Category Archives: Reviews

Inside 3D Printing Santa Clara 2014 Recap

We finally landed in San Francisco after two long flights. First one from Bangkok to Dubai took only 7 hours, and then another 15 hours from Dubai to San Francisco, where we continued by taxi to Santa Clara. Flights went well, luckily I got some sleep, and felt alright despite the 14 hours time difference. We stayed in Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, the hotel attached to the conference center. It was very pleasant stay in many ways (although it was slightly freakish of them to reply with commercial messages to my instagram posts about the show). The breakfast surprisingly served more than toast, bacon and eggs, and after five days I still fitted into the same pants.

The first conference day was mainly workshops, which I didn’t attend as we were quite busy putting our booth together and organizing interview schedule for 3DPI.TV. From what I heard from some of my friends who attended, the workshops were good. We managed to get two interviews done on the first day. The first one was with the couple behind Table Top Inventing: Steve and Debby Kurti. Both very nice and professional. Steve seemed to be more of the tinkerer and Debby taking care more of the admin side of things.

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Hotel Quickly App Review

Hotel booking, especially in Thailand, can be sometimes slightly challenging. There are so many options to choose from. Not only discovering the most suitable from the endless hotel offering, but also finding where to get the best price for the chosen hotel. Usually the online hotel booking services are the places to go, as they tend to offer better prices than booking directly through the hotel website, although not always. The big players in the field of online hotel booking such as Priceline.com with Agoda and Booking.com, and Expedia with hotels.com have been dominating the scene for years, but it seems that more and more new players with different concepts are moving into the lucrative hotel booking market.

hotel booking websites

I was recently introduced to one of the new comers called Hotel Quickly. They are targeting mobile only bookings through an app, which is available for iOS, Android and BlackBerry users. The founding team behind the app is also quite convincing, including startup veterans and former Foodpanda.com executives. Hotel Quickly tapping into the fastest growing ecommerce market in Asia – smartphone users – doesn’t really come as a surprise.

Enough with the introductions; lets dig into the app review.

App overview

The concept of the Hotel Quickly app is quite simple.

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Uber Thailand App Review

Using the Bangkok taxis is like playing lottery; you never know how the experience will be. I know, I have had my shares on both sides of the coin. Some times you get the driver who speaks English, takes pride of his line of business and it shows. The car is clean and it smells fresh in the car. He drives carefully and chooses the best route.

bangkok taxis

Most of the time, however, it’s not like this. The driver (if he first of all chooses to accept you in his precious cab) can be

a) rude
b) angry at you for missing an intersection
c) takes the scenery route
d) hasn’t showered in days / smells like urine
e) suddenly stops to fill the gas during the trip / stops to take a piss on the roadside
f) overcharges you / gives you wrong change
g) drunk
h) or the worst: drives an accident

The list goes on. I’ve been through all the above and even more… So goes without saying that there would be room for improvement.

Bangkok taxis are very cheap. And unfortunately it shows in the quality of the experience. So what other options are there. BTS Skytrain and MRT Metro are my preferred options.

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3Doodler Review

Early last year I backed up a project in Kickstarter called 3Doodler. It was the first time for me to back anything on Kickstarter and to be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect. The delivery time was long, and I had almost forgotten the whole thing, until just recently, 10 months later it finally arrived. There was a bit of a mix-up with the courier company, which is more of a standard at this part of the world.

The 3Doodler, for those who are not familiar with it, is the infamous 3D printing pen that raised over $2.3 million from over 26,000 backers with their Kickstarter campaign last year. Besides the money the 3Doodler also raised a lot of questions and varying opinions. Some thought it was the best idea ever and some condemned it as a simple glue gun.

Was it just hype around an average product or have they unlocked something unique? Now that I actually have the 3Doodler, and been playing around with it, I thought I’d write a review from a non-tech user perspective. In this review I will look into the five aspects listed below. Each section will be graded 0-5, 5 being the best outcome.

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