I have to admit, I was at first a little star struck by Frank Eliason. After all, as the person who established a new customer support paradigm on Twitter for Comcast, he’s a celebrity among the Twitterati. But when I met Frank at BlogWorld last month, he was just as nice as can be. The next time I saw him, he was leading a conference panel about customer support via social media. I’ve been a fan ever since. 

A lot has changed since Frank first introduced the concept of customer service on Twitter in April of 2008.  Now, many companies (including Boingo) view Twitter, Facebook, etc. as important channels for interacting with valued customers. See what you started, Frank?

Unsurprisingly, Frank travels a good deal. Below are a few of this travel tips:

• When you travel, what is the one item you always take with you?
  I can’t narrow it down to just one item! I always pack the same things:  iPhone, Netbook, laptop, wireless cards, toiletries and clothes. With all my electronics, you may not want to stand behind me in the security line, but rest assured I tend to be fast.

• What are you listening to your on your iPod these days?
  I am mainly into Billy Joel but am also listening to a Grammys CD that goes through all the years of the Grammys.

• What is your favorite city in the world and why?
  My favorite city is Venice.  I went there for my honeymoon and also after our daughter passed away.  During my honeymoon, I marveled over the city’s uniqueness. During our last visit, I also grew to appreciate the people, their spirit, and their generosity.

• What is your favorite dining spot in the world?
  There is a restaurant on top of the Hotel Danieli in Venice that has the most amazing view.  I highly recommend it.  Food is good too!  I hope to get back there some day.

• Where have you been recently that you liked or were surprised by?
  I did not stay there, but during my last trip to Vegas I spent a lot of time at the Encore.  I am not a gambler, but I have to say I really enjoyed the restaurants and ambiance of the place.

• What’s the most surprising/unexpected place you’ve ever visited?
  Tallinn, Estonia.  I just loved that place.  It was amazing to see on one side, the Soviet-era housing and on the other side, a quaint older city that was thriving.

Frank, when you’re ready, please share with us the deets on your next pioneering project!

You asked for it, and we’ve delivered! Boingo Mobile, our Wi-Fi service for mobile devices and smartphones, is now available on the Blackberry® Curve 8900, Blackberry Curve 8320 and BlackBerry® Bold.

For just $7.95 per month, Boingo Mobile gives you a high-speed alternative to cellular data so you surf the Internet, download large files, upload pictures, and stream video — all on your Blackberry. Usage is unlimited and you can connect all over the globe. That’s right, surf to your heart’s content while you travel for business or pleasure and save on international roaming costs.

To get Boingo Mobile, first download our free login software directly to your Blackberry. The software tells you when you’re in a Boingo hotspot and automatically connects you. Next, sign up via the software; or alternatively sign up on a PC.

We’re constantly working to expand our portfolio of smartphone support, which now includes the Android™, iPhone®, Symbian™ Series 60, and Windows Mobile™ platforms. We know how much y’all love those mobile devices of yours!

To download the free Boingo software for Blackberry, click here.

To download Boingo software for other mobile devices, click here.

To sign up for Boingo Mobile Wi-Fi for your Blackberry, click here.

Read the press release here.

In support of cancer awareness in general (October is Breast Cancer Awareness month), we interviewed survivor extraordinaire, Meaghan Edelstein.

Two years ago, at age 28, Meaghan was diagnosed with stage 3B cervical cancer and told her chances of survival were slim. But she waged a victorious battle against the illness and then went on to establish  Spirit Jump, a “grassroots non-profit organization with a mission to provide hope and comfort” to those battling cancer. During her own ordeal, Meaghan was so comforted by the “uplifting cards and inspirational gifts” that she has duplicated this experience for other cancer victims through Spirit Jump.

Meaghan, yours is a remarkable story of survival against the odds and we toast to your continued health! Good luck as you travel around the globe dispensing comfort to others battling cancer.

Here are a few of Meaghan’s travel tips:

1. Is there a gadget you can’t live without?

I cannot live without my iPhone! Spirit Jump runs 100% through social media and email. We have people all over the world trying to connect with us and that means at all hours of the day.  With my iPhone I can stay connected no matter where I am or what I am doing.

2. What is your favorite city in the world and why?

I LOVE Boston. It’s a city full of history and full of life. I received my cancer treatments at Dana Farber Cancer Institute so there is a very special place in my heart for Boston.

3. What is your favorite dining spot in the world?

What a hard question to answer! There are so many great places and I think each city has a specialty.  I just got back from Vegas and ate at a fabulous restaurant in the Venetian called Zeffirino.

4.  What book is on your nightstand?

One of my favorites books The Time Travelers Wife.

5. Where have you been recently that you liked or were surprised by?

Las Vegas. I just got back and I have to say it was a blast! When I was diagnosed with cancer I thought I would never get to Vegas but I guess I proved myself wrong. It was a great city with wonderful food, shows and people!

6. What’s the most surprising/unexpected place you’ve ever visited?

St. Augustine,  Florida. I went on a short weekend vacation and had no expectations. My boyfriend and I had such a wonderful time there. It was absolutely beautiful, full of history, Tiffany crystals, ghosts and a wonderful winery. I can’t wait to go back. The Saragossa Inn in St. Augustine Florida was amazing!

Thanks, Meaghan!

If you’d like to support someone battling cancer through Spirit Jump, get more information here.

Fritz Faerber of the San Francisco Examiner shares some helpful tips for traveling abroad with your iPhone (or any GSM phone) without incurring a hefty bill:

1. Disable “Data Roaming”
2. Turn off email “Fetch” option
3. Consider adding a temporary international calling plan
4. Consider adding a temporary international data plan
5. Keep track of usage statistics
6. Connect to Wi-Fi whenever possible

Need to locate a Wi-Fi hotspot? Check out our Location Directory. We have a feeling you won’t have any trouble finding a Boingo hotspot overseas.

Read the entire article here.

Is your smartphone filling up with applications you rarely (never) use? Welcome to the club.

According to various studies, “smartphone users download many more apps than they actually use,” and “consumers stop using the vast majority of iPhone apps almost immediately.”

If you’re looking for applications you will cherish and use daily, check out Fierce Wireless’ list of top ten mobile apps designed to be part of your everyday life:

1. Aha (free): “…connects iPhone users from across major U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle and Washington, D.C., to share real-time information on traffic conditions.”
2. MotionX GPS ($2.99): “…premium location app optimized for the iPhone 3GS, complete with accelerometric-assisted GPS for improved accuracy…indicates and tracks the user’s position wherever they go–not just on street maps, but also topographic and satellite maps, which explains why the software is so popular with runners, hikers, skiers and boaters.”
3. Put Things Off ($2.99): ” …expressly targets procrastinators… encourages users to focus on what’s important each day and ‘put off stuff that’s not’–its touch-based filing system incorporates a series of virtual trays that separate tasks according to priority level, with completed chores disappearing in a puff of smoke.” Available for iPhone.
4. Sherpa (free): “..local discovery application optimized for Android…promises a customized user experience that improves each time you use it, recommending retailers, restaurants and attractions as it begins to understand your likes, dislikes and behavioral patterns.”
5. Snac (free): makes ” it easier to get at popular applications like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr while also offering up news, weather, email and related tools in a user-friendly, at-a-glance format.” Available for various smartphones.
6. 3deep: (free): “…offer users new insight into their contacts’ presence, location and availability…users share information on their current status, whereabouts and preferred means of contact, and the app’s Tell Me When feature indicates whether communications are best initiated via voice, text, e-mail or IM. Users also determine when and with whom they want to share deep presence information, and can limit how much personal data they wish to divulge on a case-by-case basis.” Available for various smartphones.
7. Vlingo (free): “speech recognition app–available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices–delivers a single voice interface that works with native and third-party applications, offering one-button access to contact lists, search tools, local listings and social networking status updates.
8. WeatherBug Elite ($0.99): “live updates from a vast global network of professional weather stations…bolsters live local weather conditions and forecasts with the addition of full radar animation as well as supplementary map layers spanning infrared satellite, humidity, air pressure, wind speed and next-day high and low temperatures.” Available for iPhone, Android, Nokia, Windows Mobile and Blackberry.
9. Wertago (free): location-sensitive mobile social networking app… grand prize winner in last year’s Android Developer Challenge…pinpoints where the action is, complete with real-time ratings, tags and reviews…also tells you which of your friends are already there and includes tools to message and coordinate plans with them.” Available for various smartphones.
10. Zagat to Go ‘09 ($9.99): “…includes over 40,000 reviews from the venerable ratings guide, as well as suggestions covering nightclubs, hotels and retailers…the iPhone version incorporates GPS features to guarantee you don’t get lost en route to that out-of-the way place. Other components of the application include search, reservations, top-rated lists organized by locale and sorting by food, décor, service scores or estimated meal cost.” Available for various smartphones.

Check out the entire article here.

Ad network JiWire just published a great report on Wi-Fi usage trends that are quite similar to the data Boingo published back in June. The meat of the data, as summarized by Christina Warren of Mashable:

“In the first half of 2009, JiWire saw mobile device ad-request usage while on a WiFi network increase 79%. WiFi-capable smartphones and net-connected devices are a hot trend, so this isn’t surprising, but check this out: in North America, 97.8% of all Wi-Fi device ad requests were from either an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

Even more interesting, these numbers completely align with a study that Boingo published in June. In Boingo’s study, which evaluated mobile device usage at WiFi networks in airports, the iPhone and the iPod touch accounted for 93.9% of all associated devices.

Two studies with from two different companies are showing essentially the same results: iPhone and iPod touch users really take advantage of public WiFi.”

I just installed the new Facebook app for iPhone 3.0 and am thoroughly impressed by the cleaner, more intuitive user interface. Here is a list of things that are fixed/added in this new version:

• An icon-driven homescreen grid that allows for easier navigation through the various functions within your account
• An adjunct page from the homescreen (just scroll over) that lets you add shortcuts to “favorite friends and pages”
• Landscape mode view
• The ability to upload videos from the iPhone 3GS (best to use this over Wi-Fi, of course)
• The ability to make friend requests and flag that you “like” a post
• Newsfeeds that are truly up to date. One of my pet peeves about the previous app was that the newsfeed didn’t reflect the real-time updates displayed in the PC view. In fact, this is a problem I’ve noticed with Facebook apps across all mobile platforms. But now the iPhone Facebook app has pulled ahead of the pack!

For me, the best thing is the app doesn’t have the look and feel of a re-purposed PC app. As evidenced by the icon-driven homescreen grid, this upgrade was designed for the iPhone.

Have you installed the new Facebook app on your iPhone? If so, what are your thoughts?

A newsfeed that is up to date

Clean, easy-to-navigate homescreen

Accessible by scrolling over from the homescreen

My favorite email magazine, Urban Daddy, recently recommended an interesting travel app called FlightCaster, which“uses a radical patent-pending algorithm to tell you (with high probability) whether your flight will be delayed, or if you’ll be sitting on the tarmac for a while.”

The delay prediction is derived from a number of sources, including weather patterns over the last decade, in-bound aircraft tracking data, and FAA monitoring. Simply put, it’s all about the math, science, and history, baby!

You can use FlightCaster on your laptop by visiting their site. For the iPhone and Blackberry, the application is $4.95 and can be purchased via iTunes and ShopCrackberry.com, respectively.

I’ll give the app a go when I’m next on the road. In the meantime, if you have a flight to catch, try it out and let us know how well it works for you!

Here’s an example prediction:

…not that Wi-Fi ever went away. But as Om Malick articulates in his article, the smartphone era is upon us and it is making us hungrier than ever for bandwidth. And 3G just ain’t cutting it:

“[Wi-Fi] usage has grown as major 3G networks have choked under heavy mobile Internet use. There is no stopping smartphone sales, according to data collected by Infonetics Research, a market research company…With the growing availability of Google Android-based handsets, 2009 will prove to be a banner year for smartphones.

In my opinion, the presence of PC-quality browsers, such as Safari, on smartphones and webkit-based browsers, as well as the growing popularity of social-networking services such as Twitter and Facebook as communication tools, have boosted the demand for wireless data. These tools demand data connectivity, and people want to check them while on the go. This spurt in usage has left the carriers that long saw themselves as Wi-Fi’s enemy coming around and embracing the insurgent technology.

AT&T’s $275 million acquisition of Wayport and the recent agreement between Verizon and Santa Monica, Calif., Wi-Fi aggregator Boingo Wireless are signs that despite the availability of faster 3G networks, the low-cost economics of the Wi-Fi ecosystem are alive and kicking.”

Read the rest of Om Malick’s article here.

A recent FierceDeveloper article about mobile OS consolidation got me thinking: if I could save only three mobile operating systems from falling off a cliff, which three would I save? Because let’s face it, there are a lot of mobile operating systems out there, and only so much money and developers to build a truly rich ecosystem.

Frankly, I don’t know which ones I’d save. Working at Boingo, I’ve been exposed to the entire gamut of mobile operating systems and like a good unbiased parent, I like them all for different reasons (okay, maybe secretly, I have my favorites). But clearly, the market is at an inflection point and seems to be heading towards some sort of mobile OS consolidation. So who do you think the three winners will be? Here’s an alphabetized list of mobile OS’s as a reminder:

• Android
• Blackberry
• iPhone
• Maemo
• Palm
• Symbian
• Windows Mobile