Prize Giveaways – Vague Direction

[UPDATE: All maps are now gone, sorry!]

‘Ahoy me hearties,

It’s been quite quiet around here for a month or so, but all for good reason – there’s fun stuff coming!

In the meantime though, I was just having a clear out and found some treasure which I’d love to give away to anyone who might be able to make use of it/them. Shiver me timbers, everyone loves treasure, not just pirates.

Anyway, I have two sets of maps (unused) from Adventure Cycling Association.

There’s:

~~1) Atlantic Coast 2-6 (Windsor Locks, Connecticut to St. Augustine, Florida)~~ UPDATE: Atlantic Coast map set is now gone!
~~2) Southern Tier 1-7 (San Diego, California to St. Augustine, Florida)~~ UPDATE: Southern Tier map set is now gone!

It’d be great to give these away to someone / a party who will get a lot from them – ideally anyone who has a North American bicycle trip in the pipeline and could really use some navigational help.

If that’s you, email dave@steepmedia.com (or hit reply to this post if you’re a subscriber), put “OMG GIMME DA MAPS” in your message, say which of the sets you want, and then explain what you have planned and how these maps will help. First come first served. Will happily post to anywhere on this wonderful planet.

Cheers!

VIDEOS: Evernote Hello & Vague Direction (plus a competition to win stuff!)

COMPETITION NOW CLOSED – congratulations to the winners – enjoy your year-long Evernote Premium accounts!

[dropcap]Bit[/dropcap] of a different post today. There’s a high chance that you have a small selection of go-to apps on your phone, ones that you use day in day out and don’t really think about. It’s rare to find an app that becomes totally engrained in your everyday life – it’s always open because it’s useful, provides value and is effortless – Evernote is one of those. It’s a second brain where you can safely store your ideas, notes and thoughts. It’s the only tool I use to keep track of everything that happens on the road.

I’ve been working in partnership with the Silicon Valley folks for a while now, and some of that work has presented itself over on The Evernote Blog (read all about it here) and in this commercial about Evernote Hello – which has played a crucial role in this project so far, and is super intuitive & useful when it comes to remembering the people you meet.

And below you can see a video about how Evernote in general comes in handy on the Vague Direction project. It’d be easy to reel off all the ways that the app helps with efficiency in the video, but it’d be quite long, so other highlights that were left out are included below the video.

Web Clipper – for any articles or text from the internet, use clipper to copy the articles, then read them offline.
Image recognition is built into search. It can read text from photos / receipts / travel tix / posters etc (this blew my mind).
Skitch – for annotating photos and maps. Good for marking directions.

If you don’t use Evernote, and want to be more productive, check it out – odds are you’ll never look back.