When I received an email from earthTV.com telling me about their service,  I thought it sounded such an amazing technological feat, that I asked them to do a guest interview for the Europe a la Carte Blog. The company founder Thomas M Hohenacker tells us about the challenges of setting up earthTV.com.

1 What is the aim of your site?

EarthTV.com aims to show the World live in fantastic quality, daily to TV viewers and web users all around the world.

2 What prompted you to start your site?

I always wanted to create a television program that can connect people around the planet on a daily basis and that could easily cross all cultural and language bounderies. I also travelled extensively around the world and thought it a fascinating idea for us all to be able to see – at the same time – in highest quality what’s happening around our planet.

3 What has been the hardest aspect of running the site?

Everything was a challenge in this project and it took many years to implement. We had to create everything from scratch to make this vision
come alive: from motion control camera systems, that could withstand any
temperature and climate conditions and that could be entirely controlled
from a central broadcast center, to the transmission and finally to creating new Live formats for international broadcasters and the earthTV.com website

We have designed and built our own motion control camera systems. They
weigh over 30 kg, are extremely precise and over 100 functions can be
controlled from our broadcast center in Munich, it’s as if the world’s
best camera operators were at each location.

We have a very sophisticated content management and delivery system that
produces live feeds several times per hour from all locations around the
world – with a different camera angle and pan each time. We use over 6
different satellites and over 30 different Telco providers to generate
and deliver the live feeds around the world.

4 What is the funniest thing that has happened to you running the
site?

The funniest: spider having a fight in front of the lens, a seagull falling in love with the camera and looking into the lens each day.

5 Is there anything you would do differently with the benefit of hindsight?

I spent a lot of time explaining the initial vision, to show the world live, in high quality, to potential clients. I thought they would participate early on, but they were all afraid, thinking the vision was just too big. It took me a year or so to realize, that we would just have to do it all ourselves – as our potential clients did not have the imagination to picture the possible.

When they then saw that we had installed the network and what we had
achieved, they agreed that it was the most logical and natural thing to
do.

In TV many want to be Pioneers, but paradoxically they are scared to be
First….

My comments – John sounds like you have been totally dedicated to your vision and it has finally come to fruition.

I found a link to the Laptop Friendly Cafes site, which lists cafes which offer free wifi in a user friendly environment, in one of my Google Alerts and my ears pricked up. Since I bought my netbook in February 2009 and my unsatisfactory experience with the FON wifi community, finding free, reliable wifi has become a real issue with me. I contacted Craig, the founder of Laptop Friendly Cafes, to ask him to do a guest post for Europe a la Carte.

“Whether you’re a traveller, a student, or someone who likes to work away from the home or office, a good laptop-friendly cafe can make your life a whole lot better!

Below are some good reasons why we need more laptop friendly cafes:

Travel
When travelling, especially on a budget you need all help you can get. Internet cafes are good, but can sometimes be a bit of an unpleasant experience because there are so many people packed in to a small place. So if like myself and a lot of other travellers, you take your laptop with you on some trips, laptop friendly cafes are perfect because you get a free internet connection – saving you money, power outlets to keep you up and running and a more pleasant environment to catch up on your emails, post your travel pics and generally surf the web with a good coffee in a
comfortable chair.

Working off site
As more and more of us are spending a great deal of time in front of our laptops at work meeting impossible deadlines, it’s important that we are productive. A lot of offices are quite hectic with phones ringing, chatter from meetings and general office banter, all taking our attention away from the task at hand. If you do have the luxury of working off site, a good laptop friendly cafe is the perfect environment for getting some work done in an uninterrupted, productive environment with the use of free wifi to keep up to date and in touch with your work emails.

Studying
Being a student is tough, you’re normally sharing a house with possibly 4-6 other people, and a quiet space to focus on study can be hard to come by. A broadband connection in a shared house can also be expensive and all too often slow or unreliable. A free wifi connection and a quiet corner with a table and chair in a cafe can be great escape from the madness that is student housing. The best time to go to the cafes is the off peak times, mid afternoon onwards as you avoid the morning coffee rush and most cafes are happy to have customers in seats buying the occasional coffee in quiet times.”

Update 5 December 2009:  Craig has now released an iphone app featuring all of the cafes listed on the site in New York, London, Sydney & Melbourne.

FON is a wifi communty where members share part of their home wifi with other members, in exchange for the use of the home wifi of the other 300,000 global members. Your home broadband is split into a secure private access and public FON part.

I started doing research into availability and cost of wifi when I bought a netbook in February 2009. I want to be able to keep on top of emails and blog admin when I’m on the move. Of course a netbook is only useful if you can easily and cheaply get online.

I first heard about the FON wifi communty in the UK through my BT Broadband Option 1 package which gives me 250 minutes of wifi access either in a BT Openzone or a BT/FON hot spot. Now I could gain unlimited firee access to the FON network if I upgraded to BT Broadband Option 3 which costs around £9 a month more than my Option 1 package, However if I purchased a FON wifi router for £30 this would entitle me to unlimited free wifi at FON hotspots worldwide.

FON router by nightRPStar

I decided to fork out £30 in a FON router. It was quite hard to set up the FON router and now I have three wireless networks available, the BT home hub, the private “My Place” FON and the public FON.

You can search for FON hotspots online but I haven’t found the maps to be that accurate and it can be hard to find an operational FON hotspot. So far I’v e only looked for FON hotspots in the UK. I’ve spent quite a bit of time moving my car around outside a supposed FON hotspot trying to find a decent signal. Even once I’ve found a good signal I had messages such as access denied when I try to log on.

However for a £30 investment I still thought it was worth a try. I’m hoping that as the FON community grows and technology improves that it will become easier to locate and access the FON hotspots.

Have you used FON either through BT Broadband or as a member of the FON community? How do you find it?

If you haven’t considered joining Twitter yet, you really should. It’s becoming the web’s social hotspot and the developing into a very interesting travel experiment. Consider these two recent developments:

• Paul Smith is attempting to hitchhike his way to New Zealand, via Twitter.
• Portland has opened their online Twisitor Center. They’ll be more to come – a new site is tracking all of them.

Here’s how I use Twitter to keep up with the world:

• Follow companies to get Tweets on their travel deals. I follow Ryanair_EDI to get Ryanair’s deals specifically out of Edinburgh. How cool is that? Have a look around for your favourite airline or specific destination-based deals.
• Keep in touch with your favourite bloggers. Myself, Karen Bryan, Amanda Kendle, and Heather Cowper of the Europe A La Carte Team are all on Twitter.
• Post your travel questions. Twitter is an open forum, and even folk who aren’t following you can find your tweets via Twitter Search. It is best if you have a specific question; for example, I recently posted a query about driving times and ferries for a hiking trip in Norway. Someone who lived nearby dropped me a note and gave me a detailed response. Very helpful!

  Do you use Twitter for travel? How do you use it?

  Image Courtesy Luc Legay

In February 2009 purchased a netbook, a small laptop, so that I could work and stay connected when I’m travelling. It’s not ideal having to search for internet cafes when you’re travelling and I’ve found if I’m away for more than a couple of days without internet access that I have so much catching up to do.

by dougbelshaw

A netbook is a compromise between the tiny screen and keyboard size but easy portability and low weight of a mobile phone and the luxury of a large screen and keyboard but heavy weight of a standard laptop. My Advent 4213 weighs 1.4 kigs but you need to add on the weight of the charging cables and plug which means it can take up a fair proportion of my flight hand luggage allowance.

Of course having the netbook is only part of the solution as I still need to connect to the internet to read emails, update on social networks and administer the Europe a la Carte blog.

Initially I tried the FON free wifi network (mainly in the UK) to get online but I could rarely pick up a signal at the designated hotspost. Now I always try to stay in accommodation which offers free internet access to guests, either through wifi or a wired connection.

However I sometimes find bargain accommodation which doesn’t offer free internet access. As a back up I purchased an 02 pay as you go mobile broadband modem in September 2009 for use in the UK after doing a lot of research in to the best UK mobile broadband provider. This is useful to me when I stay in UK Travelodges as their wifi costs £10 for 24 hours whereas with 02 it’s £2 for 24 hours (which also includes wifi hotspots).

It’s expensive to use mobile internet outside the UK, so I’ve just stuck to the free internet either in my accommodation or cafes.

When I’m on the road I do try to be disciplined and only do the bare minimum online, as there was no point in being in travelling if I am going to sit at the computer for hours.

by Silviera Neto

The other issue with the netbook is one of security. Sometimes I have to carry it with me, if my accommodation doesn’t have a safe.

What’s your opinion? Do you think that having a laptop and internet access is essential to your travel or do you think it’s better just to concentrate on being out and about during your trip?

Update December 2009: After ten months of travelling with my netbook including my 10 day Summer 09 UK Blogging Tour I’m now of the opinion that travelling with my netbook is definately a blessing. I am able to prepare blog posts, update and interact on Twitter and Facebook and upload vidoes to youtube as well as keeping on top of emails and blog comment moderation. However I’m all too aware of the potential to spend too much time online.

If you’ve been wandering the world for a while now you’ll have started to notice the changing trend of backpackers. These days the unshowered, subsistence-level travellers are hard to find and hostels have become home to backpackers in quality clothing and bristling with electronics. These are the new generation of backpackers: the Flashpackers.

geek charme by Giorgio Montersino

With the changes in technology and their dramatic reduction in price, it isn’t surprising. Most people don’t go down to the shops without their phone and mp3 player – so why should larger trips be any different? Laptops are affordable and getting smaller and lighter while the original-style hostels, with sagging beds and peeling wallpaper have evolved into slick, serviced accomodation complete with wifi.

There seems to be a bit of confusion over what really defines a flashpacker. Are they just the traditional backpackers a bit more geared up? Or are they backpackers with a bigger budget, staying in hostels but able to afford restaurant dinners? Personally I consider them a bit of both and it definately describes me these days.

I travel with phone, laptop, iPod, a small point-and-shoot camera and a larger digital SLR. And, of course, all the charging devices. I twitter, blog, flickr and youtube my travels and enjoy doing it. I love having the gadgets with me -although I sometimes don’t love the weight of my backpack- and I love the way I experience my journeys with them. Far from removing me from the experience, I get more into it. More focused on the view in front of me and how I can capture it, more involved in the events and people so that I can describe them well enough in blog posts later.

So what about you? Are you a flashpacker, and if so what’s in your flashpack?

alone by Giorgio Montersino

Years ago I was walking down a road in Los Angeles when I spotted billboard that, to me, encapsulated one of the more enjoyable aspects of travelling. It was advertising a car, but that’s not as important as the message printed above it in three metre letters:

Go Away. Come Home. Gloat.

I can hear you protesting “No, we go away for the experience! We travel for the adventure!” but, seriously now, you can’t tell me that you don’t get a small frisson of glee when you drop in lines like “Yes, well, in Namibia last year…” or “This reminds me of a wonderful little restaurant I know in Paris…”

Ah-huh. You’re still protesting, but you know no one believes you.

Of course in the modern world with it’s thirty-second attention span we can no longer subject people to four hours of a slide-show of sunsets and mountain vistas. The eyes of friends and family glaze over by the time you reach Day Three in your journey’s recounting. So how can you still gloat, still tell people all that you’ve seen an experienced without boring them or bringing them to think that you’re a pain-in-the-proverbial name dropper?

Bored by scragz

Tell them all with a Blog

This is, of course, the most popular option. Blog your adventures! Gather a loyal cadre of readers who await your every written tale of excitement and amusing food anecdotes! If you don’t already have a blog (are there people who don’t?) sign up for a free one before your next trip. Of the big ones (MySpace, LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, Typepad) I prefer WordPress for it’s slickness and community-building aspects. There are also plenty of travel sites which host free blogs.

Keep it quick with Twitter

I’ve discussed this before, but it deserves to go on the list. Anyone can handle an SMS length update on your doings, right? If you update thirty times a day, they’re still each only short aren’t they? Just beware. You do have to pay for each SMS you send to Twitter, just as you have to pay to send an SMS to a normal phone, and those costs can stack up. It is addictive to try and create pithy, exciting updates in 140characters or less.

Make it pretty with a Facebook Application

The explosion of Facebook users means that this is a really nice way to show off to people you know – ESPECIALLY those who were enemies in high school but for some reason have still hunted you down and befriended you. So show off! Update your status with what you’re doing, or use the Twitter application to update it from your Twitter feed. Make some pretty maps showing where you’ve been. Search for “maps” and then click on “Application” in the result window and you’ll get a list around five hundred different applications. I’ve used the TripAdvisor and TravBuddy applications before on Facebook and found them both pretty good.

Show off on Flickr (or another photo hosting site)

Where are you going to showcase your photos? Of course, the really embarrassing ones taken by that Canadian guy you met in a bar in Reykjavik will appear on Facebook, but for the best of your shots, make sure they get onto a great photo hosting site. Just be careful of what you put up and how if you wish to retain the rights to them. The terms of service of Facebook do state that they can use any data you put up there, including your photos. Flickr gives you the option of releasing them under Creative Commons if you wish.

Spread the sound with Last.fm

This is a music social networking site which hooks into your iTunes library and creates your own personal radio station based on your tastes. It’ll play songs tagged similarly, or in the libraries of other users who also have what you have. Anybody can listen to your type of music by putting in your username and listening to your station. What you need when you’ve discovered that Lithuanian hip hop is your next great love and it needs more exposure. Similarly, a MySpace page will let you put in music – in fact bursting the eardrums of anyone who pops by is a must there.

Sketch your way into DeviantART

So you find yourself sketching quick glimpses of foreign life in your Moleskin, scribbling furiously in a bus-stop like the hipster artist you are? DeviantART lets you showcase your work and set up your own online gallery. The shop function even lets you sell artwork, but do make sure you are aware of their copyright policy before releasing work on the site. It isn’t just limited to traditional art – put up vector art and photos as well.

Send a Postcard

Putting pen to paper, licking a stamp and writing an address is still the best way to get people to pay attention to your travels. Everybody gets email, everybody has blog feeds building up in their RSS readers. Nowadays though, an old fashioned postal message is going to get you the attention that the flashiest MySpace background won’t. People will stop to read your short missive if it arrives by mail. They will look at the photo. They will think “Oh look, she was thinking of ME while away!” and feel special. And because of that they will be more likely to be forgiving of all the name- and place-dropping you do when you get home.

Old postcard. by Hot Meteor