Choice is Overrated

For a while there it looked like we’d be traveling to Tokyo instead of Germany this fall. Europe won out, but Tokyo’s still high on my list, and by way of experimenting both with the city and with what’s available on the iDevices Tokyo-wise, I bought the Wallpaper City Guide to Tokyo.

Populated with Wallpaper magazine content, it’s a useful way to get a quick overview of the city; here’s the “contents” screen:

My favourite aspect of the application is that rather than trying to be a comprehensive guide to Tokyo, it’s a highly-curated stripped-down guide to Tokyo. In a world where Google can tell us 785,000 places to rent a car in Tokyo, the simplicity of “just go to Mazda Rent-a-Car” is very, very appealing:

We’re moving from an era where we were prisoners of scarcity of information to an era where we’re prisoners of choice; I’m convinced that there’s an unfulfilled demand for opinionated niche travel advice, the kind of advice that says “if you like Frank Gehry, go and visit these 6 places” instead of “here are the 2,600 things to do in Paris this weekend.”