What is TransparencyCamp?

TransparencyCamp (or TCamp as we like to call it) is an “unconference” focused on government transparency. We interpret that focus pretty broadly, encouraging all manner of folks to attend. At TCamp, you’ll meet government officials, opengov advocates, journalists, bloggers, technologists, information designers, developers, academics, students, hacks, hackers, multimedia producers, activists, council reps and wonks (just to name a few) who have come with the common purpose of learning, teaching, best-practice sharing, next-step taking, and community building for “opengov”.

Although Sunlight has mostly worked on US federal level open government, when we talk about “government” at TCamp, we’re talking about all levels of government — local, state, national — and we’re talking about governments outside the US, too. Last year, 23 transparency advocates from 14 different countries joined the conversations at TCamp, thanks to generous sponsorships by the Omidyar Network and the Open Society Institute. Each international fellow took the lead (or co-lead) of a session at TCamp, not just to share the variety of experiences they’ve had working for transparency in their home countries, but to jointly problem-solve issues with American advocates in fields like citizens engagement, supporting watchdog organizations and connecting with civic hacking communities.

This year, we’re expecting more international Campers and more US Campers, too. If you’re an advocate who would love to share the work you do (or work through the issues you’re up against), but are concerned about the cost of travel, point your mouse here to learn more about our TCamp Scholarship program. If you’d like to help us make it easier for folks outside the Beltway to make it to TransparencyCamp, donate as a Super Camper. Any amount you contribute over $20 will help reduce the cost of TCamp and support our travel stipends for TCamp Scholars.

We’ll be blogging more about the organizing process of TCamp as the event approaches, but I want to end this post with two “TCamp Tid Bits,” if you will:

1. We’ve opened up an area where folks can brainstorm session ideas and vote for their favorites. (Check it out — and contribute! — here.) So far, my personal favorite is Josh Tauberer’s recommendation for transparency-themed Battledecks. Sounds hilarious. What do you think?
2. It’s hard not to talk about TCamp Scholars without talking about Tamar Gurchiani. Tamar attended last year’s Camp on a TCamp scholarship and, a year later, is now working on bringing TransparencyCamp to Georgia (the country). If you haven’t seen it already, take a peek at her announcement post while you enjoy your lunch.

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The cost of your ticket doesn’t always add up to the cost of your trip. Hidden fees for checked baggage, meals, pets, unaccompanied minors, or even seat locations can add up and get you spending more than you thought. Here’s a chart that details the fees between 15 different US airlines. More »

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If you’re changing planes or trains but have an hour or two of layover time you may want to explore your area, but it can be tricky to know how far you can go without getting lost or missing your next connection. Webapp Cartoo uses Google Maps to predict how far you can travel by foot, bicycle, or car from a given point and specific window of time. More »

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See the realities of comercial air travel baggage handleing first hand, download a leaked version of Facebook Messanger for Windows, and listen to the most streamed songs of 2011 on Spotify. More »

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It’s a bit cliché, but it’s true all the same: the best features are often the ones that make you smack yourself on the forehead and ask why you didn’t think of them (or why nobody else did).

Which the reaction I immediately had when I heard about a new feature that Hipmunk, the flight and hotel travel search engine, is launching this morning. Today the service is adding support for Google Calendar integration, which means it can check its flight listings against your schedule to figure out which ones will work best for you.

Now, calendar syncing is hardly a new concept for travel sites — many of them will let you automatically sync your booked flights and reservations into your calendar. But Hipmunk says that it’s the first travel site to delve into your schedule and find potential conflicts to help you book those flights in the first place.

The interface, which you can see in the screenshots below, makes this pretty straightforward: once you’ve entered your Google Calendar credentials, you’ll see vertical yellow-tinged bars hovering over Hipmunk’s flight search grid. Obviously not all of your scheduled events will warrant changing your flight plans, so you can ignore them if you’d like.  Or you can hit the ‘sort by Conflict’ button, which will actually hide any flights that overlap with any of your commitments.

Likewise, Hipmunk will look at your calendar to figure out where your meetings and events are located, which it can use to suggest hotels that are convenient.

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The Social CEO Series is supported by MessageMaker Social, the social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence. Visit messagemaker.com/social and follow us @MsgMkrSocial on Twitter.

Sir Richard Branson has never been slow to transition his business. What started as a bootstrapped mail-order record retailer that he founded in 1970 is now an empire of more than 300 companies in 30 countries that span diverse industries such as music, travel, health and beyond. Well before commercial space travel is economically viable, Virgin Galactic is already selling $200,000 tickets to space.

So, too, has Branson been quick to transition to the social web with a personal style. Where most corporate blogs still house formal announcements, the Virgin Group website hosts a blog written with Branson’s first-person flair. Many of them read like diary entries.

“I spent a wonderfully productive weekend with Ted Turner on his spectacularly unspoilt ranch in Montana,” begins one blog entry. “I had a fantastic time on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon earlier this week,” starts another.

Branson’s Twitter, Facebook and Google+ profiles are all equally personal and active. Much of what he posts is related to his many philanthropic efforts. But other times, he’s just tweeting his thoughts or writing about his active globe-trotting lifestyle.

“Currently just huddled up with family & friends in the continuing tropical storm realising what really matters in life,” he tweeted after his private island estate was destroyed in a fire last month.

Few executives (or billionaires, or knights) are so candid in their public communications.

Mashable recently asked Branson about why and how he and Virgin businesses use social tools.

Q&A with Richard Branson

When did you start using social media? How has the way that you use it changed since then?

Virgin as a brand is naturally conversational. We like to chat with our customers to see how things are going and what we can do better. So for us, using social media feels very natural. I started to get active in 2008, first because of Virgin America, whose guests are quite active online (the airline is based in the Silicon Valley) and whose fans expressed their enthusiasm for the airline online — even before they started flying. But social media is also beyond business — people want to know what’s meaningful. So I use social media to share what philanthropic causes and campaigns are important to me and Virgin Unite [the non-profit foundation of Virgin Group]. Our companies do it too. For example, Virgin America’s #flyfwdgiveback sale on Twitter drove lots of donations to educational charities in a very short window of time.

Why is it important for the head of a company to have an independent social media presence?

It’s very important because there are so many Virgin companies globally who each do different things, and my current focus is philanthropy. While I’m still active with the companies, I spend a great deal of time with Virgin Unite and have seen how social media can spread awareness about how we use business as a force for good. It also allows me to share the lessons I’ve learned in business, as people are always keen to find ways to be better at what they do.

You keep a blog on the Virgin Group website. What inspired you to start doing this?

My first company was a student magazine so it felt right to use the blog to share entrepreneurial insights and tips and share the stories of other entrepreneurs, both in the profit-making sector and not-for profit. There are many entrepreneurs out there who are looking for fresh ideas and to exchange feedback, and the blog on virgin.com is a great place for that sort of exchange.

What is the most interesting or consequential Twitter exchange you’ve ever had?

I first realized that Twitter would change how we communicate back in 2008 when I did an interview via Twitter with the L.A. Times at 35,000 feet from onboard Virgin America’s first-ever Wi-Fi flight. I thought at that point, you can have any sort of exchange in 140 characters or less, no matter where in the world you are. That made me realize just how much the medium was changing — and also the message.

To make an understatement, it seems as though you have a lot on your plate. How do you have time to tweet?

Well, it’s not that hard to do, and it’s fun to share what I’m doing and who I’m with — be it at a Carbon War Room meeting with climate wealth entrepreneurs, the Grand Prix with Rihanna, checking out Virgin Galactic space vehicles with future astronauts or raising money for the London Marathon — and equally fun to hear immediately what people think. Social media overall — the comments on the blog and Facebook, Twitter — allows me to hear what people are saying on a daily level about each business and the brand, too — the good, the bad and everything in between. It’s important to take the time to listen.

How has Virgin Group or its companies used social media internally?

The airlines use it a lot with its employees I know, and they train them on how to use it to help their guests. We’ve found that sometimes their guests are more likely to tweet about a problem than tell their inflight teammates, so Twitter can actually help deliver real-time guest service. They are also exploring internal platforms like Chatter or Yammer — there are so many innovations in social media, I can hardly keep up!

What advice would you give to other company leaders about how to develop a presence on social media?

Be authentic and organic. It can’t be forced or it won’t work. And most importantly, have fun.

The Social CEO Series is supported by MessageMaker Social, the social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence. This smart, simple SaaS solution elevates your company’s social presence among thousands of social Pages and accounts, helping you meet compliance regulations, maintain brand consistency, maximize engagement and generate actionable intelligence — without adding additional human resource costs. Visit messagemaker.com/social and follow us @MsgMkrSocial on Twitter.

More About: features, mashable, richard branson, Social CEO Series, Social Media, Virgin, virgin group

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It’s all existing Google technology, putting a browser view of Google Earth inside the Maps window, but it’s a new integration. It’s not the most useful feature, but it is a new and immersive way to plan a trip.

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Google Maps is still on a roll with bold new features. In August, the 2D map view got a weather layer, which is another useful tool for trip planning. Recent accessibility improvements include voice search and new international domains. Maps also got more social with the introduction of g.co shortlinks and built-in +snippet sharing of Maps on Google Plus.

What are your favorite things to do with Google Earth? Share them in the comments.

Discuss

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To get the best deal on a domestic airline ticket, there’s a lot of timing to take into consideration. Travel site FareCompare has meticulously gathered all the data to suggest when exactly to start looking for your ticket and when to purchase. More »

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There are hundreds of travel sites out there that will help you plan your trip, but often these guides come in the form of game-ified networks or consist mainly of questionable crowdsourced content from local experts — in other words, strangers. More often than not, these people are incentivized to write reviews, making the information questionable at best. Granted, there are some cool startups, like Triposo and Gogobot out there, but sites and apps like the former are taking an algorithmic approach to travel recommendations — no real people in sight.

Trippy, a startup launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is of the mindset that recommendations are always better when they come from people you trust and that know you well — your friends. Thus, iterating on the age old crowdsourcing model, Trippy is designed to be a so-called “friendsourced” travel solution, tying your social networks, like Facebook, into its platform to let you find out which of your friends have been to the destinations you’re considering — whether it be that they’ve checked-in, lived, worked, or studied there. (Much like Spotify’s model for music.)

Trippy believes that tapping into the travel experiences of your friend (people you implicitly trust) is far more valuable than receiving advice from strangers. Hard to disagree with them there, unless that stranger happens to be a wizard.

Through one-click recommendations and Facebook-style commenting, Trippy lets your friends literally and figuratively chime in to tell you what hotels, restaurants, and destinations would be right for you. The startup offers an easy autocomplete tool to quickly pull up what you’re looking for — from a complete database of locations. Users can then add places they’re considering so that friends can comment on the itinerary, offering feedback in Facebook-style comment feeds.

This hits on one of Trippy’s coolest features: The startup allows users to take advantage of a “friendsourced” itinerary made for the trip they’re planning in realtime, by picking suggestions for destinations you’ll like the most (based on those social recommendations). Trippy then automatically converts those recommendations into an itinerary and plots the trip on the user’s travel map.

When the Tripper is ready to check rates or book the trip, they can do that right from Trippy’s platform. And this is how Trippy plans to make money, by taking a share of the revenues earned by hotels and third-party services when the user makes a purchase.

The startup’s mobile app allows users to follow along through seeing your pictures in realtime as you roll through the recommendations they provided on your itinerary. The interface is clean and smooth, and if your friends are the traveling kind, Trippy may very well have some legs.

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Most power airfare searchers know that buying two one-way tickets on separate airlines can sometimes be cheaper than buying a roundtrip ticket on the same airline. But on most travel search portals you have to do a little digging to find these one way fares, and sites like Kayak wouldn’t pair two one-way fares from different airlines. Today, Kayak is integrating these fares, which the company has dubbed ‘Hacker Fares’ into flight search.

So if you are looking weekend roundtrip flight from New York to San Francisco, and the best price is $600 for an economy ticket on Airline A, you’ll also see the price options for two one-way fares on Airline A and Airline B, which may be cheaper. Kayak calls these Hacker Fares because searching and matching separate airline and travel sites for these cheaper one-way fares requires a bit of hacking.

Kayak has even trademarked the term and filed a patent for the technology. CMO Robert Birge says that airlines won’t be upset over this because the company is simply searching what’s already out there via flight data on the web.

While Birge won’t reveal how often a roundtrip fare on the same airline is more expensive than two separate one-way fares on different airlines, he did say that Kayak expects the addition of Hacker Fares to impact a ‘significant percentage of queries’ on a daily basis.

Kayak, which filed its S-1 nearly a year ago, appears to be holding off on its plans go public. As the company reported in its most recent filing, revenue is up but net income is down. Kayak could be waiting for Google to launch its own ITA-powered flight search tools and services that will directly compete with Kayak.

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