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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