NEW: Listings, UI, and “filter by rating”

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New app versions are now available in the iTunes App Store for:  New England At-Hand, Historic Boston At-Hand, Finger Lakes At-Hand, and Hudson River Valley At-Hand (modified name).  These feature our latest innovations.  You will notice that the search window now shows you, in words, what search criteria produced the results. It also shows you the settings for: search radius, number of listings to return, price range, physical difficulty, and editor ratings. We have also incorporated numerous speed improvements and bug fixes in this version.

Download the new version.  Try out the new search and improved itinerary functions.  We think you will like it.

Send us feedback at info@AtHandGuides.com. And please take a few minutes to write a review in the App Store.

Finally, re-check your favorite destination area or attraction type.  We are adding many new listings every week.  With the weather favoring outdoor activities, especially look for expanded natural listings – sanctuaries, reserves, parks, waterfalls, gardens, trails, refuges, and more.

Get out; discover and experience with your At-Hand Guide.

What’s an At-Hand Guide? Vote for your favorite message

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Our At-Hand Guide editions are evolving and soon will become a single free App At-Hand Guides with lots of both free partner editions and in-app purchase of whole states and theme attractions.  There will be an evolving and expanding set of features, and of course new listings every week.

Please take 5 minutes and vote for your favorite phrase describing At-Hand Guides.

Here is the URL:   http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KNDNQ2J

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Thanks all who voted in our recent  99Designs logo contest.  Above is the wonderful result you helped choose.  We love it and hope you do to.

Will you vote for At-Hand Guides new Logo?

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The colorful and iconic maps that have underpinned the app launch icons and the opening splash pages are about to disappear. We have launched a professional LOGO contest at 99Designs.com and have narrowed the candidates to 5 approaches.  We would love to have your input.  Which to you love?  Hate?  You can also leave us your additional thoughts on this blog.

With an expanding footprint, including NYS and California and other areas and themes, the map theme as a logo for At-Hand Guides has run-its-course. The new logo will symbolize the full set of states, cities and themes that will be available as in-app purchases or as free content from a single FREE ‘At-Hand Guides” app.

Click on this link to vote.

Thank you.

Editor Reviews & Ratings At-Hand?

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We have a Millennial friend working as a digital media expert/leader at Porter Novelli in Manhattan.  He has assured us that At-Hand Guides is very mis-placed in offering expert, trusted listing ratings.

We trust no “expert” he intones, at a lower Manhattan sidewalk brunch some months back.  The world has moved to “trusted peers” he assures with only faintly concealed arrogance and out-front certainty to us.  User-ratings are the only way he assures us in 2011.

Yet, repeatedly TNooz, the global technology news site for the travel industry has warned the TripAdvisors, Yelp and others of coming problems as evidence of scamming and being played in their user-ratings keeps exploding. The Wall Street Journal has recently weighed in bringing visibility into the executive suite.

Now, the scandal has reached the “smart consumer” in the February 2013 issue of The Costco Connection.

At-Hand Guides, has from the very beginning as the germ of an idea to provide a better experience of Concord and Lexington, MA  been 100% committed to our users having a great experience. We have no conflicts in providing our users with a listing rating.  It is what it is.  A very few places in New England are knock  your-socks-off, must-see before-you-die destinations, which get a 5 star rating.  Many, many more are OK, if you are already nearby, and have the time.  They receive a 1 star rating.  The rest are somewhere in-between.

Expert journalist David Horowitz, writing in the Costco monthly, notes that user-rating/feedback is much like the Internet worlds of viruses and SEO (search engine optimization) with “arms-races” on both sides of the aisle.  Businesses hoping to raise their reviews and ratings hire reviewers with Craiglist ads, and sign contracts with reputation protection firms, while the TripAdvisor’s of the world try to detect and delete them.  The game keeps escalating.

TripAdvisor’s Brooke Ferencsik, the Newton, MA firm’s top PR executive, admits that you have to examine reviewers’ past history, their badges and their travel history.  Or better to go to your Facebook account and check with friends. Dah!   Wasn’t that all the stuff we were supposed to lose by dispensing with experts?  Simply trust those “peers”?

We would love to hear from our Blog, Twitter and Facebook friends. What do you think?

Is depending on the mob an excuse for not doing the full job?  Are experts the better way?  Or is a combination what you want?

Any Apps At-Hand in the coming mobile world of Altered Presence? #MoMoBoston

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We think not.  At the January 15th  MoMo Boston event Prat Vemana of Staples Velocity team made the most significant statement of the evening’s panel:  “Mobile is about the moment”  And with the moment being the ongoing NOW, there is ultimately very little place for app switching among potentially hundreds of brand, functional, game and other categories of apps.

A point of integration is inevitable.  Much as “search” trashed the library world of “Portals” on the World Wide Web, the “moment” does not naturally include APPs.  It includes an altered-presence, as the Europeans coined in he early 00’s. 

But it is now 2013 and true altered-presence is not invented yet.  But the race is on.  Most of the visible contenders are rushing to part you from more of your money and have you engaged and loving it, if we are to believe tonight’s panel.  They include Google, probably a long-shot as the leader from one era seldom gets it right in the next wave.  It includes Apple who would like you to fall in love with SIRI as your genie servant. It includes Facebook, who would like to apply all the personal information it’s aggregated about you and your friends to a ubiquitous mobile presence. And it includes startup Kimera Technology with a primitive network mediation layer not so different from that proposed by Doc Searles in The Intention Economy.  There are likely a dozen others in stealth mode, funded by the VC herd as candidates for the next big-thing.

So enjoy your apps, while the transitional era exists and before the great disruption occurs.  Enjoy them At-Hand.

#MoMoBoston

Invasive, Non-Native Species At-Hand

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Our new banner photo is the snow-covered, pendulous branch of a mature Norway Spruce.  They are considered a weed and rogue tree in New England by some.  This one is beautiful year round, providing a visual and sun block to the nearby residences to the west. We highly value and appreciate it.