VagabondingEntrepreneur.com

During the last month I became aware of other blogs and websites about (web)-entrepreneurs with vagabonding lifestyles. Here are some gems:

• Location Independent Living
• workingnomad.com
• mytropicalescape.com
• 4 hour work week

If you know other good related sites, please leave your comments!

This article is part of a “Immersion”-Series which will portray 3month-immersion options on different topics and in different countries.

You want to learn fighting, an effective martial art or just get fit? In Thailand you can learn thaiboxing or “muay thai” in a great immersion environment with professional teachers for a very small amount of money.

I will introduce two very good and different places here, but highly encourage you to do your own research before setting off.

Rawai Muay Thai Camp
At Rawai you train 6 hours a day, 6 days a week. A three months immersion period will give you more than 400 hours of training! According to the Rawai Gym, this is also the ideal training time:

The ideal length of time to be training in Thailand is 1 - 3 months.
The first 3 weeks you are building on your fitness, stamina & technique.
In the second month your fitness is up to speed and looking like a Pro fighter, your loss of body fat is noticeable and you are mentally on an extreme high.

The school is located on Phuket, the biggest island of Thailand, which is also a popular tourist destination. You will not be in a tourist setup though, but can reach all popular spots pretty conveniently e.g. for weekend trips.

Monthly costs:
Training: $320
Accomodation: $160
Food & Drink & Party: $300
Total: $780/month

Muay Thai Sangha
This school teaches the system of Muay Thai Sangha. It consists of three elements:

• Muay Thai Kaad Chuak (Empty Hand Combat)
• Krabi-Krabong (Armed Combat)
• Muay Plam (Grappling Combat)

There are also meditation an Buddhism classes here, so you can follow a more spiritual way.

The school is located in a very different spot than the first school. It is in Chiang Mai, a city in the north-west of Thailand.

Monthly costs:
Training: $260
Accomodation: $160
Food & Drink & Party: $200
Total: $620/month

Business: You probably want to keep you (online) business running while training - don’t worry. Thailand is the ideal place for it. In most places to live, you will find an ADSL broadband connection with Wifi anyway, but there are even very good options for more remote places in thailand. You can get prepaid SIM cards for GPRS/EDGE data flats at every 7eleven 24hours a day! A wealth of information on this is available at EdgeThailand.

You should travel without a guidebook because

• guidebooks are expensive
• guidebooks are heavy
• guidebooks cover only a fraction of your target destnation
• guidebooks are outdated

Guidebooks like the popular backpacker bibles Lonely Planet or Rough Guide cost a lot. Those printed dinosaurs are obsolete in todays fast paced world. Many places change far faster than it is possible to update a book and print a new edition of it. Alternatives are online resources which are often community-built like VirtualTourist or the Lonely Planet Thorntree forums. There are a lot of other quality and free specialized websites like PassPlanet, TravelHappy or TalesOfAsia.

Get a Map!
One of the oldest tools for travel is still one of the bests but often overseen nowadays. Get a good map. Not this tiny guidebook maps which show the backpacker trails but a good quality paper map. As a reader of this blog I assume you are interested in a vagabonding lifestyle rather than getting to all the tourist spots in as little time as possible. With a map you can go to any place and make you own picture, you will get information about good spots on the way.

“Scan” your Guidebook
If you have a vague idea where you want to go, simple check your favorite guidebook in a library or traveler cafe and use your digital camera to “scan” the important pages. You can access them anywhere with your digital camera display. Carrying the information like this does not add additional weight to your baggage and is free. You can also mix together information from as many guidebooks as you want without having to buy them let alone carry all of them.
Google Book Search is another option if you are desperate for some guidebook information but can not get the book. The service allows you to read a lot of books online for free (including most Lonely Planet titles). It does not disclose the entire book though. If you do some intelligent searches however (you need to know place names before), you can often get the information you need. Give it a try!

Google Earth is a great tool to virtually explore your target region. It allows you to already get a feeling for the place and the environment there. If you enable the Google Earth Community Layers you will get a lot of additional information like geocoded photos of the region, interesting landmarks, sights and even youtube videos related to the area.

Couchsurfing and Hospitality Club are networks for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit. This means you can sleep on a “couch” in your destination place for free in exchange to doing the same some day or contribute in other ways. The best thing is not the free bed though, but the people you meet. It is one of the best and easiest ways to immerse into a new place as mosts host will be happy to help you with all information you need about the place. So even if you do not want to get hosted in terms of sleeping at your hosts place you can just meetup to for a coffee or a drink and chat for a while.

If your are a vagabond / frequent traveler, there are some unique challenges on implementing GTD. I will present a few and describe my own methods on how to circumvent them:

Support Material
As you most probably do not want to take stacks of file folders with you, you have to find a more lightweight and portable system. The solution to this is to virtualize your support material. Digitalize as much as possible of it and store it in a similar folder structure on your computer.
You can even do this on the road by using your PDA-camera as a scanner.

Tech Gadgets
You want to have robust tech gadgets and a checklist at hand to pack all required cables/adapters/power supplies for your target region. As I always try to simplify my gadgets in respect of lightweight travel, my two main tech gadgets are:

• IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad X61T
  
  
  This thinkpad is small, light, very robust and converts in a Tablet PC. Although I usually do not use the Tablet PC concept for work, I rely on it for other things: It is perfect as a paperless office, as you can just “draw” on PDF documents, sign them, add handwritten notes etc. Furthermore it is perfect as a ebook reader with a huge and very good display. No need to carry tons of books.
• HTC P4550 TYTN II
  
  
  This is the perfect allrounder. I use it for GPS navgiation (mainly on-device maps of remote regions - not turn by turn navigation); as a mp3-player; camera; scanner (I use the camera to “scan” documents); GTD Planer and of course as a cell phone and VOIP-phone.

Those two devices are sufficient in almost every situation. I can understand that photo-enthusiasts might want to carry a saperate quality camera though. As the HTC has all possible functions cramped into one device, there are some inevitable battery issues. I recently played with a BlackBerry which is probably the best device if you want long battery hours. There are some issues on getting internet in countries without BlackBerry service though…

Internet Access
As you might still run into situations without internet access, I suggest to have separate GTD categories for internet work (@internet) and offline computer work (@computer).

“Analog” paper-based GTD system
If you like adventure travel in remote regions without internet or even without electricity, you should be able to implement your GTD system with pen and paper only. There are a lot of people who even choose this as their main GTD system. See this website for example implementations. I personally prefer a PDA though…

How to deal with distractions on the road
If you are in a different country, different climate, different timezone where people are speaking a different language - there are a lot of distractions coming from all directions. The goals is to “get back to ready” as soon as possible. The easiest way to do that is to have predefined workflow lists. If you are in your home-environment with a productive GTD system, you probably work best without a stiff workflow structure, but if you are on the road and want to get back on the track as fast as possible - this is the way to go.

There are a lot of articles and blog posts on how to get cheap flights. Most of them list all popular meta flight search engines and tell you some tricks like “look for airports nearby” and similar. In this post I will tell you secrets to get the cheapest flight possible which are often overlooked.

But lets begin with the basics:

The best flight search engines:

• Sidestep
• Farecast
• Farechase
• Kayak
• Expedia

After having an overview of available flights always check the flight you are interested in on the airline’s website. Sometimes you get more details and options on the flight; can avoid the commission or even get a special deal.

General tips:

• try differnt days +- 2 days can make a significant difference in price
• try nearby airports
• try individual one-way flights instead of a round trip

Why you should not ignore traditional travel agencies:
As it is very convenient to book via the internet, very few people think of going to a travel agent and ask for an offer. You should do that! As they are all aware of the competition through internet booking, their fees are usually not much higher or even the same as booking through an internet booking site. They have however far better options to do a custom flight inquiry. A lot of advanced search option are simply not available in consumer-optimized internet booking systems. You travel agent however has these options. He can find special deals, especially for more complicated multi-stop flights.

As you probably do not want to waste your time talking to travel agents - I suggest the following method, which works fabulous for me:

Every traditional travel agents nowadays also has a website or at least an e-mail address. Build your personal email list of travel agents (I have about 30 in my list). Then you compose a mail which you will send to all of these addresses. It should contain what kind of flight you are looking for, what alternations are possible (nearby airports, flexible date, …) and how they should contact you. I figured out some agents prefer to send a fax rather than an e-mail. Some agents simply do not respond to your request if it looks not interesting for them. But as you mail your request to a lot of agents, you will often get very good offers. In many cases I get a flight by this method cheaper than any flight offered by internet flight search engines.

Local Budget Airlines
Budget airlines can make a huge difference in costs for a flight. They started with local flights but there are a lot of international budget airlines as well. As these airlines use all possible techniques to keep costs low, they usually do not partner with big flight databases and only sell directly through there website. That means you simply won’t find their offers in flight search engines!

Here is a list of popular budget airlines:

Africa Budget Airlines:

• Fly540
• Kulula
• Mango
• Precision Air

Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Budget Airlines:

• FreedomAir
• Jetstar
• Skywest
• Virgin Blue

Europe Budget Airlines:

• Air Berlin
• Easy Jet
• Ryan Air
• SkyEurope

India, Sri Lanka Budget Airlines:

• Air Deccan
• GoAir
• IndiGo Airlines
• Jet Airlines
• Kingfisher

Middle East Budget Airlines:

• Air Arabia
• Jazeera Airways

North America Budget Airlines:

• Aero California
• Aviacsa
• Click Mexicana
• Southwest Airlines
• Spirit
• WestJet

South America Budget Airlines:

• BRA
• Gol
• Ocean Air

South East Asia Budget Airlines:

• AirAsia
• Jetstar Asia Airlines
• Lion Air
• Nok Air
• Pacific Airlines
• Tiger Airways

Intercontinental Budget Airlines:

• Oasis (London <--> Hong Kong)
• Zoom (Europe <--> North America)

In this article I only selected the most important budget airlines. Especially for Europe and North America there are a lot more. Do a custom search on your target destination for them.

or: What you don’t know about GPL, Creative Commons, Public Domain licenses.

This is not about affiliate programs but creating and selling your own products based on other people’s material. After reading this article you will be able to create and sell you own product today without any costs and of course - legal.

Creative Commons
The Creative Commons licenses became very popular recently. The licenses are quite liberal and restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work. Big sites like like flickr.com are using them. Some licenses explicitly exclude non-commercial use; some exclude derivations of the work. The most liberal license allows you to do nearly everything you want as long as you keep an attribution to the author. You can find the details of the licenses and additional resources here: http://creativecommons.org/

GPL
The GNU General Public License is a very common license for free software. There is a popular misunderstanding of the word “free”. From the definition of the Free Software Foundation:

The word “free” in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.

And to make it clear to everyone see this FAQ section: DoesTheGPLAllowMoney

One of the most popular examples of selling GPL software are linux distributors. The license details can be found here.

Public Domain

A work is in the public domain if there are no laws which restrict its use by the public at large. Laws vary and a work may be public domain in one jurisdiction but not another. Some works become public domain after the coyright expires (e.g. see the large collection of ebooks at gutenberg.org. Other works are intentionally published as public domain. For example nearly all publications of the US federal government are in the public domain with very interesting material (e.g. CIA World Fact Book, ….).

Examples:

Product: Language Course of the Foreign Language Institute

All of the language courses published by the Foreign Service Institute are in the public domain. You can download them for free at FreeLanguageCourses.com or buy the same material for more than $1000 (!) at multilingualbooks.

Product: books at amazon

The bestselling book “The Art of War” is in the public domain and free available at gutenberg.org. You can however also buy it at amazon.com (in printed form though).

Product: US Map Data

The USGS/Tigerline Map Data published by the US Census Bureau is in the public domain as well. You can download it for free. Just put it on a DVD-ROM and sell it like ajmsoft or agismap. Some companies bundle this to a working map server appliance (with a free map server) and sell it for several thousand dollars.



Ideas for you:

Product: printed book

gutenberg.org has a huge selection of classic books which are all in the public domain. Several download formats are available. You can just use the texts in it’s original form or change them as you like. The Lulu print-on-demand platform makes it very convenient for you to publish your own book. You can for example take one of the gutenberg Top100 books, format the text nicely, design a cover and sell it as a printed book on Lulu. You can go from 0 to your own book within one hour! It is very esay and free to create a lulu.com account and setup a book-publishing project. You will receive your revenue conveniently via paypal.

Product: Audiobook on CD

A huge amount of good classics are available as audiobooks on librivox.com. The site depends on community efforts. Everybody can be a speaker for audio books. So the quality varies, but usually has quite high standards. Conveniently the new audio-product is still in the public domain (this must not generally be so). You can for example sell those audiobooks on Audio-CD or as collections on CD-ROM/DVD-ROM via Lulu. Both will be created on demand including nice printed covers. As usual marketing is the key. You will need a good cover and sales page and some creative methods to get people to notice your product.

Product: Photo Calendar

Many photos on the photo-sharing website flickr.com are under a Creative Commons license. You can filter the pictures by license and might want to filter them for the very liberal Creative Commons Attribution license. You might additional sort the results by “most interesting” and you will get very good pictures on your keywords. The publishing service lulu.com allows you to publish photo calendars. You could now create some niche-calendars with high quality flickr photos and sell them through lulu.com Note that you have to add an attribution to the author when you use the creative commons license mentioned above.

These are just a few examples of the possibilities. After a bit of brainstorming you will see there is a lot more to do!