Free airport WiFi for Nintendo 3DS users from Boingo Wireless

by Jessica Marati on

Boingo Wireless and Nintendo have teamed up to bring Nintendo 3DS owners free airport WiFi access in 42 airports across the United States, including Chicago O’Hare, New York JFK, and Houston George Bush Intercontinental.

The Nintendo 3DS is already a great travel companion, with its open-source Internet browser and built-in camera, not to mention a catalog of hundreds of addictive games featuring real 3D graphics. This new feature is one of several included in a system update that became available for download yesterday.

“Nintendo 3DS is our most connected device ever, and this agreement will allow people to stay entertained while they’re on the go,” said Zach Fountain, Nintendo of America’s Director of Strategic Partnerships. “Whether it’s accessing special offers and content, downloading items from the Nintendo eShop, receiving surprise SpotPass content, or automatically receiving 3D videos from the Nintendo Video service, there have never been more reasons to connect.”

Free airport WiFi from Boingo will also include access to Nintendo’s SpotPass feature, which allows the system to detect wireless hotspots and download special content from Nintendo, including exclusive promotions, 3D videos, and add-on game content.

Boingo manages wireless access in more than 400,000 locations around the world, including airports, hotel chains, cafes, restaurants, convention centers, and metropolitan hot zones. Their service generally costs $7.95 per 24 hour period in the United States, with monthly unlimited plans starting at $9.95.

Colombia’s Lost City gets long-term preservation plan

by Sean McLachlan on


Last year, Gadling’s Aaron Hotfelder braved the mountainous jungles of Colombia to visit Ciudad Perdida, the nation’s famous “Lost City“.

These remote ruins were built by the Tayrona, a culture that thrived from 200 AD to c.1650 AD. More than 250 of their stone settlements have been found in a 2,000 square-mile area. The Lost City is the largest Tayrona site known with more than 200 structures over 80 acres. One highlight is a strange carving, shown below, that appears to be a map of the city.

Unknown to the outside world until the 1975, the site now attracts an increasing number of tourists willing to make the five-day trek, and this is destabilizing some of the structures. Erosion and local narcotics traffickers are also taking their toll, Popular Archaeology reports.

Now the Global Heritage Fund has teamed up with the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History, which runs the Teyuna-Ciudad Perdida Archaeological Park, to preserve the site. The area will be fully mapped and examined, and they’ll create a management plan to reduce natural and man-made damage to the site. One good aspect of the plan is that it’s incorporating the local indigenous people. They’ve always known about the Lost City and consider it sacred, so their input will be crucial to ensure its future.

Photos courtesy William Neuheisal.

Gusta: your online community for food events, worldwide

by Laurel Miller on

What happens when two former food-loving Airbnb.com employees get together and create a company? You get Gusta, an online global community of chefs, venues, food enthusiasts, and events.

Founders Chris Collins and Carly Chamberlain wanted an outlet for world and armchair travelers to find out about food events and dining locales in specific regions, and enable them to purchase tickets or make reservations directly from their site.

How it works: industry peeps go to Gusta and post events for supper clubs, food tours, food trucks, cheese shops, wine bars, cooking classes, pop-up and traditional restaurants, food festivals, event spaces, or any other creative food endeavors. You go to Gusta, create a free account, select your city of choice, and see what’s going on when you’re in town.

Just looking for a great meal? Use Gusta to find, review, and book dining experiences in your home city and when you travel. Want to automatically receive a $10 coupon for any one event posted on Gusta? Click here. Happy holidays!

Does Online Sharing Diminish Real Life Experiences?

by Mike Barish on


When we travel, we love to share our experiences. Whether via blog posts, tweets, Facebook status updates or photo sharing apps, broadcasting experiences – particularly those involving travel and food – has become as much a part of life as, well, life itself. But is that a good thing? Does constantly live-sharing experiences diminish the experiences themselves? Watching this video for the new Evernote Food app left me feeling a bit overwhelmed by social media.

Don’t get me wrong; I share photos of my meals and tweet about my travels as much, if not more, than the next guy. I’m guilty of this. But something about this video – and the app itself – has me feeling that we might have reached a tipping point in social media.

We already run the risk of seeing our trips through viewfinders rather than our own eyes. Now we seem to be sacrificing conversations and interaction with the people around us for popularity online. When meals are placed on tables across the world, servers are ignored, dining companions are told not to touch anything and smartphones emerge to document the food from all angles. Only after the appropriate number of glamour shots have been posted to Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and now, apparently, Food, can people actually, you know, eat.

At some point, we all need to remember that the urge to document and share our experiences is born from the fact that the experiences are enjoyable to us first. In order for our online social networks to live vicariously through us, we first need to do some living. If you’re only doing activities for the stories or clout (or worse, Klout), are you really doing anything at all?

So, maybe we should put down the smartphones and cameras for a bit, take a break from sharing everything online and enjoy the company of the people sitting right next to us. Savor ours meal for our own sake. If we don’t, it’s a slippery slope to this becoming a reality:

Let’s create memories that live more vividly and richly in our minds than they ever could in a status update. Life was in HD long before our cameras were.

Photo by Flickr user adactio.

Thieves steal rhino horn from Paris museum

by Kraig Becker on

Earlier this week, two people entered a museum in Paris, used some kind of gas to neutralize the guards, and made off with a rhino horn from one of the stuffed animals on display. This was the fourth such robbery in Europe this year, as thieves look to sell the valuable horns on the black market in Asia.

The incident took place on Tuesday at the Museum of Hunting and Nature in the Marais district of Paris. Around noon, the two individuals entered the building used what is described as “paralyzing” gas on the guards, and then proceed to remove the rhino horn from the display. When they had claimed their prize, they disappeared into the streets, and at this time, there are no leads in the case.

Rhino horns continue to be a hot commodity in Asia, where they are used in traditional medicines. Because of the demand there, a single horn can fetch as much as $100,000 on the open market, which has contributed to the rise in thefts from European museums this year. Worse yet however, is the continued poaching of the animals throughout Africa, resulting in the black rhino recently being declared extinct in West Africa.

I’m guessing these thieves don’t care about the source of their rhino horn and that stealing them from museums is just out of convenience. If they lived in Africa, they would probably be brutally slaying the animals there as well.

[Photo credit: Selber Fotografiert via WikiMedia]