What good is a travel assistant that doesn’t go with you on the road? One of the gaping holes in Rearden Commerce’s enterprise travel application was the lack of a mobile version. Now it has one, starting with the Blackberry. (Rearden is a service aimed at corporate road warriors, after all). Apps for the iPhone and general Web browsers are on their way later this year. Once Android phones launch, it can easily port its mobile app to those as well. Interestingly, the company is on the fence about developing an app for Windows Mobile because of its declining market share.
Rearden is tied into your corporate travel profile, so it knows your complete itinerary—flights, hotels, rental cars, dinner reservations, basketball game tickets. Any time a change is made to your itinerary (flight delay, gate change, new hotel), the change is synced to the mobile app, which you can also look at offline while on a plane. So if you use a Blackberry and your company uses Rearden (soon to be available to all JPMorgan Chase customers as well), everything you need is right there in your mobile phone. It can also tell you the weather where you are, gives you click-to-call links for any phone number, and lets you e-mail any itinerary segment through the Blackberry e-mail client.
Features that Rearden is working on for the future include letting you rate restaurants and see how co-workers or Zagats or OpenTable rates those same restaurants, so you can see which nearby restaurants have been highly rated. It is also developing support for airline or event tickets sent as a bar code image to your phone.
With the $100 million it just raised Rearden can afford go after the mobile market aggressively. Now, where is that iPhone app?
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Who cares about the iPhone?
Why is it that every god-damned article having anything to do with mobiles has to ref the iPhone now? 99% of “road warriors” will be using BB or WM for the moment….
Rearden Commerce’s Personal Assistant is an interesting product and similar to TripIt in that they both offer a personal travel assistant to simplify our lives. But it appears that Rearden is focused on Fortune 500 companies and not the consumer. TripIt is perfect for the consumer and it’s free. Do you know how much Rearden charges? I couldn’t find anything on their site that gave pricing. I’m assuming it’s a per seat model. And the $100 million will certainly give them the juice needed to aggressively go after the mobile market.
Trip-it is to Rearden as Yahoo circa 1995 is to Google today. Rearden lets you book and change reservations for all types of stuff, Trip-It just tells you what you’ve already done and told it about, no bookings, no change of bookings, no non-public outside information added (everyone has weather and flight delay information).
Great.