or if you need to present to many people, then a portable projector like the Kickstand Micro Projector from BEM Wireless is the way to go. Small and light, this projector would not look out of place in any boardroom.

Extra Long Charging Cables

Have you ever plugged your phone in to a hotel outlet only to find that you can’t work where you want because the charger cable’s too short? This must have been a problem for many folks as there are tons of longer cords for sale at Amazon. Problem solved.

Conclusion

From planning through traveling, lodging, dining, doing business and coming home, this list of must have travel apps and tech for your devices covers the basics.

Source: http://smallbiztrends.com