The National Business Travel Association (NBTA) and The Wall Street Journal have announced the Judges’ Choice for the first-ever Business Traveler Innovation Award. Celebrity judges yesterday chose Worldmate’s Live Mobile Travel Software as a top innovation for business travelers. The award, along with those to honor additional winners, was presented today at the 2010 NBTA International Convention & Exposition in Houston.

Corporate travelers submitted nominations for services, ideas and products that help make life on the road more efficient and productive for business travelers. Submissions were categorized, and the public voted for their favorites. Ten of the top submissions were featured at the Business Traveler Innovation Pavilion at the NBTA Convention, where attendees were able to demonstrate and learn about products and services recommended by their colleagues. A panel of travel celebrity judges then evaluated the featured innovations to determine the 2010 Business Travels Innovation Judges’ Selection Award winner.

Craig Banikowski, CCTE, C.P.M., CMM, NBTA President & CEO, said, “The culture of corporate travel continues to evolve, and business travelers are always on the lookout for products and technologies that can make trips faster and more productive. The services we’re honoring with the Business Travelers Innovation Awards were confirmed as some of the best by those who know first-hand: the travelers themselves. They’ve spread the word and now more know which innovations will help them make corporate travel even more beneficial for business.”

WorldMate Live Mobile Travel Software tracks every trip and sends real-time alerts about itinerary updates and changes, including flight delays and cancellations. WorldMate products also feature travel resources including flight schedules, weather forecasts, travel directories, maps, world clocks and a currency converter.

Celebrity judges included:

• Terry Jones, Founder and former CEO of Travelocity.com
• Chris McGinnis, Travel Expert and Author
• Patricia Schultz, Author of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die
• Edward Silver, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the National Business Travel Association
• Andrew Winterton, President Suppliers, Products and Technology of Carlson Wagonlit Travel

Travelers’ Choice Award

The 2010 NBTA Business Traveler Innovation Travelers’ Choice Award was presented to Continental Airlines for the Mobile Boarding Pass. Paperless boarding passes enable customers to display a 2D bar code along with passenger and flight information on their mobile phone, eliminating the need for a paper boarding pass. The Traveler’s Choice Award received the most votes from business travelers.

Category Winners
The following winners received the most votes from business travelers in their respective categories:

• Sustainable Practice: Enterprise Rent-A-Car Energy Efficient Thin Client Terminals
• Travel Personalization: Continental Airlines Mobile Boarding Pass
• Traveler Comfort and Well-Being: The Heavenly Bed by Westin Hotels and Resorts
• Meetings & Conventions: The Hyatt Meeting Promise
• Outstanding Apps: TripIt Travel Orgainzer
• Travel Convenience & Efficiency: The National Car Rental Emerald Club
• Business Collaboration: Show and Share by Cisco Systems
• Traveler Productivity: iPad by Apple, Inc.

About the 2010 NBTA International Convention & Exposition
Widely recognized as the must-attend event for business travel buyers, suppliers, industry leaders and business travel journalists, the 2010 NBTA International Convention & Exposition is taking place in Houston August 8-11, 2010. More than 5,600 travel professionals will take advantage of the Convention’s programming, designed to empower attendees to maximize value for their companies, including more than 65 seminars on the most important topics in business travel, more than 400 companies exhibiting in the Expo and countless opportunities for networking with peers. For details, visit www.nbtaconvention.org.

The National Business Travel Association (NBTA) is the world’s premier business travel and corporate meetings organization. NBTA and its regional affiliates – NBTA Australia/New Zealand, the Brazilian Business Travel Association (ABGEV), NBTA Canada, NBTA Europe, NBTA Mexico, and NBTA USA – serve a network of more than 17,000 business travel professionals around the globe with industry-leading events, networking, education & professional development, research, news & information, and advocacy. NBTA members, numbering more than 5,000 in 30 nations, are corporate and government travel and meetings managers, as well as travel service providers. They collectively manage and direct more than US$340 billion of global business travel and meetings expenditures annually on behalf of more than 13 million business travelers within their organizations. For more information, visit www.nbta.org.

How it works:
TripCatch (an opt-in service), monitors a user’s BlackBerry mailbox for travel confirmation emails and imports the travel itinerary automatically to their WorldMate account. With Tripcatch automation, confirmation emails for flights, hotels, rental cars and more generate detailed trip itineraries. The WorldMate service also includes flight alerts, calendar synchronization, and itinerary integration with mapping, navigation and LinkedIn contacts.

To ensure the absolute privacy of WorldMate travelers, the TripCatch implementation is certified with the Privacy Seal from TRUSTe , the leading internet privacy services provider. Only information explicitly allowed by the user is ever accessed by WorldMate, and users can opt-out at any time.

“We know that business travelers deal with all kinds of challenges and annoyances, have little free time to waste, so we built TripCatch to cater to their busy lifestyles. Automating the creation of mobile-accessible itineraries allows WorldMate users to more fluidly incorporate mobile business travel services, with no extra work to their already hectic schedules,” said Jean Tripier, CEO of WorldMate. “WorldMate makes life easier for business travelers, and TripCatch takes our service to a whole new level.”

So I set out to find some evidence on Baruch Gutgold faith. With today’s modern technology, it is very easy to browse and search many online resources related to family genealogy. One such fine resource is the Jewish Gen site. It was there, in the Lodz Ghetto list (I knew the family origin was in Lodz or it’s surrounding shtetels) that I found this:

Baruch Gutgold - Lodz Ghetto Listing

It seems that Baruch and his family lived in Mittel street, before they were forced to move to the Ghetto. Other Lodz Ghetto listings confirm this:

Golda Gutgold - Lodz Ghetto List

Laja and Ber - Lodz Ghetto List

We can safely assume that Baruch and Laja, and their children Golda and Jeszaja Ber were family as they all moved into the same Ghetto address: Hausierer Gasse 2 Flat 28, Dom 30.

And that’s were the mystery begins! Looking at Lodz maps, both current or pre WWII, there is no mention of Mittel street at all?

Did they lie about their real address? Probably not. The Jews were terrified from the Germans and feared that any lie, if discovered, will bring their demise. Was it a German clerk typo? Probably not as well – the German seldom made such mistakes. Also, if you look at the Lodz Ghetto list you will find more than 1900 listings with this cryptic “Mittel” street specified as the address of the person before the move to the Ghetto.

At this point, I turned into the help of other Lodz researchers.

The immediate response and main theory of many of them was that “Mittel” is the German word for the English “Middle” and as such, it is a translation from Polish of a street name which has the same meaning (middle) or that was in the middle part of the town (maybe a main street in the town center).
Orit, one of the researchers who helped me the most, initially speculated that:

One of the possibilities of translating Mittel to Polish is “środkowa”. There was such a street in the Ghetto which was named “Winfriedstrasse” by the Germans. But this assumption failed as “Winfriedstrasse” was not found in any of the Lodz Ghetto listings. It was then suggested that the literal translation of the name was used as a verb – and if so it would coincide with “Boya-Żeleńskiego” which is the street name today (close to the Jewish cemetery, south-west to the cemetery).

However, this theory has a major flaw – the original address was probably outside the Ghetto, so it will not be found in the Ghetto list and the use of the literal translation seems a bit forced.
One researcher, a Lodz resident, stated that:

Regarding mittel Street in Lodz. I’m a Lodzer and lived on Pomorska Street. I’m mostly sure that Mittel Street is meant Srodmiejska Steet. It begins From Piotrkowska Street and runs west.

This was actually a detour in our search, as you will see later.
Other researcher followed the same logic:

Mittelstrasse – means Middle or Central street, ‘Srednia’ or ‘Srodkowa’ in Polish. Two streets were named Srednia and Srodkowa before the war, but neither was the ‘Mittel Str.’ during WWII (one was Friedrichstrasse, the other – Winfriedstrase).  The first one is now ul. Pomorska, where the Jewish Community has the site, the other is near the Jewish Cemetery, and it was one of the ghetto streets, now ul. Boya-Zelenskiego.

This researcher, however, suggested to compare other information in the quest to find the elusive Mittel street. Well, looking at phone directories gave no clue – none of them (even the ones dated in the 1940′s) has Mittel street in them.

The breakthrough came when we tried the following name, suggested above by one of the researcher – Pomorska street.
As Orit explained:

The most comprehensive reply stated that the street is in fact Ul. POMORSKA:
“… Before the War the name of the street was ulica Pomorska, and during a short time – ulica Srednia (middle in Polish). …The street was, however, also called Friedrichstrasse. After the War it was named ulica Nowotki and after 1989 renamed into ulica Pomorska.”

I have compared the addresses of a few families appearing in Lodz Ghetto Database in Mittel street (residence address), with the addresses of those families in the Lodz pre-war directories.
They did appear under Pomorska, with an identical house number.
Therefore, at least for the families I am interested in, Pomorska is the answer.

Yet another theory suggests that Srodkowa street was also nicknamed Mittel.
This street is near the Jewish Cemetery, and it was one of the ghetto streets, now ul. Boya-Zelenskiego.
To support this theory, one should find a match with a pre-war address. I did not.

This was it!

Lodz phone directory from 1937 had the answer. In the1937 Poland Business, School, and Organizational Directory (Selected Cities), image 1037 [DLoZG] {d28} we find:

Baruch Gutgold - Lodz Directory

And we can see that Baruch Gutgold was living in:

Baruch Gutgold - Pomorska 44, Lodz

Yep! Pomorska 44 (you can even try to call him on 209-28). The listing even coincide with the family knowledge that the Gutgold’s had fabric dyeing “factory” (actually this was a small shop) in Lodz.

So Mittel street (in this case) is ul. Pomorska! And the complete answer to the puzzle is that ul. Pomorska was called for a certain period Srednia which is the Polish translation for the German Mittel. The street name was changed a couple of times more, but from 1989 it is called Pomorska again.

There are still some who think that Srodkowa could be also Mittel street, but in light of the above evidence, we doubt it. Formally, there is no “Mittel” street, but informally there is (at least) one street which is identified with Mittel street, and that is ul. Pomorska of our time. It is a central street in Lodz and the Jewish Community office is there.

This article is contributed to all the Lodz Ghetto researchers, and dedicated to the memory of Baruch Gutgold and his family who were murdered by the Nazi’s in the Holocaust.

• Comprehensive itinerary management, directly on the smartphone
• Pop-up flight alerts if a flight is delayed or canceled, with suggested alternative flights when necessary
• Calendar synchronization of flight and hotel information to Outlook / Notes
• Easy sharing of itineraries with coworkers and business contacts
• Itinerary integration with mapping and navigation
• Easy connections with LinkedIn contacts while on the road
• One-click access to designated travel representative

Initially, the private-label capabilities and certain special features will be available only on Blackberry devices; but WorldMate also supports iPhone and Nokia devices with their standard offering and will soon offer the special TMC and corporate features on these devices.

“We’re delighted to bring WorldMate’s industry-leading mobile travel technology to our TMCs and their corporate customers, which will ultimately enhance the quality of service provided to business travelers, keeping them connected and informed throughout the trip,” said Scott Hyden, vice president, U.S. Sales, Travelport. “The product features on WorldMate are exceptional. As we listen to our customers’ needs, Travelport will continue to partner with companies like Worldmate to deliver world-class solutions.”

“This collaboration between Travelport and WorldMate enables TMCs to create their own privately branded premium mobile offering,” said Jean Tripier, CEO of WorldMate. “Teaming up with a travel distribution leader like Travelport will also enable real-time information and transactional capabilities that were never seen before on a smartphone.”

PARIS, April 29, 2010 – Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT), a global leader specializing in business travel management, has signed non-exclusive, global referral agreements with conTgo and WorldMate, enabling the company to extend some of its key products and services to SMS and smartphone platforms, which are provided by each supplier respectively. This is the first phase of an extensive plan CWT has to increasingly offer its products and services via mobile channels and social networks.

In an era where mobility is synonymous with connectivity, CWT is helping companies increase compliance, better manage costs and protect confidential information while enhancing travelers’ productivity, comfort and safety on the road.

To that end, travelers will be able to receive concise, easy-to-read itineraries from CWT via conTgo’s SMS platform and WorldMate’s smart phone application for the BlackBerry and iPhone. Later this year, the application will be available for the Android platform as well. In addition to their itineraries, travelers will be able to receive flight alerts, flight status reports and up-to-the-minute schedules through the WorldMate application. Companies with a global travel program and more than one online booking tool have the added benefit of knowing WorldMate can consolidate transactions from all corporate online reservation systems.

CWT’s suite of security solutions, including health and safety alerts, real-time crisis communications and destination intelligence, can also be sent to travelers’ mobile phones via SMS. This is true for specially targeted messages regarding travel policy compliance and risk mitigation as well. Furthermore, via the conTgo SMS solution, travelers can get instant feedback to specific requests, including destination-related information.

Andrew Winterton, CWT president, suppliers, products & technology, said:

“Today, mobile connection is a must for business travelers. They want relevant information concerning their business trip in real time and they expect on- and offline services to be available anytime, anywhere. The market offers a variety of premium-priced, mobile solutions from which to choose and travelers often make their own selection so they can stay well informed and in control before, during and after their trip. Companies that do not offer travelers a managed mobile solution incur higher costs, inadvertently encourage non-compliant decisions, and risk the spread of confidential information through social networks. By making our products and services available via mobile channels such as conTgo and WorldMate, we can help our clients offer a preferred solution with the right functionalities for their travelers. This has a direct impact on their bottom line. These are exciting times for our industry and CWT is well positioned to help its clients make the most of mobile developments.”

WorldMate mobile technology gives business travelers access to more information to cope with flight cancellations, sudden meeting changes, and last second booking requirements. The American Express mobile travel services resulting from this collaboration will provide road warriors with the essential tools they need to monitor and control their itineraries. Services include:

• Automatic itinerary synchronization
• Pop-up flight alerts accompanied by suggested alternative flights when necessary
• Calendar synchronization to add business meetings into the itinerary
• Sharing of itineraries with colleagues and business contacts
• Itinerary integration with third party mapping and navigation application
• Social networking tools allowing travelers to locate and connect with colleagues
• One-click access to American Express Business travel counselors

“Connectivity around-the-clock and around-the-globe through mobile devices is becoming business as usual for business travelers.” said Lisa Durocher, senior vice president, American Express Business Travel. “Offering real-time client support that benefits both business travelers and corporate travel managers is a key pillar in our servicing platform. We see the mobile arena expanding and continue to build upon our mobile services by partnering with leading mobile and technology suppliers including WorldMate as technology continues to produce better ways of serving our clients’ needs.”

“We are pleased to work closely with American Express Business Travel to help realize their customers’ mobile needs,” said Jean Tripier, CEO of WorldMate. “Millions of business travelers across virtually all major corporations rely on WorldMate and American Express separately today, and this collaboration brings a remarkable level of combined service into the hands of millions more.”

American Express Business Travel is currently piloting the program with clients and the full commercial rollout is planned for later this year.

The new Emoze Dragon 555 push content platform aggregates web information and converts it to a format that is viewable across a wide range of mobile devices. Based on the same smart, simple, secure technology as Emoze mobile push email, the Dragon 555 allows users to receive breaking news, financial updates, weather information, the latest sports results pushed to their mobile device in real time.

Moshe Levy, CEO of Emoze, Ltd said, “In the frantic pace of today’s world, it is often difficult to keep up with business and personal information. We are proud that Emoze is able to provide a solution that makes life better for our users.”

The Dragon 555 Push Content Platform

The Dragon 555 platform provides both Mobile Operators and Enterprises with a total management and control package, enabling them to offer this service to subscribers and still manage the system effectively. The leaner, more resilient infrastructure is designed to provide outstanding performance and efficiency while minimizing capital investment and operational expenditures. The modular design of the Dragon 555 provides total reliability, redundancy and scalability while sharing resources in order to maximize the use of expensive infrastructure.

For Mobile Operators, Emoze Mobile Push Content offers a true value added service than can entice new subscribers and inspire loyalty in current users. The simple, easy to use management interface allows for easy customization, allowing subscribers to choose which channels they want pushed to their mobile device and exactly how often, either instantly or according to set intervals. Emoze Mobile Push Content is currently offering breaking news and sports coverage featuring the Champions League and counting down to the games in South Africa.

For Enterprise, Emoze Mobile Push Content offers an opportunity to push business news, exchange rates and corporate data directly to their mobile workforce as well as push special offers and other advertising content directly onto the consumer mobile devices of consumers. The smart, user-friendly management tools allow corporate IT to control the system securely and efficiently. As with Emoze’s push email transmissions, all data is compressed and encrypted to protect privacy and never stored on a third party server. In addition to the advantage of instant, no hassle delivery, push consumes less of the battery’s power optimizing usage.

BCC Support
By introducing Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) support, Emoze has responded to one of the most asked-for updates from its users. This service includes an alert to inform users that their message was received as a BCC, providing a helpful notification before they reply.

Enhanced Attachment Support
This version includes improved support for email attachments. Users can now view and download all Microsoft office documents up to 6MB or pictures (jpeg) and PDFs of up to 4MB. Attachments can be downloaded to the phone’s memory or to an external memory card.

HTML
The platform now offers full support for HTML emails, enabling users to take advantage of a wide range of visually appealing fonts and images. Users can now send and receive messages in rich fonts, include graphics or photos, and create colorful newsletters, tables or charts. This version will also offer enhanced support for embedded images. Emoze’s platform offers users an interface that matches that of today’s most popular email sources, including Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.

Advanced Inbox
With this feature, users can enjoy unparalleled customization of inbox viewing. Emoze now allows for easy switching between header reading options. Users can choose to view two line headers, enabling them to see the first line of the email, one-line headers, which show the only the subject line or remove the header entirely to allow the most messages to be shown on the screen. Furthermore, Emoze has made switching between these views simple and intuitive.

Menu Shortcuts
Instead of having to navigate through layers of menus, users can now take advantage of a numeric shortcut menu to quickly select the function they want.

Additional features:

Add or update contacts directly from email
Create a customized signature
Choose the best available broadband connection or manually select WiFi
Support for Google Contacts and Calendar fields
Support for virtual synchronization of all social networking contacts
Use Text to Speech (on phones which support the feature)