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Traveling the world, most people take plenty of pictures, need access to their business or private contacts, want to make mid or long-term appointments, have to write letters to Visa or Immigration authorities or simply want to stay in touch with their loved ones.

While bringing a laptop or notebook computer is an option for many - most people refrain to do so, as they are quite bulky, can break down, get lost or stolen - all of which will cause havoc to your personal documents, private video or music collection and other valuable private data on it:

Computers can be a royal pain sometimes and it pays to avoid catastrophes, as most of us aren’t Geeks or want to watch out for our best gadget all the time. Most of all we want to enjoy our travels, get new impression, take plenty of pictures and share them with friends, family and the rest of the world.

How good that these days, most of the above activities are possible through online applications, with great ease-of-use and acceptable security and capacity.

Let’s have a quick look what options are available and what could be your best choice depending on your situation:

1. Pictures and Photos

The 2 indisputable kings of photo storing and sharing on the internet are Yahoo’s Flickr.com and Google’s Picasa Web Albums. While the functionality of both is pretty similar - besides ease-of-use - they mainly vary in storage capacity and pricing structure. While I would prefer Picasa due to its better ease-of-use and much larger free capacity (1 GB) compared to Flickr’s mere 200 MB for a start, Flickr wins hands down when you think about storing large amounts of photos.

Just subscribe to Flickr’s Pro Account, which costs USD 24.95/year and you are set to go with unlimited capacity and bandwidth, being able to store thousands of pictures for either private use or sharing it with friends, family or other people around the world.

Flickr’s community is by far the largest photo community on the net and if you want reviews of your pictures, finding similar ones or simply are looking for inspirations for your next destinations, you can’t go wrong with Flickr. You can pay via Credit Card or Paypal, which is convenient enough. USD 25 seems pretty moderate, considering the fact, that a new external hard drive would set you back a multiple of that amount and is prone to getting lost, broken or stolen when traveling.

An advantage for Picasa Web Albums is that it will drive additional traffic to you if you own a website, if you chose to share, tag and describe your photos and let Google index them.

Google recently introduced a new pricing scheme for their Picasa Web Albums, which sets in if you exceed the initial 1 GB of capacity. 1 GB may sound like a lot, but these days with multi pixel cameras it might be only enough for less than 1.000 pictures, which you will exceed easily when traveling more than a few countries at once. Additional space will set you back USD 20 for 10 GB, USD 75 for 40 GB, USD 250 for 100 GB or USD 500 (!) for additional 400 GByte of capacity per year.

In my eyes this is far from being lucrative for the photo crowds, with storage prices coming down rapidly over the last few years. On top of that you can only order additional capacity using Google’s own ‘Checkout Service’, which is not-so-established like Paypal or simply paying with credit card, which almost every traveler carries around these days.

Clearly Yahoo is leading the way in this regard, they are also offering unlimited storage for their Y! Mail service, compared to Google’s current 6.3 GB for its Gmail, which you can’t officially use for storing other kinds of data. Maybe that will change one day, when Google introduces its much awaited Gdrive service, which is expected to hit the net sometime in the first half of 2008.

But if Picasa’s Pricing is any indication, Gdrive won’t be as competitive as its next competitors like Mozy.com or Microsoft’s Skydrive. Of course you can try to utilize your Gmail space with 3rd party tools like Gmail Drive or Gspace, but then again those are unsupported by Google. And with Google’s attitude of changing the rules of the game whenever they want to, your data is definitely not safe using this kind of services in the long run.

For uploading or backing up huge amounts of your pictures while traveling, it might be useful to not rely on their web interface alone, as it can be a micro-managing and time-consuming process. To automate this, check into an Internet Cafe and install Picasa’s Desktop Software or the Flickr tool FlickrSync. Just remember to delete or better safe-erase your pictures from the used computer when finished.

2. Documents - Texts, Spreadsheets

Being longer on the road you certainly will run into a situation of having to write a computer-written letter to a bank, immigration authority, potential or current employer. It’s good as well to having access to your CV, passport copy, bank statement or standard letter templates you would like to use for creating a new one.

The 2 options you might want to consider here are Zoho.com and Google Docs, which offer online applications for creating, storing and sharing electronic documents. You don’t need a bloated MS Office to carry around with you or alternatives like the Open Office suite. For simple text processing and spreadsheet calculations both online options are more than sufficient, if not complete for your needs.

Both offer presentations as well, with Zoho having the most complete portfolio, extending to Notes, Netmeeting and Planning Software, Project and Database Creating, Groupware Mail, Chat and Wiki Software amongst other more business-like applications, like CRM.

Google is offering some of these applications as well, but they are more scattered around and seem less interconnected and integrated than at Zoho.com. Most of the Google Apps are marked ‘Beta’ since their introduction, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but some do truly lack the kind of functionality and finished touch of more established ones, which are around much longer.

In my opinion - Google Docs is sufficient enough for most basic needs, while Zoho offers the more polished and complete package, if you are planning to work more seriously while traveling abroad.

3. Contacts, Calendar and Notes

During your work and travel life you will make plenty of new friends, meet interesting people or potential business contacts to stay in touch with. While every Computer, depending on what Operating Systems it’s running, comes with its own set of Contact Management and Calendar Software, these are rarely inter-exchangeable or transferable.

Having worked in the IT industry for 14 years - I can’t even recall how many times I painfully had to transfer my Calendar or Contacts Data from one program to the other - always balancing between loss of data, duplicates, manual input/editing and different formats. It’s usually a time-consuming and boring manual process of getting everything up2date again and most of the software is proprietary with few interfaces to other applications.

As I collected close to 1.000 contacts during my work life - I use for a couple of years now a service called Plaxo.com. They started out as a small online application to synchronize your Microsoft Outlook Contacts, mainly spamming all your e-mail contacts with messages to join them and to update their own credentials. But things got better over the years:

Plaxo is one of the first providers who recognized the needs of users to store all kinds of information (calendar, contacts, tasks, notes) in a central place, yet always having the chance to exporting them in full again, if they want to change to a different provider or synchronize with a mobile device or an upcoming new service.

When they came out with their new version 3.0 sometime mid last year - it was a huge step forward, away from the old MS Outlook dependence, to a open yet secure place of storing all your contacts, calendar appointments and notes. The list of supported import and export options is impressive and includes the Crème de la Crème of Information Management Suites like Gmail, Y! Mail, MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Mac OS X Contacts/Calendar, AOL/AIM, Windows Live/Hotmail and LinkedIn as well as standard im/exporting formats like .iCal and .vcf for calendar or contacts.

You can consolidate, merge or de-dupe your data - the related function has currently a 30-day trial period - or sync them with your mobile phone, PDA, desktop applications or other mobile devices.

As well you can simply use their web interface, thus having access to your data wherever you may roam without having to use any offline program or package. Plaxo Pulse is a feature, where you can get feeds from Social Networking sites, like YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo 360, del.icio.us, Xanga, MySpace, Windows Live or Digg.com to stay in touch with the activities of other fellow comrades.

You can sync between multiple computers and get reminders for important dates and updated contact information via e-mail, too.

Plaxo’s basic functionality is free for the first 1.000 contacts and costs USD 49.95/year for Plaxo Premium with additional contacts and functionality.

Another contender for Calendar and Contact functionality is yet again Google Gmail, especially after they recently upgraded their included Contact Manager following the voiced requests of their users. Their Calendar Tool was always sufficient enough and you can even share it online, thus making friends and family aware of your current whereabouts or plans.

And let’s not forget the Online Contact Managers for the Business World, the 2 Top Dogs are LinkedIn.com and Xing.com (formerly OpenBC).

Conclusion:

A few years back when Online Application were still in their infancy, nobody really trusted them to get the work done or to store personal data safely and secure on central servers. Thankfully a lot has been done to improve the functionality and ease-of-use of these services and more and more people are tired of ‘fat’, bloated proprietary programs. These days the main security concerns are more on the backend, meaning the device you access your data with.

The chance of using a Spyware or Keylogger infected PC in an Internet Cafe - thus exposing your personal data - is higher than losing your online stored data with Google, Microsoft, Flickr or one of the other main players. The main players of the Online Application World have a reputation and their business model to lose, which can’t usually be assumed about the Internet Cafe in Shanghai, Manila, Jakarta or just around your corner, which you will probably only visit once during your travels and never again thereafter. Therefore it can be useful to access the internet with your own notebook, PDA or wireless device to reduce the risks of exposing your login credentials

Maybe it is an option to travel with a notebook after all - it doesn’t have to be the latest and greatest model. A used smaller model with wireless connectivity would be enough to access the internet and your accounts safely, having stored all your files online, while still offering the convenience of desktop usage. If you check out eBay, Yahoo Auctions or simply ask around, you can get a capable 12″ notebook for less than USD 500 these days.

Though Google did a great job creating and acquiring various useful Online Applications, they are far from perfect, as the interconnection of most of the applications is still lacking. Here it would be a better option of using specialized Providers, as mentioned above, who do a better job - often more complete and cheaper than Google is currently willing to do.

And of course it might be better anyway to not be dependent on one Big Brother only, which most big Online Service Providers seem to have a tendency to become. After all they are all private businesses with the main goal of earning money from your collected data. Nothing wrong with that, just chose the one who follows your needs of ease-of-use, value for money, privacy and interconnection of Data Sources best, depending on your situation.

What is your take on Online Applications? Which ones do you use when traveling? Do you have better or cheaper alternatives when storing photos, documents or contacts on your travels? Please share and let us now by making use of the comment form below!

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written by Chris