KeyToss Announces Four Free Travel Tools for the Mobile Web
Written by KeyToss
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
New features include Flight Status, Translations, Currency Rates, and Snow Conditions.
nglewood Cliffs, NJ – December 16, 2008 - KeyToss (http://keytoss.com), a fast-growing mobile web portal, announced its first steps into the travel services market with a new set of tools targeting business and leisure travelers. These tools, which include Flight Status, Translations, Currency Rates, and Snow Conditions, offer a level of customization not offered by other mobile services.
The Flight Status tool, powered by FlightStats, allows mobile phone users across the world to check the status of airline flights. In addition to allowing users to customize the airline list, the Flight Status tool tunes itself by listing “favorite” airlines and optionally, saving previous flight searches. The tool also makes it easy to monitor the status of a flight over time. FlightStats, with the most complete coverage of commercial airline flights, tracks about 100,000 flights per day.
The Translation tool, powered by mobitra.mobi, gives users the ability to get translations when they need it most – while on the go. Fifteen languages are available (English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Dutch, Greek, Portuguese, Swedish, and Catalan), and users can customize the tool to include just the languages they need. Since many browsers on mobile phones cannot natively display special characters used in languages such as Chinese and Russian, or even French and Spanish, the Translation tool offers the innovative option to display translations as images instead of as text. The tool also allows users to select a default “home language” and to save translations for future reference.
The Snow Conditions tool, based on data from OnTheSnow.com, provides up-to-date information on snow conditions at over 1,200 ski resorts in 33 countries. Users can customize the tool to display the latest info for their favorite mountains.
The Currency Rates tool provides users with market exchange rates of several dozen different currencies, updated many times a day. Users can customize the tool to display the exchange rates for any combination of currencies.
“We’ve built a platform that emphasizes personalization and gives us an opportunity to create new services that mobile users need,” said co-founder Rajesh Raichoudhury. “We’re very excited about these services because they’re just the start. We have some very cool features in development.”
The KeyToss mobile portal is available at http://m.keytoss.com. The service is free.
Currently in beta, KeyToss gives smartphone users a great deal of power and flexibility in personalizing their mobile homepages. WAP Review, a leading mobile review site, in reviewing an earlier release of KeyToss, proclaimed that KeyToss was a better service than iGoogle for smartphone users. The Code Factory Blog declared, “KeyToss, currently in beta, comes closer to reaching mobile portal perfection than any I have seen so far.”
KeyToss works great on Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, PalmOS, and Symbian.
Key features include:
Access to over 50 search tools in one search bar.
Tools include Google, IMDb, Amazon, Yelp, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, Yahoo, MSN, and Yellowpages.com. Users can select which tools to include in a drop-down menu, and can access the full set of tools at any time using keywords
Localized searches.
KeyToss saves the user time by automatically sending the user's pre-selected location for searches on Google Local, Yelp, and Yellowpages.com. The user can store an unlimited number of locations and can switch between locations with one click.
News feed summaries.
Add just about any RSS or Atom news feed, and control how to display it. Number of headlines, summary display, conversion of article links to mobile-friendly format, and choice of mobile transcoder. Users benefit from knowing what's popular with the growing KeyToss community, which has shared over 1,500 news feeds.
Personal Links.
Users can add any links to any webpage; if the webpage is not mobile-friendly, KeyToss provides the option to create a link that automatically converts the linked page to mobile-friendly format.
File Transfers.
KeyToss makes it easy to move documents, applications, and media files from the computer to the phone. This eliminates the need to manipulate memory cards or deal with cables and sync software just to move a single file.
Sports scores, weather forecasts, and stock quotes.
All customized to the user's preferences, of course.
KeyToss is a privately-held start-up.
About FlightStats
FlightStats is an airline, airport, and travel information service provided by Conducive Technology Corp. FlightStats provides current flight status and airport information via Web services APIs, RSS feeds and on its own Web site at http://www.flightstats.com/ where visitors can get flight status, track flights, view on-time performance ratings by flight or by airline, check for current airport delay and weather information, and much more.
FlightStats' parent company, Conducive Technology, is also a leading supplier of air travel information services to travel agencies, logistics professionals, airlines, airports and industry analysts.
About mobitra.mobi
mobitra.mobi is a free mobile translation portal that offers the translation among 16 languages. Specially designed for mobile devices and without any additional software, it allows the customer to see the translated text as an image for character sets the mobile does not support, e.g. Chinese in American handsets, as well as a number of value-added features. mobitra.mobi will become the reference for mobile translation, since it already includes the translation of the text contained in an image taken with a mobile phone camera (beta), and in the mid-term, speech translation will be available. Get it, translate it!
Mobile Technology Feature - Top 10 Business Apps for Android - Android has become one of the most popular mobile operating systems
in the world due to advanced software, competitive manufacturers, and an
app market that is filled with exciting and useful applications. Read
on for this fine Top 10 List compiled by tech writer, Blake Sanders
The Really Big List of Mapping, Geo location Mobile developer resources, APIs and Tools - The Mobile Ecosystem... no question that mobile is huge and
the opportunity for developers, in particular, geo developers! There's
loads of developer resources on the web so to help the developer,
here's a listing of just some of the fine dev resources, blogs,
toolsets and more to consider when developing or porting your app to a
smartphone or Tablet.
ArcGIS.com Mashup Tutorial with Flickr and Foursquare data-
Here's a simple "how to" tutorial on working with the free ArcGIS.com
to easily import KML or RSS data from Flickr and foursquare into ArcGIS
to create your own custom map mashup. ArcGIS.com has some recent
updates including support for KML, be sure to check it out!
Most Users of Free Photo Apps Say Adding Cool Effects is Most Useful - Adding cool effects
to photos was rated as the most useful thing by more than halfof
consumers surveyed using free online photography services, according to
CatchFree a free
online service that helps people find the best free mobile and web applications
to perform useful tasks.
Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet Up Close - No Replacement for the iPad But Pretty Darned Sweet - As could be
expected, speculation and blogging is rampant with many stories and
pseudo "reviews" coming out, many of them touting the next "iPad
killer".
Mobile Developer Resource - MapQuest & The Mobile Worker - Facility management companies, surveyors, multi-level marketing,
insurance claims, pipeline companies, water utilities; all have field
workers who would benefit from mobile applications. Not only checking in
to work sites, but keeping a record of the work done
Flickr GPS Photo Tag Tip - Here's a tip for Flickr users who want to share their GPS information
with their photos. note, in order to do this you'll need to be
capturing photos using a GPS-enabled or GPS-aware camera (see you're
smartphone hardware settings to ensure that GPS or location sharing is
turned "ON)".
Mobile data usage in Canada to triple between 2010 and 2012 - Some interesting, yet not terribly surprising, numbers on mobile
usage coming out of Canada. According to a report summarized on
Techvibes, mobile usage is soaring, in particular, the smartphone
segment
Social Location Directory
Do you have a location-aware application, social location service or other location-sensitive service that you'd like to share with us? Please browse this growing directory of Social location Services and feel free to leave a link to your favorite service! See the Directory HERE
Suggested Reading
The Underground Guide To The iPhone:
The iPhone is – if I may say so – one of the greatest mobile
revolutions of the past decade. More and more, mobile phones seem to
materialize out of our wildest dreams. Because of the tight integration
of third-party applications, you can do nearly everything with your
device — be it gaming, working, fooling around, and of course phoning.
Good Mobile Messaging: Executives and professional field forces spend an increasing amount of time on the road tending to business.
Mobile Apps - Native or Web?:
You probably have a plan to build a mobile app, but you've struggled
with the basic question - Should I build it using open web standards
such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, or should I build it as a native app
for the devices I want to target?
iBike Coach App- a new “Always On” feature always gathers data
Nike+ GPS App- for sports tracking, recording and sharing
Featured Events
Content & Apps for Automotive Europe 2012 (18-19 April, Germany)
will give you key insights on how in-vehicle connectivity is being
revolutionised as OEMs integrate dynamic content to stay relevant
throughout the vehicle life cycle.
Location Intelligence for Enterprise - Europe 2012, January 16-17, London Hear from Google, Jones Lang LaSalle, Tesco, Willis, Oracle,
ESRI, Microsoft, PBBI and many more as they debate the best strategies
for business models and integration.
Consumer Telematics Show 2012 (Jan 9, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, USA) is the most prestigious and
dynamic consumer telematics focused meeting for the automotive industry.
Held in Las Vegas on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES),
this year's senior-level speakers will include General Motors, Audi,
Toyota, Panasonic, Continental, Hughes Telematics, Gartner, KIA,
Mercedes-Benz and many more
Esri Dev Summit - The
Esri Developer Summit (DevSummit) brings together developers and GIS
professionals from all over the globe. March 26-29, 2012, Palm Springs,
CA
