Over the years I have put well over 1,000,000 miles into traveling around the United States, Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. Through these experiences I have picked up a few travel tips and tricks that I wanted to share.

First things first, pack efficiently. As one of those people who likes to be prepared, I am always faced with a dilemma of limited space in my bag. My rule is that I never want more than what I can carry (or roll).

Use a shirt packing system

If I have time, I have my shirts boxed or folded at the dry cleaners. This is very convenient, but I don’t always have time to get that done. For shirts already on hangers you can use a shirt packing system. There are several brands to choose, I use one made by Eagle Creek that I bought at the Container Store.

Stuff your socks in your shoes

A trick I learned early on was to stuff my socks in my shoes. This saves room, and protects your shoes from getting squashed. Over the years I added using a plastic bag to protect the outside and to keep the bottoms of my shoes from touching my clean cloths. I just recycle the bags from the cleaners you get with boxed shirts.

Use Downy Wrinkle Releaser

Downy makes a great wrinkler releaser, just spray your cloths on a hanger, let it sit for a few hours and all those wrinkles are gone. I tried some other brands, but they did not seem to work as well. Another benefit is a fresh smell, this helps out if you get caught in a situation where you have to wear a shirt more than once (I don’t like it when that happens). Make sure you get a travel size dispenser.

I know seeing is believing, so here is a before and after picture. This only took 30 minutes, I usually pull out the shirts the night before, spray them and they are perfect in the morning.

Before

After

Pack a mobile office

The Container Store sells these great black mesh bags, I use them for all my miscellaneous cords and knickknacks. The pencil case is perfect for a miniature mobile office complete with a mini stapler, tape, pens, stamps and paper clips.

Fogless travel shaving mirror

Cutting yourself shaving while traveling is never fun. I put a stop to this by shaving in the shower with this handy traveler mirror.

Use your mobile phone for convenient scan and faxing

One of the reasons I joined the Realeyes3D team to work on Qipit, was that I recognized the need for an easier way to capture and share written information. I immediately thought how I already used my camera to copy whiteboards, but they were hard to read. I thought of all the times I was in a hotel room or at a convention and needed to send a last minute fax, only to find that either the hotel’s fax machine was broke or they wanted to charge me $5 a page in the business center. All of you road warriors out there will relate to not having the time to submit expense reports while in the office. It is nice to know you can make copies of all those receipts with your camera phone. You can even use Qipit to archive important travel documents , just in case you lose your passport. Qipit certainly makes it easier when traveling the world.

Hope these travel tips help make your travels a little easier, and please share some of your travel tips and secrets.

~ Conrad

For the upcoming Labor Day weekend, I thought it would be appropriate to share a cartoon of our favorite office worker Dilbert, who really doesn’t like to labor.

Dilbert clearly illustrates why so many people use Qipit rather than buying a scanner. It costs less and can be used with your digital camera or camera phone, which you probably already own, and it is much easier.

I hope you have a fun and safe Labor Day Weekend.

~ Conrad

How do you send a fax, when there are no phone lines, power plugs or fax machines?

Ever since fax machines became a staple of business in the 1980’s this problem has faced business travelers, long haul truckers, construction site workers, emergency responders, sales professionals, anyone on a remote job site and people caught in an emergency situation after a natural disaster.

To solve this problem using existing wireless networks, you can take the brute force approach, and build a specialized piece of equipment such as a portable facsimile machine. The problem with this solution is that it is expensive and still a little bulky. One example of this approach is the Greta (aka PM-70), which uses GSM networks and costs almost $1,200 plus a monthly recurring wireless data plan.

Our approach is to use a device as familiar, cost effective and ubiquitous as the mobile phone in your pocket. Why carry any more than you need? Plus your mobile phone makes phone calls, sends texts messages, probably can check email and does a lot more. Even making a call with a portable fax machine can be a little awkward unless you are calling flipper.

LG Dare (3.2 Mega-pixel camera phone) from Verizon Wireless
Dimensions: 4.1″ x 2.2″ x 0.5″ (Weight 3.76 oz)
Cost: $199.99 plus monthly data plan

Of course there is a lot going on behind the scenes to allow you to use your camera phone to fax documents anywhere in the world. A traditional or portable fax machine has a very controlled environment to create scans. Qipit does not have this luxury and must compensate for uneven document illumination, shadows, glare, motion blur and noise. Qipit must also dewarp (or straighten) and crop the document to eliminate unwanted background information.

But you don’t need to know all that, nor do you probably care. All you need to do is take a picture of your document then send it to Qipit (copy@qipit.com). Include the fax number in the body of the message, if you want, type your fax subject in the subject field. It’s that simple, no need to buy any more equipment or download any software. Best of all Qipit is free and works any time and any where, just like you.

How to Send a Fax Using Your Mobile Phone

If you want to learn more about faxing with Qipit, just check out the post I did a while back, Four ways to use Qipit to Send a Fax for Free .

There is always an elegance to simplicity.

~ Conrad

This is the second post of the series on Visual Expression (Also see The Power of Visual Expression)

Back in March, at the South By Southwest Interactive conference, yes this was the conference with the now infamous interview of Mark Zukerberg by Lacey Peterson, where twitter helped, well you know…..

Also checkout this graphical recording of the interview by Marilyn Martin if you missed it, click the image to see a full size view.

Now back to my point. At SXSWi, I picked up some information on Dan Roam’s new book “On the back of a Napkin”. For those of you who are not familiar with Dan, he is an author, speaker and thought leader in the field of visual thinking. In his recent book, Dan explains how simple drawings can express ideas that can be universally understood. Dan believes that anyone with a pen and a piece of paper (Dan likes to use napkins as he believes they are less intimidating) can convey the most complex business ideas, as well as communicate better with customers, vendors, and employees.

In his book, and in the video of his workshop below, Dan draws on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries in the field of vision science, to lay out simple tools to take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show. In his workshop, Dan relates a simple example which takes us back to the days of elementary school. As kindergarteners we all knew how to draw and visually express ourselves. This is something I discovered to be true when I visited Westwood Elementary school a while back. Children at that age show no inhibition towards putting what they are thinking onto paper. But Dan points out, if you visit that same kindergarten class ten years later, hardly anyone will say that they can draw or use visual images to describe a problem. Something in the education process happens to push us away from visually expressing our ideas, even though it is so fundamental to how we think.

Here’s a video of Dan Roam’s workshop, from a visit he did to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters, this event took place on May 27, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.

The video is about 55 minutes, but I think it is worth taking the time to watch. In the workshop, Dan lays out our 6 visual pathways:

• What
• Where
• How
• When
• Why
• How Much.

Dan shares simple techniques to enable anyone to visually express even the most complex of ideas, but don’t just take my word for it. Here is a video interview by the Wall Street Journal of Tim Armstrong an Advertising Executive at Google. In the interview Tim explains how he uses a simple pen and paper as a visual tool to explain their advertising model, rather than a complex Power Point slide deck. His methods are exactly what Dan preaches in his book and workshops.

Dan’s techniques along with a pen, your writing surface of choice, and Qipit to easily save and share those ideas, make for a powerful combination. What do you think?

~ Conrad

This is the first part of a series of posts on Visual Expression. (Also see Dan Roam’s Technique’s to Visually Express your Ideas)

Through out my life I have always been a visual thinker. Concepts seemed to solidify when I could see them, whether it was in an illustration, graph, chart or video animation, for me visualization is the quickest way to learn. Professionally my career has taken me to Asia, Europe and Africa, far from my roots in Texas, and when faced with language and cultural barriers my universal translator has always been a pen and a whiteboard, flipchart or a piece of paper, along with some visual expression of a concept, problem or question. People universally, seem to understand pictures and illustrations, charts and graphs, maps, timelines and flowcharts.

Visual thinking is so fundamental to how we think, that when the tools of visual expression are used can understand what our ancestors where trying to express over 32,000 years ago. This illustration is from a cave in Lascaux, France and is among the oldest known drawings in the world.

You can clearly see a bull running in a herd, and then you can imagine the animals that existed and how fundamental they must have been in the life of early man.

This got me thinking, if I was to express my life today what would a visual expression of my environment look like, there weren’t any cave walls close by so I used a writing surface more familiar, called a whiteboard.

The visual expression of my environment shows a computer, my mobile phone, buildings, construction, and a herd of cars (aka traffic). Of course the caveman was a much better artist than me. Please share a visual expression of your environment. We will store them here for future generations to ponder.

Check back next week for part two.

~ Conrad