At-Hand Guides

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

AtHandGuides — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:54:23 +0000

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

AtHandGuides — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 18:44:30 +0000

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

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?

AtHandGuides — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:26:05 +0000

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?

AtHandGuides — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:01:38 +0000

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

AtHandGuides — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:25:35 +0000

We think not. At the January 15^th 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

AtHandGuides — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 01:29:45 +0000

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.

2012 in review

AtHandGuides — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 03:29:11 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Rainbows: At-Hand

AtHandGuides — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 15:42:35 +0000

As the year 2012 wraps up we found it a time for reflection on the year, who we are, and where we are going. America’s 24 hour media, the cable news channels, the Internet web sites, and even the casual “water cooler” conversations have become virtual stressors – High Unemployment, Benghazi, Fiscal Cliff, Storm Sandy, and the Newtown shootings. Yet, if you look out your window, walk down your street – it is all still there, just as it was. We invite you, in 2013, to use At-Hand Guides to get out and relish and be inspired by the world around you – the natural beauty, the amazing historical past our lives are built on, the culture of agreements we live by, and the beauty in art created by our fellow life travelers.

Below is the rainbow, from Rye Harbor State Park, looking toward the continuing precipitation in Portsmouth at about 4PM on Friday 21 December 2012. Keep your eyes open, look up, look back. Beauty and art is always at-hand.

Boston Sunday Globe features iPhone app “New England At-Hand”

AtHandGuides — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 20:59:58 +0000

Necee Regis’ News, Apps, Deals, and Gear from New England and Beyond, in the Novenber 11, 2012 Travel Section , features our app New England At-Hand. Check it out on page M2. Best today with location-based personal search and custom itineraries from selections.

Travel Section – Boston Sunday Globe – 11 November 2012

Verizon Gets At-Hand #MIN43

AtHandGuides — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 20:37:50 +0000

Verizon, the old landline incumbent carrier gets the world of integrated mobile, with-you technology. The parent, and half-owner of Verizon Wireless has opened Innovation Centers recently in Waltham, MA and in northern California.

At-Hand Guides was there in mid October as part of the MassInnovations #MIN43 monthly event.

The “Verizon Wireless” brand is nowhere to be seen in these showcases except on an occasional slide flashing on the wall-sized video screens. 49% owner Vodaphone is 100% absent.

In the salons are exhibit after exhibit of the stunning world of integrated, personal, real-time ubicitous personal and buiness wire-less support Verizon intends to be a part of if not leader and definer of.

In the back-room is lab space and support techs and engineers to ensure, with its partners, it all comes together smoothly.

These sorts of visions were, not so long ago the province of HP and IBM. Hail Verizon! The torch is passed.

A Verizon representative acknowledged they were on a path where voice communications was a rounding error, an afterthought. We appreciate the investments in 4G LTE by Verizon (and in similar technologies by other carriers), and they should know that our At-Hand Guides, with multiple high resolution images and other real-time location travel support will be there as a growing partner.