trips

AUSTIN, Texas--After three days jammed into buses headed here from cities across the country and four days perfecting their pitches, the winners of the second-annual Startup Bus competition claimed victory tonight.

If you haven't been following the happenings of the Startup Bus, 38 teams of so-called "buspreneurs" departed on six buses from San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, and New York last Tuesday, headed for the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) here. Each team, formed mainly from strangers aboard their bus, faced this challenge: conceive of an idea, and take the time from departure to arrival in Austin … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--When he started making his new film "Rango," director Gore Verbinski knew he wanted it to look and feel much like many of the Westerns it evokes: gritty, dirty, and sweaty.

"He wanted to be able to smell the breath of the characters," said Kevin Martel, the film's associate animation supervisor. "The feeling was that if you were to take a deep breath, you'd inhale all that dust and dirt, and you'd probably start coughing."

All joking aside, creating the look of a traditional Western was one of the biggest … Read more

Summer may seem like it's a long way off, but over here at Geek Gestalt, it already feels like it's just around the corner.

That's in large part because I'm already deep in the planning for Road Trip 2011, which will be my sixth annual journey in search of some of the best destinations around for technology, military, architecture, science, nature, and so on.

For the past five years, the project has been in the United States, and I've had the opportunity to visit the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, the Southeast, the Rocky Mountain region, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If you were walking down Second Street here yesterday morning, and thought you might be losing your mind, let me reassure you: Those really were life-size Lego Chewbacca and R2-D2 models and the world's-largest Lego Millennium Falcon.

On March 31, Legoland California will pull back the wraps on its brand-new "Star Wars" Miniland, an all-new interactive area at the amusement park that will feature more than 2,000 individual models from the George Lucas-created universe.

And yesterday, as part of a small tour to promote the new attraction, several Legoland personnel swung through CNET's headquarters … Read more

TripIt, the little traveler's help app that launched in the fall of 2007, is finally getting acquired. Business travel and expense management firm Concur (Nasdaq: CNQR) is putting up $120 million for the start-up.

In June 2008, I said that Tripit was clearly an acquisition play, not a long-term business. I did get my timing wrong, though: I thought they'd be acquired within the year.

I talked with TripIt co-founder Greg Brockway and Concur President Rajeev Singh today about the deal, and the prospects for the company. They want to have their businesses meet in the middle of … Read more

There are a great number of travel Web sites on the Internet that let you search flights, hotel listings, and car rentals, but if you want a quick way to get that info while on the go, check out the new Kayak for iPhone app. Though Kayak has been around for some time, the latest version for iPhone includes a completely redesigned interface and faster search results making it much easier to get your travel plans in order quickly. Like the older version, Kayak works seamlessly with the Kayak.com Web site.

Instead of the older tilelike interface, Kayak has … Read more

There's all sorts of information being processed by your car's sensors and computers to which the average driver simply isn't privy. Griffin wants to give you a peek behind the scenes with its CarTrip OBD monitoring system and CleanDrive app.

The hardware consists of a small CarTrip module that plugs into your vehicle's onboard diagnostics (OBD-II) port and collects data from the car's computer, storing to its internal memory or an optional SD card expansion. The unit is able to then connect wirelessly to an iOS or Android device via Bluetooth and transmit that data … Read more

SANTA CRUZ, Calif.--When I lived in this beach town on the central California coast in the early 1990s, I loved visiting a stunning local state park where each winter you could find more than 120,000 monarch butterflies swarming, clustering, and flying everywhere you looked.

It was an awesome sight.

Today, a visit to the monarch grove at Natural Bridges State Beach reveals a much grimmer situation--just 2,000 monarchs during the peak of their "overwintering" season, the period from late October through early March when the colorful butterflies rest in the trees here, protected from the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If you've ever taken Lincoln Boulevard through the Presidio here, you almost certainly didn't know that you passed within feet of one of the best-preserved World War II-era anti-aircraft machine gun nests in the country.

In fact, all around the Presidio are dozens of these original trenches and fox holes, most of which are completely grown over with weeds and other vegetation, but many of which still have the pillars on which Army crews once mounted their .50 caliber guns in preparation for an aerial or sea-based attack that, thankfully, never came.

As part of my Road Trip at Home … Read more