Chain-less Bicycle

Tempo

Performance Hybrid Bike 
$849.00 SALE $809.00

[+] Click to Enlarge                                   [+] More Pictures

The Tempo is designed with more sporty riding in mind. This bike offers the perfect blend of performance and versatility for commuting and recreational riding and touring. The Tempo combines Shimano's Nexus 8-speed Premium gearing (identifiable by its red stripe) with an RST CT-Free front suspension fork with 75mm of travel to provide an incredibly smooth, quiet and thoroughly enjoyable ride. 

This hybrid bike is a combination road bike and off-road bike. Built on a 700C road bike frame, this bike offers 3 inches of travel on the RST front suspension fork, 1" rise handlebars for control and safety, 1 1/4" tires for smoother, quicker rides, and Shimano's Inter-8 gearing to deliver a smooth, enjoyable, worry-free ride. The Tempo's 8-speeds are controlled using Shimano's Rapid Fire Shifter, offering fast and precise transitions thorugh a versatile range of gearing (30-92 gear inches) for tackling hills as well as cruising at fast speeds. The RST front fork also offers a lock-out feature for times when you want a stiffer feel from the front fork. Most of all, with its fully enclosed shaft drive and internal gearing, there is no grease to get on your hands or clothes and no derailleurs or sprockets to clean and maintain. This is why the Tempo is a perfect bike for all-weather commuting or just getting away from it all for a while. In short, this bike is designed for years of fun-filled worry-free riding, without the maintenance and greasy mess of chains and derailleurs. 

Tempo is the perfect choice for someone who wants the comfort and convenience of a h

Google Expands Its Wiki Approach to Map Making (India Edition)

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by Erick Schonfeld on August 27, 2008 at TechCrunch

When it comes to the availability of good mapping data, not all parts of the world are created equal. That's why Google is taking a wiki approach to filling out the white spaces on its maps, particularly in developing nations. Back in June, it launched Map Maker for a small group of island nations where there isn't great existing cartography data. But now it's added India to the countries that can be modified on Google Maps. As Google gains more experience with this experiment, more countries may be added in the future. Although it is starting in regions that have poor map data, hopefully it will figure out a way to add this capability for every region of the world. (Even in the U.S., which is not yet editable in this fashion, Google Maps is not perfect).

Map Maker lets anyone add or edit roads, points of interests, and other features on Google Maps. You can mark tourist destinations (like the Taj Mahal), restaurants, factories, helipads, even shrubbery. There is a drop-down list of dozens of feature types to choose from for consistent tagging and easy searchability. Map Maker also lets you define particular regions and neighborhoods by drawing or tracing them using the satellite imagery as your guide. UnlikeGoogle My Maps, any changes to Map Maker are automatically added to Google Maps for everyone to see (although Google reserves the right to moderate contributions).

Here is a video from Google India explaining the service and a list of the 57 countries that can now be edited in Map Maker (image below) .

Number of travelers booking online down. What’s up?

Fewer leisure travelers are booking online, because they're frustrated by online travel reservation sites, according to e-commerce research by eMarketer.

This year US travel sales booked online will reach $105 billion, up 12% from 2007.

Marketer forecasts that US online leisure and unmanaged business travel sales (including airline, hotel, rental car, vacation package, intercity rail and cruise) will reach $105 billion. Furthermore, from 2007 to 2012, sales will increase at an 11.6% average annual rate.

Even though online travel sales are growing, fewer travelers are booking their trips online.

"The fact that fewer travelers are booking online is not due to economic concerns—online travel bookers are an affluent demographic—it is caused by frustrations related to the planning and booking capabilities of online travel agencies," says Jeff Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, US Online Travel: Planning and Booking. "This, in turn, is spurring a renewed appreciation for the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional travel agents."

Get the full story at eMarketer

Spining your gears

Earthscape's iPhone App Puts The Earth In Your Pocket

Posted at TechCrunch: 22 Aug 2008 09:47 AM PDT

There is no Google Earth app yet for the iPhone, but Earthscape has released the next-best thing: Earthscape Basic. The app is now available in the iTunes store for $10, and puts a little globe in your pocket that you can spin around and zoom into specific locations. It shows where you are based on your GPS coordinates, and highlights locations with Wikipedia entries (and lets you read those entries as well). As cool as it looks, though, it is less functional than a preview last May suggested it would be.

Frank Taylor at the Google Earth Blog takes the app through the paces in the video above. As he points out, there is no search capability, support for standard KML data sets, or accelerometer support. So you don't really get much more out of the app than you can already get from Google Maps on the iPhone (which comes with a pretty awesome satellite view and search). As a standalone app, you can spin the earth and scroll through landscapes faster than waiting for Google Maps to update its data over the air. Is that really worth $10? (No, but I still want it).

Update: Earthscape CEO Tom Churchill says that the app will gain more features through future upgrades:

The application itself is quite basic (hence the name), but will see a number of feature additions over the next several months, as we include suggestions for improvement from users and look to take advantage of what a virtual globe can do in a mobile context.

He also notes that while the app maintains a cache of recently seen landscape "tiles," up to thousands of them, it does rely on the network to download new information. So it is dependent on the network for its performance, and works best with WiFi and 3G.

Lessing Travel

Galileo, Worldspan and Amadeus are all reporting a softness in bookings for the U.S. as well as other regions, including Europe and Asia. The trend has been developing since the first quarter, Travelport GDS officials said, but has recently accelerated.

Travelport GDS today said booking trends in the United States for both its Galileo and Worldspan properties continued to soften through the second quarter and into the third, noting the softness—largely confined to the Americas in the first quarter—has spread to other regions, including Europe and Asia.

Other GDS executives recently noted similar booking trends. In North America, "It's relatively flat on the TMC side," Amadeus group vice president of the multinational customer group Gillian Gibson said last month. "It differs by region. The U.S. suffers the most followed by Asia, except for Australia because of all the mining and exploration companies' business travel. Europe and the Middle East are still growing."

Get the full story at BTNonline

Travel hardy

ShermansTravel Media Experiencing Rapid Growth

ShermansTravel.com Announces Relaunch of Popular Web Site, Sherman's Travel Magazine to Increase Circulation and Frequency

Last update: 4:12 p.m. EDT Aug. 5, 2008

NEW YORK, Aug 05, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- ShermansTravel Media announces a major redesign of its popular travel Web site, ShermansTravel.com, as well as plans to increase frequency and circulation of Sherman's Travel magazine.

Increased expert content and editor-vetted deals, along with enhanced functionality and improved design all help to firmly position ShermansTravel.com as the online leader in expert-recommended travel deals and information. Distinguished by fiercely independent research and a stable of hundreds of expert writers based around the globe, ShermansTravel.com is uniquely positioned to educate consumers on thousands of locations, and then to direct them to the absolute best travel deals to these destinations. Only ShermansTravel.com has the ability to recommend deals and then link consumers directly to the best means to book their travel, often sifting through hundreds of deals to bring them hard-to-find specials from major providers like Travelocity and Orbitz.

Launched in 2002, ShermansTravel.com boasts 3.24 million unique visitors in June 2008, making it #8 among all travel information web sites in the world. This number is nearly triple the unique viewers last year at this time, according to comScore. The newly relaunched ShermansTravel.com boasts new design, simplified navigation, and the addition of 300 comprehensive ShermansTravel Guides for cities, regions, and countries in the United Stated and around the world, written by renowned travel experts and fully vetted and edited by ShermansTravel.com editors and writers.

Says ShermansTravel.com Editorial Director Arabella Bowen, "We're proud to be considered one of the top travel sites by millions of sophisticated consumers. One of our biggest challenges was competing out of the gate with so many sites that had decades of content to draw on. At both ShermansTravel.com and Sherman's Travel magazine, we started fresh with a new premise that people want to travel smart but need help sifting through the vast options available to them at all price points."

As Sherman's Travel magazine goes into its third year in print, ShermansTravel Media also announces plans to increase both the circulation and frequency of the magazine, to take effect in early 2009. The quarterly publication plans to increase to 6 issues/year, and will raise circulation from 200,000 to 250,000 due to increased consumer demand for its unique focus on smart luxury values. The only magazine to address the Smart Luxury category, Sherman's Travel magazine speaks to those who seek 4- and 5-star luxury vacations, but want to travel smartly.

"We're proud at ShermansTravel Media that the market is recognizing and embracing our unique contributions to the travel space both in print and online. Our online visitors and our print subscribers value the intelligence behind our content, our diversity of offerings, and the comprehensive expert advice that we give them. This combination distinguishes us from all of the other travel media out there today," said James H. Sherman, Founder and CEO of ShermansTravel Media. "We're here to save people time and to find the best travel experiences for our consumers, and they appreciate that," he adds.

Research shows that most travelers who book online visit at least four sites before they make a purchase. Now, the new ShermansTravel.com aims to become the one-stop travel site for research, comparison shopping, and proceeding directly to booking. The largest publisher of editor-selected travel deals and independent expert travel advice online is also among the top travel sites on the internet.

ShermansTravel.com also has approximately 1,000 editor-vetted travel deals representing the best the web has to offer, culled from tens of thousands of offers from more than 250 trusted online travel providers. Enhanced search results, varied destination photos, Top 10 lists, Spotlight Articles, Perfect Trips, Today's Top Deals, Slideshows, as well as access to content from Sherman's Travel magazine and Smart Luxury travel deals and advice round out the site.

ABOUT SHERMANS TRAVEL MEDIA

ShermansTravel Media is a leading travel media company that publishes ShermansTravel.com and Sherman's Travel magazine. Founded by James Sherman in 2002 to help travelers make sense of the overwhelming number of online travel specials, ShermansTravel.com is now the web's most trusted source for editor-screened travel deals and destination advice. Sherman's Top 25, a free weekly e-newsletter published every Wednesday, recently surpassed four million subscribers. The company also has syndication partnerships with leading web sites, including MSNBC.com, MSN.com, USAToday.com, and Yahoo!. Building on its trusted online brand, ShermansTravel Media launched Sherman's Travel, the first magazine serving sophisticated, value-conscious travelers, in October 2006.

     Media Contacts:      Roland Alonzi/Joanne Bloomstein, MMG Mardiks      Tel. 212.219.0759, ext: 6765/646-237-4519      ralonzi@mmgmardiks.com/jbloomstein@mmgmardiks.com