Editor’s Note: For the client side of location-independence, check out Jay Shapiro’s story published earlier this week. 

Sights and sounds that many of us will never see or hear are just another stop on the road for Bernard Vukas—from Ottoman mosques in Turkey, to rice and curry shops in Thailand, to a beachfront office in the Philippines.

With a lifestyle that is nothing if not location independent, Vukas—a Microsoft Office Business Applications (OBA) developer originally from Croatia—has embraced the “work anywhere” freedom enabled by online work.

Vukas’ adventures started with a rather inconspicuous piece of furniture: His couch.

When a friend referred him to Couchsurfing—an offbeat networking site that connects travelers with available “couches” (i.e. local hosts) in cities throughout the world and uses karma for currency—Vukas was intrigued. He began hosting couch surfers from around the world and, in the process, was bitten by the travel bug himself.

Soon after, he read the book The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau and realized that perhaps work and travel could go hand in hand. Since his freelance developer work was all conducted online, he decided to give it a try.

Vukas’ first stop was Istanbul, Turkey. Using a travel agency to book his trip, he took a bus tour from Serbia to Turkey.

As vacations go, however, he wasn’t thrilled with the experience. “The fact that we stayed in a hotel and ate quasi-European food wasn’t appealing at all. This motivated me to strive to stay as away from hotels (and as close to the locals as possible) next time.”

While his travel arrangements didn’t meet his ideal, his work experience went well. As the bus wound its way from Serbia to Turkey and back again, Vukas made use of the time between stops to accomplish work; he’d brought an extra battery, but it wasn’t needed as the bus had electrical power. When he wasn’t working, he took in the sights and sounds of the former Ottoman empire.

When his trip wrapped up, Vukas was hooked: Working while traveling opened up almost any place in the world as a place to call “home.”

It wasn’t long before he was preparing for his next destination.

Vukas decided to venture even further from his home country of Croatia, ditching the cold European winter for the tropical climes of Thailand.

This time, however, he decided to give couch surfing a try himself.

“[Thailand] was my first time using Couchsurfing…and it was awesome!” he said. “I’m not a huge fan of planning, so I hired a girl on oDesk to help me organize everything. She had been to Thailand before and she connected me with Phiseak Klanutai, the organizer of weekly Bangkok Couchsurfing meetings. I ended up staying with him…for almost four months.”

Vukas spent a total of six months in Thailand before returning home. After logging another trip to Thailand, as well as a trip to Bangladesh, he was convinced: Location was completely irrelevant to his ability to make a living.

This realization freed him to take an even bigger step: Uprooting himself and moving halfway around the world to the Philippines.

For this decision, Vukas credits Google. “Pictures of Boracay that appeared on Google Images were part of the reason I moved. I’ve had 30 years of winter in Europe, and I wanted a change. This seemed like a perfect destination!”

Based on his experiences, Vukas has some key advice for other contractors who want to embrace travel while still making a living:

Establish a work center: ”I try to set up a home-base as soon as possible, so that I’m able to work,” he said. “When I travel, I usually work from my room. On rarest occasions I go to coffee shops. I rent on a monthly basis, usually apartment-style 1- or 2-bedroom units with a kitchen.”Stay longer: ”I try traveling as little as possible, spending at least three to six months in one location. Renting on a long-term basis is important, as well as arriving to your destination in the off-season.”Make sure your costs are covered: Make sure to set or adjust your travel plans according to how much you expect to work and earn while you’re there—this means researching what your costs will be and setting a budget. And don’t be afraid to charge what you’re worth, Bernard advises contractors. “I usually recommend starting in the $20-30 range, especially if they have a good career track record.”

For Vukas, online work has been the key to changing travel from a mere vacation into a way of life. Have you had a similar experience? Share your travel adventures and on-the-road work advice in the comments section below.

Julia Camenisch is a freelance technology and business journalist. She also works as an editor and copywriter for a wide range of clients, including national magazines, small businesses and nonprofit organizations. Julia brings to oDesk a passion for empowering small businesses through the innovative use of technology.

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Mapping and location-based services are integral to Nokia’s future and a key way that we stand out from the crowd.

Nokia’s commitment to building the leading location offering is demonstrated every day around the world in its rich set of location-based apps like Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport, Nokia Maps, Nokia Pulse and Nokia City Lens. Quite literally, Nokia helps people navigate their world. But this is only the tip of the iceberg: as a result of our acquisition of NAVTEQ and other mapping industry players, Nokia was the first to build the world’s most accurate and comprehensive global digital map by sending teams to verify every street in every city.

We can do more with our location heritage and mapping expertise, and go beyond a digital version of the paper map. Maps can be more than getting a person from point A to point B. They should bring places to life and inspire us to sense our world.

This is why today we are introducing HERE, the world’s first location cloud that delivers a location platform, location content and location apps across any screen and any operating system.

Just like digital cameras created possibilities that were unthinkable with analog photography, today’s digital mapping has amazing potential to grow into what we call computational cartography, the ability to produce maps on-demand and tailored to their actual use cases. Today’s digital maps are generic – i.e. always the same, irrespective of the content they visualize. We also believe that this game-changing evolution in mapmaking should be available to more businesses and more people around the world – it should expand beyond cars and beyond Nokia devices.

“Location based experiences need to evolve from an app-centric approach towards a holistic customer experience; consumers want services that are optimized for multi-mobile device use and available on demand, everywhere”, said Thilo Koslowski, VP and Lead Automotive Analyst, Gartner.

Nokia Lumia and HERE are naturally made for each other, providing the best location experience on a smartphone, but we aren’t reserving HERE just for Windows Phone. Instead, we are opening it up to all devices and operating systems to give everyone, with any type of device, the possibility to recognize and the ability to use the best location platform in the world. This openness is what sets HERE apart from other digital maps in the world. And with HERE, location will be an even more powerful differentiation for Nokia.

We’re making HERE Maps available for iOS in the Apple App Store as a HTML5-based app and introducing HERE Maps API for Android. We will also introduce HERE Maps for Firefox OS and we’ll continue working, together with Mozilla, to give people the best mapping experience on the OS.

We are introducing LiveSight, a technology based on a highly accurate, 3D map of the world, which provides the most precise and intuitive augmented reality experience. Nokia City Lens, developed exclusively for Nokia Lumia devices, is the first application using LiveSight.

Our industrial collection of data is about to leap a chasm with the planned acquisition of earthmine. earthmine offers a complete solution for collecting, processing, managing, and hosting 3D street level imagery.

So stay tuned. There is so much more to say in the coming hours and days and the long-term, and we’re looking forward to your continued feedback as we move ahead. You can also follow us on Twitter: @heremaps.

image credit (home page banner): Ken Ohyama

View the original article here

Mapping and location-based services are integral to Nokia’s future and a key way that we stand out from the crowd.

Nokia’s commitment to building the leading location offering is demonstrated every day around the world in its rich set of location-based apps like Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport, Nokia Maps, Nokia Pulse and Nokia City Lens. Quite literally, Nokia helps people navigate their world. But this is only the tip of the iceberg: as a result of our acquisition of NAVTEQ and other mapping industry players, Nokia was the first to build the world’s most accurate and comprehensive global digital map by sending teams to verify every street in every city.

We can do more with our location heritage and mapping expertise, and go beyond a digital version of the paper map. Maps can be more than getting a person from point A to point B. They should bring places to life and inspire us to sense our world.

This is why today we are introducing HERE, the world’s first location cloud that delivers a location platform, location content and location apps across any screen and any operating system.

Just like digital cameras created possibilities that were unthinkable with analog photography, today’s digital mapping has amazing potential to grow into what we call computational cartography, the ability to produce maps on-demand and tailored to their actual use cases. Today’s digital maps are generic – i.e. always the same, irrespective of the content they visualize. We also believe that this game-changing evolution in mapmaking should be available to more businesses and more people around the world – it should expand beyond cars and beyond Nokia devices.

“Location based experiences need to evolve from an app-centric approach towards a holistic customer experience; consumers want services that are optimized for multi-mobile device use and available on demand, everywhere”, said Thilo Koslowski, VP and Lead Automotive Analyst, Gartner.

Nokia Lumia and HERE are naturally made for each other, providing the best location experience on a smartphone, but we aren’t reserving HERE just for Windows Phone. Instead, we are opening it up to all devices and operating systems to give everyone, with any type of device, the possibility to recognize and the ability to use the best location platform in the world. This openness is what sets HERE apart from other digital maps in the world. And with HERE, location will be an even more powerful differentiation for Nokia.

We’re making HERE Maps available for iOS in the Apple App Store as a HTML5-based app and introducing HERE Maps API for Android. We will also introduce HERE Maps for Firefox OS and we’ll continue working, together with Mozilla, to give people the best mapping experience on the OS.

We are introducing LiveSight, a technology based on a highly accurate, 3D map of the world, which provides the most precise and intuitive augmented reality experience. Nokia City Lens, developed exclusively for Nokia Lumia devices, is the first application using LiveSight.

Our industrial collection of data is about to leap a chasm with the planned acquisition of earthmine. earthmine offers a complete solution for collecting, processing, managing, and hosting 3D street level imagery.

So stay tuned. There is so much more to say in the coming hours and days and the long-term, and we’re looking forward to your continued feedback as we move ahead. You can also follow us on Twitter: @heremaps.

image credit (home page banner): Ken Ohyama

View the original article here