10 Essential Mobile Apps for Business Travel (plus 3)

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

The adage “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door” doesn’t apply when it comes to mobile apps. There are thousands of productivity apps for business travelers. How can anyone find that better mousetrap in the overwhelming pile of options? That’s why our team came up with 10 essential apps that will make your traveling employees happier and more efficient. Your iPass solution provides the essential connectivity for all of these apps. And, if you have a mobile device management (MDM) solution in place, you can easily distribute and manage them.

Here’s the list of 10 that we just featured in our user newsletter.

1)       iPass Hotspot Finder – Lets you easily find Wi-Fi hotspots anywhere, including the more than 1.2 million iPass Mobile Network hotspots in 113 countries where your users can use iPass to connect. Features include Geotracking directions, and ratings of hotspots, among other mobility tools.

2)       Here on Biz – Networking on steroids! It locates, identifies, and alerts you to any nearby LinkedIn users, and provides a secure, real-time chat client. A great app for networking at conferences.

3)       Evernote – A personal assistant in your pocket. It stores and lets you search photos, memos, video, typed notes, and almost anything else you want to capture to work on or review later. A built in OCR even lets you capture and search handwritten notes.

4)       Dragon Dictation – Talk, don’t type. This voice recognition application lets you speak and instantly see your text or email messages. You can dictate tweets, IMs, emails, and notes.

5)       Expensify – Eases the pain of expense reporting by tracking expenses and filing expense reports right from your mobile device. It uses the camera to scan receipts to capture the date and amount. It also tracks mileage and imports expenses from other sources.

6)       OfficeDrop – A scanner in your hand. It converts captured images and saves them as text-searchable PDFs that can be easily shared with coworkers.

7)       RingMindMe – The “Doh!” killer app. How many times have you turned off your ringer for a meeting, forgot to turn it back on, and missed important calls? RingMindMe will alert you at a set time to turn your ringer back on, so you will never again miss a call.

8)       CrowdCall – Conference calls made easy. It lets you launch conference calls simply by selecting members from your contact list and pressing “Call.” No PINs, no dial-in numbers.

9)       EasySign Mobile – Electronically sign documents. You won’t have to print out a form, sign it, and scan it back in. Just use your touchscreen to write your signature, size it, and place it electronically in any document.

10)   Hootsuite – The social media app for social media. It manages all your social interactions from one interface, and offers a wide variety of features to manage your schedule, and track clients and contacts.

Here are a few more:

• HotelTonight – Only released this year, the app has moved from the US and now covers some cities in Europe as well. You can book hotels, up to 70%, very last minute.
• <a href=”http://travel.cnn.com/explorations/play/appy-traveler-373984″ target=”_blank”>Splid – A photo and audio app, that does not allow files to be edited or changed in any way. You can record terrible travel experiences and have backup proof – photos with times and dates.
• Xe Currency – Not just an accurate currency conversion app, but it provides the historic rates for the currency and can be used offline. Nice for when returning to the office after a long trip.

These are just ten among those millions of better mousetraps out there. Do you have any great apps that help your users ben extra productive?

Any others that you would like to share?

Tags: mobile apps, travel