A little machine that shocks your muscles promises to prevent jet lag if used during a flight. Although it did soothe our shoulders, a sleep specialist isn’t convinced.

Ian Cumming at the WorldNomads office in Sydney

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Ian Cumming is a big nerd. He’s also a passionate traveler. These two traits combined can only result in something happy.

I’m a fan of Travellr.com, the website that Cumming, an Aussie gent, co-founded. I use it almost every time when I’m going to a new place. I have a link to it on the front page of this blog.

It’s a questions-and-answers service devoted exclusively for travelers. Ask a question about a place and it will tap into its network of self-appointed experts to answer it.

It has grown impressively since I started using it a year ago, going from a few scattered users to a solid membership. Questions get answered in a matter of minutes. This is probably one of the reasons WorldNomads, an Australian travel insurance firm with a strong social media strategy, acquired Travellr.

Disclosure: I blog occasionally for WorldNomads in exchange for travel insurance. However, I was using Travellr before this agreement.

I paid Cumming a visit when I stopped in Sydney back in April. I finally got around to this short interview.

Why did you found Travellr?

I had been traveling overseas and found that my most memorable experiences came from hanging out with locals and going to the places they liked to go. This got me thinking about how I could connect travelers with locals in order to tap into relevant, local travel advice.

This was back in 2007, and I discovered that there wasn’t much in the way of a real-time question and answer network for travelers. So I decided to build my own network, and so we founded Travellr.com.

There are plenty of established of Q&A services, like Yahoo Answers and Aardvark. Travelers and can also get their doubts answered in forums like Lonely Planet’s ThornTree. What made you think you could do better?

Q&A is a certainly a hot topic on the web at the moment and there are many companies trying to move into this space and find a way to monetize it. As well as the services you mentioned, there’s also Quora, Facebook Questions, Ask.com Answers, and TripAdvisor Answers.

The fact that all these Q&A services are launching validates the market for Travellr and shows that consumers are looking for more tailored services than just plain forums. We’ve spent the last two years researching and developing our Q&A engine around answering travel questions – the system is location aware, real-time, scalable, and learns from user’s questions and answers.

Our aim is to get a relevant answer from our network as quickly as possible, and I think from a technology point of view we are one of the leaders in this field, especially for travel questions.

What kind of questions do you see most often?

Our questions are really varied. There are obviously many questions about hotels and restaurants. But I think when people ask our network harder or more obscure questions, it really brings out the experts who are keen to share their knowledge.

Two months in India: where should I go?

I haven’t been – but here’s a few tips from our Q&A’s on Travellr.com:

* See the grand monuments in Delhi and Lucknow built by the Mughals and nawabs.
* 3-4 days in Dehli, a couple in Lucknow and a day in Agra for the Taj Mahal.
* Explore the Jimalays and visit Uttarakhand from Dehli and go to Kausani or Ranikhet.
* Visit Mumbai and spend a few days on some beaches in Tarkarli or Goa.
* For yoga and meditation, visit Rishakesh. Also Dharamsala is a good spot for Vipassna Meditation, the home of the Dalai Lama.

What kind of travelers use Travellr? Backpackers? Resort lovers? Tour group groupies?

Most people who use Travellr are seeking a more authentic experience, so we seem to have a range of backpackers, seasoned travelers, expats, tour guides, and independent travelers. I think the only common thing between our members it that they all love to travel and share their travel experience and knowledge!

Why oh why are all the questions on Indonesia only about Bali?

Bali is a popular place for Australia (of which we have a large membership), so it’s naturally a place that gets asked about a lot. Feel free to ask a question about somewhere in else in Indonesia

There’s some repetition on the site. People tend to ask questions that were already answered. How do you prevent clutter?

If you ask a question that’s already been asked, we recommend it to you when you’re asking. (See here for an example of this in action).

To prevent clutter, we’re looking at some other ways to help people find the best content quickly in search results, such as an ‘interesting’ or ‘best rated’ search filter.

If I had to pick three Middle Eastern countries to visit, which ones would you suggest?

I haven’t been to the Middle East, but our most discussed locations in this area are Iran, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, so I’d look into going to these places!

You’ve probably answered 4 out of 5 questions I’ve asked on the site. How much of Travellr content was created exclusively by Ian Cumming?

Haha! That’s because you asked about places that I know about, and Travellr recommended your questions to me! There are thousands of questions and answers on Travellr and my answers don’t even make up 1% of the total content-base. I’m constantly amazed by the amount of travel knowledge we can tap into on our network.

My spell-check wants to know: Is it ‘traveller’ or ‘traveler’?

Where can I eat the best phở in Vietnam?

Not sure, ask!

When it comes to mobile travel apps, it’s a buyer’s market at the junkyard. There is not shortage of half-baked, vaguely useful apps that you may use once or twice then forget they existed.

So many location-based apps that suggest attractions close to you have incomplete and often outdated databases. Place-specific guides also tend to be limited, often listing the most obvious attractions.

An app like ProGuides has useful general information about a place, but like so many travel apps, it’s an abridged Lonely Planet in mobile form.

So it was a rare pleasure to test out a travel app that really gets mobility and all its possibilities: location, user-generated content, navigation, and augmented reality.

Disclosure: mTrip offered me a free iPhone app for review. The app sells for $5.99 in Apple’s App Store.

First of all, mTrip is not for every traveler. Because its city-specific guides are so complete, it may feel like cheating for more adventurous types who like getting lost in strange new places.

What sets mTrip apart is the itinerary advisor. The app asks you what kind of attractions interest you by using sliders. For example, I can tell it to suggest lots of parks and museums, but go easy on the religious sites. I then punch in the number of days I’ll be in the city, and it creates a customized itinerary for me. Ingeniously, it can organize the itinerary based on your starting position (like your hotel) and

by distance to minimize walking times. You can also specify the intensity of the itinerary, that is, how many attractions it should cram into one day. As such, mTrip acts like a tour planner without the large groups and cheesy T-shirts. You also have the freedom to change the itinerary anytime.

I tested the app for New York City, and the list of attractions, shops, bars and restaurants is impressive. mTrip gets its content from Germany-based Falk CIS, a firm specializing in mobile navigation and travel maps.

Users can also add new places and rate them.

The app also has an Augmented Reality function which I didn’t get to test, as I was neither in New York and don’t have the iPhone 4 or 3GS with the required video camera.

In all, mTrip is ideal for the traveler who likes to know where he’s going but would like to lose the bulky guidebook. Independent travelers who wear T-shirts with “Losers plan it” written in the Lonely Planet logo will find it an electronic babysitter.

The app is currently available for 17 major world cities.

Another reason I like mTrip: they are based in my hometown of Montreal.

Further reading:
Review: mTrip iPhone app uses augmented reality (AP)