This week’s SkiftSeedlings speaks to that breadth of opportunity by including everything from a media company looking to launch the world’s largest consumer travel event to a small device that tracks employees’ driving behaviors.

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The back of the Burj al Dubai's gold-plated iPad. / Burj al Dubai

Guests at the self-proclaimed world’s most-luxurious hotel, the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, are being bestowed with a new privilege on arrival – a gold-plated iPad.

As lesser hotels struggle to provide free wi-fi, guests at the Burj Al Arab, one the world’s tallest hotels, are being offered one of the 24-carat devices, worth £6,715, upon check-in.

While the “bling” equipment may be deemed a little showy for some tastes, the iPads are specially engraved with the name of the hotel and contain software that acts as a “virtual concierge”, offering information on the hotel’s many services which include private dining experiences and a butler.

The hotel said it had introduced the gold iPad, “the ultimate in luxury accessories”, as a way of making itself stand out from its competitors. It also frequently refers to itself as a “seven-star” property.

The limited edition iPad is designed by Gold & Co. Guests need to return it on checking out.

The hotel has also recently installed iMacs into all its suites – an item that can also be found in much cheaper hotels however, such as the Mama Shelter in Paris. (Read the Mama Shelter review here ).

The addition will be welcomed by the kind of high-spending guests that frequent the hotel’s Royal Suite, a 8,395-square-ft room located on the 25th floor.

Inside are marble floors, mahogany furniture, Hermes toiletries, a private cinema and a rotating four-poster bed. Guests can also make use of a chauffeur-driver Rolls Royce or helicopter (at extra cost).

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An iPhone or iPad can be a handy tool to finding your way around an unfamiliar city, but now it can also be used to check in at your hotel – as our feature about hotel tech in this month’s issue of PC Pro reveals.

If you have an iPhone or iPad, these are the ten apps to download before your next business trip.

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Larry Page, Google's co-founder and chief executive, seemed an exception to the rule when he went Google Glass-less during the keynote presentation at Google I/O 2013 in San Francisco, Wednesday, May 15, 2013. Jeff Chiu

The future came crashing down on me this week at the Google I/O developer conference while I stood at a bathroom urinal.

I had just wrapped up a conversation with a man who owned a pair of Google’s Internet-connected glasses, Google Glass. He had explained that one of the gadget’s greatest features is the ability to snap a photo with a wink. “It’s amazing, you just look at something, wink your eye and it just takes a picture,” he said enthusiastically.

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But what about the submarines and the tricycles and the backpacks? At Google I/O this week, the company showed off the collection of off-road gear it uses to map the places the cars can’t go.

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Controllers and pilots aren’t using their cellphones to text, even though many passengers now do using apps and in-flight Wi-Fi. Instead, planes with modern cockpit systems can log on to new systems at air-traffic control centers and link digitally. Rather than sometimes difficult radio calls, pilots and controllers simply send each other text messages to change altitudes, routes and hand off from one controller to the next.

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TripIt Pro's new Seat Tracker feature sends notifications when an airline seat becomes available that matches your preferences. / TripIt

TripIt made good on its pledge and released a Seat Tracker feature in its premium TripIt Pro product.

Subscribers to the $49 per year TripIt Pro service can share their itineraries, identify their seat preferences (window or aisle, front or back of cabin, exit row or bulkhead), and then Seat Tracker alerts travelers when a seat more aligned with their preferences becomes available.

The feature also enables travelers to opt for economy, premium economy, business or first class, and they choose groups of seats, as many as four together.

Seat Tracker will be available through TripIt’s mobile offerings “in the coming weeks,” the company says, and is accessible via the desktop already.

TripIt, a unit of Concur, has been trying to make TripIt Pro more attractive in light of the fact that Delta, United, and American no longer — and in the case of Southwest, never — allow access to frequent flyer mileage-tracking apps such as TripIt Pro.

However, TripIt Pro organizes itineraries (as does the free version of TripIt), provides automated point-tracking of other airlines, and offers fare-tracking, gate-change notifications, and alerts about delays and cancellations.

TripIt says Seat Tracker edges users closer to “the perfect trip” because passengers can secure preferred seats “before anyone else on your flight.”

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Choice Hotels‘ tech team has identified three tech trends it hopes to capitalize on in the next few years: cloud-based technology, mobile and big data.

• Having Choice’s property management system housed in the cloud–which [it] says is the first of its kind–means owners and managers can access a property’s performance data from anywhere at any time.
• Choice…was the first hotel brand to roll out a smartphone app…Mobile booking business was up 200% in 2012 and now represents 13% of Choice’s total online revenue.
• Big data is about finding new insights about the guest, drawing conclusions instantly and then creating action items based on those findings.

Related: Choice Hotels forms division to sell its technology to rivals

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A child picks movies to stream on her iPad. Jetstar Airways / Flickr

…despite the rapid expansion of Wi-Fi on airplanes, no one has found a profitable way to cover installation costs with the scant revenue generated by the limited number of passengers who have been willing to pay for Internet service at 35,000 feet.

The great advances in airplane Internet connections are being driven far more by the opportunities that high-speed broadband service presents for airlines themselves to essentially sell more things to the customers, whether the product is in-flight entertainment, food and drink, customized services to elite-status passengers or products at the destination, including hotel packages, sports and concert tickets, restaurant and theater reservations.

On an airplane, you have a captive market, and with sophisticated technology, you can sell to passengers in very personal ways.

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Google’s updated Maps products for smartphones, tablets, and desktop improve on what’s already the best mapping experience available and add enough new features that users can use them for every part of their travel planning experience, and are a serious threat to brands like Yelp and Foursquare as well as any travel-related app and the already declining guidebook industry.

Google trotted out different product managers and directors to discuss how Maps worked on each type of device, but a few points were consistent across all platforms. The first is the introduction of a five-point rating system for points of interest like restaurants, bars, hotels, and museums. Whether or not this replaces the distinctive 30-point Zagat system was not clear from the presentation (we’ve asked Google for comment). Google is also integrating more Zagat and former-Frommer’s editorial details, from reviews to top-10 type lists.

The mobile mapping product more deeply integrates Groupon-like offers, a Foursquare-like memory of the places you’ve been, a Yelp-like user review system, and “incident” reports that will suggest direction changes if there’s an accident or traffic.

Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps for mobile, used an iPad to demo a new feature of the Maps tablet app called “Explore” that makes suggestions for events and businesses as users browse the site.

The desktop experience has more planning-friendly tools, as well as exploration features, such as Photosphere, which produces a “3-D” tour of heavily-photographed points of interest that are auto-generated from user uploaded photos.

It’s similar to Bing’s Photosynth, which Microsoft launched four years ago and then left to wither.

Google made a big deal of how personalized and social the desktop Maps experience will soon become. “We could have billions of maps, one for every user,” said Seefeld. ”A map that adapts to what you do. A map that’s build for you.” The map will highlight your friends’ favorites, as well as points of interest that are directly related to other searches you’re making; showing family-friendly restaurants if you’re looking at children’s museums, for example.

The personalized experience will require a greater buy-in to Google Plus by users in order for the benefits to appear, and, like Foursquare, will be strongest in cities like San Francisco and New York where there are active communities of users reviewing restaurants, bars, and other businesses.

There was also a strong presence for public transit across all Maps platforms. Product Manager for Google Maps Bernhard Seefeld said, ”We want to make public transit much much much smarter,” and you see this ambition across the Maps products, as well as the updated Google Now, which will include real-time transit information.

The new smartphone and table apps for Android and iOS (no mention was made of Blackberry or Windows) will be released in early summer, and Google is allowing people to sign-up as early users of the desktop version.

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