There is never a dull moment at Geogad as we work to improve your travel experience.

Geogad has added a new feature to make your travels even more uniquely yours. Now you can create mix and match the individual tour stops on Geogad to create your own customized tours. To create your own customized tour, just sign in and click on the “Create Tour” header option. You will be presented with a two maps, one showing the available tour stops and the other showing tour stops that you have dropped and dragged onto your own tour map. After you have picked the tour stops and arranged them into your preferred route, you can save your new custom tour. It is instantly available to you and to other Geogad travelers.

Your new custom tour can be streamed to your web browser or downloaded to your favorite mobile media device. Your new custom tour is free as are all of the other tours from Geogad.

This is just one small part of making Geogad your personal mobile tour guide.

Since I did not have the right equipment for creating an iPhone app, I had more time to attend the talks than I thought I would at iPhoneDevCamp2.

The most interesting for me was the most technical. It was given by Louis Gerbarg who worked on the iPhone app, Gifter. Louis has an advantage over other iPhone developers in that he used to work at Apple. He has a very good understanding of caching issues, which was the focus of his talk. One point that is valuable to know but is slightly depressing for a beginner like me is that the simulation tools that Apple supplies may not be able to really assist a developer in fixing cache issues. These issues are absolutely critical to your user’s experience when they are using your app.

Hopefully, Apple will improve the tools. Otherwise, it will cost them and the third party developers the goodwill of their customers.

For those of you not lucky enough to get an invitation to iPhoneDevCamp, all I can say is that you really need to sign up way early next time to be sure that you can get in. But you also need to watch the main iPhoneDevCamp site. It seems many did not show, and anyone and everyone was welcome.

iPhoneDevCamp2 was really a great event here in San Francisco. We were connected to the satellite camps via video link, and they looked like they were having fun too. In the case of the SF meeting, we had free food and beer. Nothing makes code come together more than good food and really great beer.

The best part of the event for me was being literally surrounded by iPhone dev experts. It is great to be able to get an answer for a question just by asking the person next to you vs. my usual method of researching on the web for hours.

The end result was not quite what I wanted, but I did make much headway. For example, I and another camp attendee (who shall remain nameless to protect him from any AT&T or Apple wrath) did a small experiment to see if I could figure out a way around buying an iPhone without the 2-year long AT&T contract.

A little background on the experiment. My phone is currently on the AT&T network. In fact, my SIM’s card is actually an old Cingular card, but it works fine in my phone. I had already tried to buy just the iPhone without the contract at the Apple store in Palo Alto because the Internet said that I could buy the iPhone without a contract for $500. The clerk informed me that the Internet was wrong (can you believe it?). The future plans call for letting people buy the iPhone without a contract, but it is not happening yet. No one really knows when (or if) it will.

So after spending much of the day browsing 3G iPhones on eBay, my fellow camp attendee decided to test if I would really be able to use my SIM card in an activated 3G iPhone. We converted a bit of marketing swag (a metal button that you can pin to your shirt) into an unofficial iPhone SIM extraction tool. Replacing his SIM card with mine, we found that the iPhone insisted on being activated by the iTunes store before it did anything. This was really disappointing since the iPhone will, at least, surf using WiFi without any SIM card whatsoever.

The result of the experiment is that I will have to get the iPhone with contract or buy a iTouch and wait for the iPhone to be made available without the contact.

At the Astia CEO Forum meeting, I got a great review on branding and messaging. The meeting was headed by John Walsh and Matt Cooke from Iron Creative Communication. If you visit San Francisco, you may have seen their branding campaign for the deYoung Museum. They also worked with Astia on a tight time budget to come up with its branding message.

I really enjoyed the meeting, and John and Matt did a great job keeping us focused. (It is not easy to keep over a dozen high energy entrepreneurs focused.) The idea behind branding is to figure out your targeted message and how you will get that out through your branding. For example, if Geogad’s target message is “Your personal mobile tour guide that can guide you around travel destinations around the world with the mobile devices that you carry with you”, then its branding might be “fun, ease to use, anytime, anywhere”.

Yesterday at the Mobile Internet SIG of SD Forum featured a talk by a new mobile social site called Wichro. Its product is called ZKOUT. It is currently in private beta that became unexpectedly public when ZKOUT was selected as an Apple staff pick. They have had about 2000 users sign up a day. Not bad for a private beta. Just wait until it goes public.

What is interesting about ZKOUT is that it has been designed to run on the regular web and three mobile platforms, low-res mobile Internet, high-res mobile Internet and a mobile site customized for the iPhone. They decided not to create an iPhone app but to use the mobile web instead.

You can completely create your account on the mobile web without having to create a account on the regular web. With Facebook, you create your Facebook profile on the web and then link your account to a cell phone and network. ZKOUT seems to get around this by completely separating the different layers of the site, such as email, mobile Internet, SMS, MMS, etc. from each other. As a result, they can run on up to 10k phones. They are able to run on 10K phones because they have access to an online list of cell phones and cell phone features that let them tailor the mobile web site to each phone. One such site with this type of info is Phone Index.

The speaker from Wichro was not clear on how they plan to make money. Mobile ads were mentioned as was subscriptions. I could not tell if Wichro was trying to keep their revenue model secret or if they are still working it out. My guess is that they are still sorting it out.