I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been roaming the streets of some obscure place when travelling desperately searching for an ATM.

For some reason I ALWAYS run out of cash when I can’t find anyone I can communicate with to ask for directions, or I’ll be in a place where announcing that I’m about to take out a stack of money doesn’t seem such a good idea.

Visa’s global ATM Locator helps you locate Visa ATMs in over 170 countries. You simply select the country and city you’re in and the site will list the Visa ATMs found in that place. You can also search by country and post code, although this is probably less useful for a traveller.

Along with the list of ATMs and their addresses, for some places you also get presented with a handy map pinpointing the ATMs. I ran a few random searches in Denmark, Kenya, the UK and the US to check when you get the map.

All the US and UK searches I ran included the map. It was more random with the searches for ATMs in Denmark. I was only sure to be presented with a map, if I used a post code. All my Kenya searches only resulted in a list, no map. I don’t know any Kenyan post codes, so possibly the map would be presented, if you searched on a Kenyan post code.

Map or no map, I’ve already bookmarked the site for use on future travels. I’ve checked the service on my PSP and while the site surprisingly hasn’t been designed with mobile access in mind, it worked OK. I’ve yet to check it on any other mobile devices, so if you test it on your pda or phone, please leave a comment to let us know how the site performs.

Try the Visa ATM Locator.

Less than two weeks ago yet another service, rsizr, was added to the long list of online photo editing services, but this one is a bit different. rsizr allows you to crop and scale your photos like the other services, but it also allows you to resize your photos using seam carving, a new, smarter way of resizing.

Normally when you resize a photo, you make everything in the photo smaller. With seam carving, however, your photo gets analysed in order to identify the key areas of your photo. As the photo is being resized the less important areas are removed, leaving more room for the key areas in the final photo.

Seam carving sounded rather hocus-pocus to me at first, but rsizr makes child’s play of using this new technology with its retarget function. I uploaded the photo of a spider that I published a few days back, adjusted a few sliders, waited while rsizr created the seams and then dragged the photo to the size I wanted.

Here is the result:

The original photo prior to retargeting:

The photo after retargeting:

I then tried to achieve a similar resize by using two more traditional methods, scaling without maintaining proportions and cropping.

The photo after scaling without maintaining proportions:

The photo cropped to the same size:

As you can tell from the photos above, scaling without maintaining proportions unsurprisingly distorted the photo, whereas cropping the photo to the desired size meant losing more of the spider than was the case with retargeting.

Have a play with rsizr, it really is quite amazing what you can achieve with retargeting. If you want to learn more about seam carving Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, the people behind the technique, have put together a video that explains it all.

What is Zangoa and who is behind the project?

Zangoa is a very innovative search engine for rural tourism, based on maps. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to find rural and ecotourism accommodation and discover its environment (nice villages, museums to visit, restaurants, photos, sights, etc.). The information comes partly from Internet sources like Wikipedia and Panoramio and partly from the points that owners and visitors add to Zangoa in a collaborative way. All these Points of Interest around accommodations, allow travellers to make the right decision when planning their holidays, and help them discover interesting spots to visit.

At this moment the Zangoa team is formed by two web developers and one tourism expert, all of them from Barcelona, and we expect to grow as Zangoa grows.

What inspired you to create Zangoa?

The sum of three factors: I have a web development company, my parents have a nice rural house near Barcelona and I love working with Google Maps.

It started a year ago, experimenting during nights and spare time with Google Maps and their capabilities. As a traveller, I had a particular idea about what I expected from a tourism website, and, at the same time, as a web developer, I wanted to do something useful and new.

I knew very well the functional features that some other web portals about Rural Tourism offered, and I was thinking about something different, something that allowed travellers to find a place to sleep using maps. And, the most important thing, a site that provided them with complete information about the surroundings.

The project started as a personal, professional hobby, but later on we decided to change it into a company product, and now we have something very nice.

What does “zangoa” mean?

The word comes from a basque proverb “non gogoa, han zangoa”, which means “where the mind goes, the legs follow”. We would like to be as useful as a local guide is for travellers and bring them where their mind had gone.

Who should use Zangoa?

Everybody who wants to spent their holidays in a nice place in a natural environment. But Zangoa’s main target is the active traveller, people who combine adventure, culture and ecotourism. People who like to discover nice places with local restaurants, museums, monuments, mountains, etc.

Zangoa goes further than other tourism websites go. Most of them only provide you with information about the accommodation but you don’t have a precise idea about the area you are going to visit. Zangoa helps you to make the right decision thanks to its complementary information.

How much does it cost to use Zangoa?

Everybody can use Zangoa free of charge, and also the owners can list their rural accommodations free of charge. But if an owner wants to offer extended information, with accomodation features, photos, description, show Points Of Interest, etc, they can do it for an annual fee of EUR 52.

Do you have any new features in the pipeline?

Of course, we have a list with a lot of new features, but at this moment we are focused on Zangoa’s marketing. One thing we want to offer soon are embeddable maps with Points of Interest, to be used on the accommodation’s website with a simple copy & paste action.

We are also working hard on translations in languages like French, Italian, Portuguese and German. In fact, a website like Zangoa is never finished.

Note

Anni Poulsen: Zangoa is already available in English and Spanish. Make sure you pay Zangoa a visit if you are looking for rural accommodation in Spain.

While other travellers’ photos can be good resources for learning about a destination, there is nothing like the live streaming of a webcam to tell you what a place is really like.

You may have to spend some time online searching for webcams, but sites such as Camvista and webcams.travel provide maps and links to destinations with cameras, which can help you find the right camera.

Some webcams are of no greater use than a still image and the quality can be a case of hit-and-miss, but cameras such as this Picadilly Circus webcam in London or this one in Rome can give you a real feel of a place.

Hotel webcams can be really useful for travellers to check out the immediate surroundings of a hotel. This hotel webcam in London should put your mind at ease about the immediate environment of the hotel. The webcam of this Palma de Mallorca hotel allows you to check out the vibe of the pool area, before you get there yourself.

I find that many hotels have either yet to catch on to the idea of a webcam or they simply don’t dare showing potential guests what the area is really like. Of course you can always zoom in close in Google Maps or Google Earth to make sure your hotel is not situated right next to a polluting factory.

Before you rush off to search for a webcam at your next travel destination, let me leave you with a link to my absolute favourite webcam at the moment – africam.com, which provides live streaming of African wildlife.

I’ve been watching their brilliant live Nkorho Pan Stream as I’ve been writing this, and so far I’ve seen a jacka, two warthogs, an impala and right now two monkeys drinking from a waterhole. I cannot think of a more inspiring way to make travellers want to visit Africa.

Update – GMT 16:12: oooh a giraffe right now at Nkorho Pan Stream

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