I like this page - 360º panorama views from different places. Great stuff, and if you’re a traveller, put up your 360º pics on the page, tag it with some location information and let’s go!

Link: Panyoe.com 

[Technorati Tags: pictures - travel - Costa Rica ]

This is only possible in Japan: an artificial beach (length 300 meters!) with swell, surf board rental and roof. If the beautiful sand, the warm water and the always nice wheather is an argument, than maybe the artificial volcano with smoke and fire. The artificial beach is called Ocean Dome and is on Kyushu Island, 1.500 kilometers south of Tokyo.

[Technorati Tags: surf - artificial beach - Japan ]

I read a nice post about the mostly by tourism untouched Carribean coast of Central America - from Belize to Panama. The Carribean - synonym for mass tourism - can be still a lovely place. Forget Cancun, forget the Dominican and Jamaican Resorts, check the true side of the Carribean.

At Condé Nest you will find a great online guide (”the coast of utopia“) with lot of tips, hints and ideas what to do and what not.

[Technorati Tags: travel - news - Costa Rica ]

A user-generated content site for travelers, by travelers. Keep track of your travels, share your trip photos, reviews, and blogs with friends and family, as well as research destinations before you book a trip.

Similar to wayn.com or epic trip.

Link: Driftr

[Technorati Tags: surf - news - Costa Rica ]

Hi Everywhere! is kind of a social network / platform for local guides who offer their help and knowledge to people new in a country. It’s for free and simple to use:

1. Post your travel plan to the site
2. A local guide books your request
3. You both met
4. You both write and post pics on the site!

Check it out, it’s great! You will learn far more about a city and their people with a local guide than on your own.
Link: Hi Everywhere!
[Technorati Tags: travel guide - network - Costa Rica ]

Kango is a travel search engine, but different than Kayak or other air fare comparison services. Kango wants to help you to get your travel plan right. Once you’re where you want to go, that’s where Kango is getting interesting: normally, you would collect information from thousands of microsites (like this!) and notes from other travelers. Kango indexes all of them and with the help of semantic technology, it detects destinations, activities and so on.

At the moment it’s limited to California and Hawaii, but this will change soon.

Link: Kango

[Technorati Tags: travel search - search engine]

When planning a trip, and I mean planning, not booking, than it may be worth to have a look at airfares. Why? Airfares are very volative, that is they rise and fall over a certain peroid quickly. If you have time to follow them, it is wise to buy when they are are their lows. But how to track them? This is where Yapta comes into play.

Yapta is a plugin for IE and Firefox (Mac and Windows) which helps you to track and compare airfares for as long as you want. You can bookmark certain flights, and get messages. Handy!

Alternatives are Vayama and Farecast.

Link: Yapta

[Technorati Tags: airfare - travel ]

Docoloco has a simple idea: you know a good place to eat, to go out, to stay or to have fun, post it on Docoloco and recommend food, places, … for others - locally. You can browse for San Francisco, or Berlin in Germany as well as Melbourne in Australia.

If you need a good advise where to eat sushi, check out Docoloco. Docoloco provides you a city map including the recommendations by users, their comments and the links to theses places and businesses.
[Technorati Tags: Local search - recommendations ]

A simple, but informative mashup of data (flight information) and Google Maps is FlightWait. FlightWait is, hmm, all about air traffic above the US, indicating any flight which is delayed. You will see these flights on your screen, marked with different colors (means different delays from 0-15 min to more than 2 hrs). The data is provided by the FAA (Federeal Aviation Association).

Link: FlightWait

[Technorati Tags: air-travel - air+traffic - FAA ]

Today, I will present you a quite new VideoChat service, it’s called SeeToo and has some nice features. What’s the idea behind SeeToo?

Let’s say you’re right now at our surf beach in Costa Rica and had some great waves this morning. Your buddy made a nice video of your last ride, and you want to share it with your surfing buddies at home. Instead of sending it via email, which is not suitable due to the size of the file, and instead of uploading it on YouTube so everyone will have a look at it, you can go to SeeToo and upload the file from your PC at the internet café. The say to SeeToo to send an invitation to your friend at home. If he’s online, you can watch the videoclip together and chat about it simultaneously.

An alternative service may be Vlip and Orgoo.

Link: SeeToo

[Technorati Tags: surf - video chat - travel ]