4.0.1 – for no fun

It been a big giant week for geo. But then again, barely a week goes past without some interesting mobile location based news. The biggest news was the new iPhone OS4.0. Yesterday I hinted at the advertising functionality, but it is the GPS enhancements that really have a lot of people excited. Here is one example:

Totally Unexpected: Background Location

All of the Apple nerds at SimpleGeo Boulder were crowded around a single screen and when this announcement hit, we all jumped for joy. As part of the multitasking features Apple added, they introduced new background APIs that a developer could use to extend their app while it’s closed. These included: background audio, background VoIP and background location.

So what does it mean?

This means that any app that’s using geolocation as a feature, context, or anything else, will now be able to know where you’re moving even when the app’s closed.

I’m personally thinking there might be a user backlash against GPS tracking at some point, and then this just makes the PNR data on travellers more valuable, but I opened this post by claiming a week of big news, and Apple was not the only one getting headlines. Google released version 4.0.1 of Google Maps for Blackberry, and the specs looked very impressive, including search by voice. But when I tried to install it I was being asked to change permissions that were impossible to change – looking online, I am definintely not the only user impacted by this issue.

At first I thought it might have been the company restrictions set my the system administrator, but after I asked politely for him to install it on his own phone as a test I got the following response:

…its working on mine. Sorry. It told me to open the Policy view, and just return from that panel by saving the settings, which I did. And I do even have policy settings on my device. The only difference I see is, that you have a 8310 Device with FW 4.5 and I have a 9700 with FW 5.0.

So maybe it is the handset model or more likely the firmware version, but either way, it looked like the only option was to uninstall and return to the old version – now I am back using Google Maps for Blackberry version 3.2.1 and voice search, Buzz, starring and labs functionality will all have to wait for a later date, at least for me personally.

 

Tnooz: Who will make money from mobile in travel and how will they do it?

Over the Easter break I wrote another long piece on mobile for Tnooz and it is now up on the site.

Who will make money from mobile in travel and how will they do it?

The article was getting so long, that I’ve promised Tnooz a third piece to close out my thoughts on where the really interesting innovation in mobile travel apps may come from in the medium term. The story above actually covers more than just mobile apps, as it looks at other business opportunities related to mobile. One that I am totally convinced of is the sale and/or better use within the airline of passenger data. Apart from my own thoughts on the importance and value of data, I also saw this earlier this week:

Google, Yahoo and other major Internet advertising companies are developing new ways to tailor ads by tracking users’ online history — and can even auction off individual customers to advertisers in the few milliseconds between a person clicking a link and the page appearing on their screen.

With OS4 for the iPhone being launched today, rumour is that Apple will also be coming out with some big news on making better use of data to serve highly segmented mobile advertising. But when will large airlines harness the power of the data already within the PNR to augment GPS data for advertising purposes and thereby unlock some of the hidden value? 

If you have no interest in mobile, then maybe take a look at this; earlier this week Spirit airlines in the US announced they will be charging for carry on bags! Hat tip to Henry Harteveldt for picking up on this one first, and plently of other sites have also reported on this news in the last few days. Or if that doesn’t inspire you, maybe you’ll be more interested in a UK study on how expensive in-flight sandwiches sold by airlines really are!

Back to my next (yet to be written) piece on mobile for Tnooz. I really want to focus on bringing together better use of customer data, location based services (mapping, overlays, GPS and more), destination content, social networking and limited gaming aspects (think Foursquare) into one consistent view on enhancing the traveller experience when they are away from home, with the mobile app at its core. Primary focus of this will be the leisure traveller, but I’m also interested to see what parts of this can generate additional revenue for airlines from the business traveller (probably not the game part!). If you are working on anything interesting that you think could be mentioned within this upcoming story, please get in touch with me. Most important angle is that you should be able to explain how it can generate additional ancillary revenue for an airline, assuming it is the airline that licences the app and markets it to passengers.

Thanks for reading.

 

Continental.com selling hotels for no commission?

I’m 99.99% sure this is wrong, but it was interesting the other day on the Consumerist website to read a detailed account of one consumer’s individual complaint against booking hotels on the Continental website. Here is the quote:

Continental has no responsibility for this at all because they don’t make money of the service and it’s just for convenience

Take that up to 100%, as no way this would be true. I went and had a look at the Continental website and they seem to be using a white label Travelocity site, although they have done a very good job of masking this. The Continental website is making multiple calls to the site below during the booking flow.

Begin earning a competitive revenue share on a myriad of products, including Hotel, Air, Car, Activities, Vacation Packages and Last Minute Deals. As a WCT partner, you will enjoy the same competitive rates and inventory that are offered on Travelocity.com, but have your branding carried throughout the customer shopping and booking experience.

I was also interested to see calls from continental.com to estara.com which was a site I was not familiar with. They are now called ATG, and I took the below text from their website.

ATG Click to Call and Click to Chat engage visitors proactively and selectively offer them the opportunity to contact a live agent from any page on any Web site, whether powered by the ATG platform or not. These on demand services engage customers at the most relevant time, such as when a transaction is at risk of being abandoned, or when the consumer’s Web behavior implies confusion. Or they can offer live help only to high-valued customers or big-ticket sales. ATG Call Tracking enables marketers to track inbound phone leads, and more accurately measure pay-for-performance campaigns. Powered by our IP-based infrastructure, Call Tracking brings low-cost scalability and reliability to improve performance across channels.

I’m not sure if the Continental agent really told the passenger they were making no money from selling hotels on the website, but in this age of ancillary revenue where every extra dollar counts, it is inconceivable that this could be true.

 

AirTran and JetBlue understand what it means to be social businesses

I don’t know AirTran that well, but I am impressed by one thing; their staff communication website appears to be on an open to the public internet site. You can’t get much more open than that.

JetBlue also impressed me with a post on the their blog discussing very honestly how they are going with their new Sabre platform. Some of the most open communication I’ve seen coming out of an airline for a while.

…Customers will call in for their choice of a rebooking or refund and hold times go up. Why don’t we just hire a ton more Customer Support people, to offset the wait times on the phones? While a good idea in theory, in reality it would take months to train new Crewmembers, and most of the time they would be sitting around, twiddling their thumbs. Guess what? We’d still have to pay them, thumb twiddling and all, and that means higher costs for us, which would then get passed along to you- the Customer- in the way of higher ticket prices. And NOBODY wants that! The correct solution? Automated services and online rebooking. Those tools are being worked on diligently behind the scenes and we’ll make them available as soon as possible.

A lot of companies talk about wanting to become social businesses and getting the benefits of participation in social media and the like, but embracing this model of business is so much more than just hiring an intern to set up a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page. Openness like the examples above is definitely a big step in the right direction. As I wrote once before when discussing this theme:

…social media is not for everyone – it implies a decentralization of the message, and for large companies used to command and control type communications, this is a very big shift indeed. There are two types of businesses that come to mind where blogging, or social media in general may not be appropriate. The first is the type of business where the brand is built on so much hype that exposing the inner workings of an organisation may actually be damaging to the carefully manufactured facade – luxury goods retailing of global brands would be a good example of this. The second example would be companies that have an antagonistic relationship with staff. A unionized coal mine wouldn’t really matter as there is no consumer brand to be damaged, but for an airline with tense labour relations, active engagement with social media could be a recipe for creating even more management headaches, especially if social initiatives are used to try and patch over things rather than as a broader initiative to actually change the corporate culture.

One person who definitely doesn’t belong in the social business category is the singer / songwriter Prince (see LotusFlow3r.com story on Techdirt). But then again, after he (or more likely his record company) complained to YouTube back in September 2008 that a video I had put together of my baby daughter featured one of his tracks as backing music and then had my file pulled from the web, you won’t find me shedding any tears for him any time soon. At least movie director Kevin Smith (7.25 minute mark) suffered a similar response as I got when he asked Prince for permission to use the same song in one of his films, so now I don’t feel so bad.

 

Some interesting eCommerce figures from Copa

I mentioned Panamanian carrier Copa recently and their new website. I know people working in airlines are always interested to know how others with similar roles are doing it. For that reason, this article from La Estrella (The Star) would be of interest to many readers, except for the fact that it is written in Spanish.

It is an interview with eCommerce Director Frank Kardonski, he says the new website cost five million dollars, and with an eCommerce team of over 30 people they spent 18 months building their new web presence, partly by benchmarking against other airline websites with the intention of reducing the number of clicks it took to obtain information. They have added new currencies and new analytics to ensure they measure customers returning to the site, as this will be one of their key measures of success.

I remember taking two airline website executives out for drinks in Cannes one evening a few years ago when they asked each other how many staff each one had in his eCommerce team. The exec from the larger airline said 50, whilst the head of eCommerce for the airline about a quarter of the size gave an answer of five people. You could just see the guy with 50 staff rubbing his hands together when he said half jokingly something like “it looks like I’ll have to tell my team to get more efficient.”

 

Cache conundrum continues – Focus on ITA

Earlier this week I mentioned the Datalex cache and how everyone is now pushing the relative merits of their own caching technology. I know that EB2 used to tout the strength of their cache (now owned by Sabre I assume they still do) and then yesterday I read some interesting stuff from ITA on caches.

In December 2008 ITA filed a patent application with the title Method and apparatus for providing availability of airline seats. The abstract appears below:

A computer program product, method and system for producing seat availability information for a mode of travel such as airline travel produce a prediction of availability of a seat in accordance with an availability query. The prediction is used in place of making an actual query to an airline or other travel mode availability system.

That patent had the names Carl Demarcken and Gregory Galperin on it,  but then in September 2009 it appears they refiled the patent with the same title, but a new inventor added (David Baggett), and a rewritten abstract.

An availability system used for a travel planning system includes a cache having entries of availability information of seats for a mode of transportation. The system includes a cache manager that manages entry information in the cache so that information in the cache is correct, current, complete or otherwise as useful as possible. The cache manager determines when a stored answer is stale and, if a stored answer is stale, sends an availability query to a source of availability information

One of the perils of writing here is that occasionally I am really pushing the limits of my expertise – clearly patent law is something that is not my forte, but it is an interesting area nonetheless. Probably the most interesting piece of corporate promotional fluff that I am mailed regularly is the newsletter I receive from law firm Griffith Hack who specialize in intellectual property; unfortunately reading this once a quarter hardly makes me an expert!

ITA cache patent application US2009234682 (A1)

I’ve lifted a few interesting slabs of text from the patent application, but it really was a very long document and I only had time to skim read it.

[0043] Set forth below are several cache management strategies. In practice multiple strategies can be mixed together and executed simultaneously to meet multiple goals at once. The availability system uses data sources which asynchronously notify a travel planning system 10 of schedule changes or updates; the cache manager 150 can track these notifications and use the information contained therein to further guide cache insertion and deletion. For instance if the cache manager 150 receives a schedule change notification that a flight has been canceled, it can remove all entries relating to that flight from its cache. Similarly, if it receives notification that a flight has been added, it can create entries related to that flight and place them on lists to be added or modified in the cache. Finally, there are data sources such as so-called “AVS messages” which asynchronously notify the system of availability data of certain flights; the cache manager 150 can treat those just as it would responses directly from the availability data sources, and enter that data into the appropriate entries in the cache if appropriate, add entries to the cache, or simply ignore the messages

and then

[0057] Another version of this system replaces the process of gathering access counts in real time with a predictor of that value. One way of making such a predictor is to model one from historical data as follows: the above system is run to gather a database of lists of entries and access counts: instead of deleting the lists as prescribed above, the list is collected in a database for later processing. When the database is large enough, corresponding entries (e.g., “all US Air flights out of BOS before 11:00 am” or “US6309 11DEC BOS-LGA 10:00”) are averaged to get one mean predicted value for each entry in the list. A list of these averages is then used rather than constructed lists described above. While entries referring to specific absolute dates are unlikely to generalize and should largely be omitted from the compiled list, entries making reference to relative dates (such as “one week from now”) are likely to be very useful.

They really are trying to cover a lot of bases with this application, but why not give it a try. I mentioned in the earlier piece on Datalex the challenge for airline buyers to compare one caching technology over another, but an even more difficult challenge may be enforcing a patent on caching technology given that almost by definition a cache is a mysterious black box that only the creators can see inside of. Maybe the patent application is more of a marketing exercize to solve the first problem of differentiation in the eyes of buyers. I’m not exactly sure how one cache creator would know how another cache was working just by looking at the output, but just as I’m not an expert on patents, neither have I ever actually tried to build a cache, so this is just one man’s hypothesizing.

Whilst reading up on caches I came across another very interesting and curious patent application that is also airline related. Nothing to do with direct channels, but it definitely ticks the innovation box for creative and radical ideas. It was called System and Method of Control of the Terrestrial Climate and its Protection against Warming and Climatic Catastrophes Caused by Warming such as Hurricanes and I’ll leave you with the opening line of the abstract to ponder over the Easter break:

This system of the control and protection of the terrestrial climate relies mainly on civilian airlines burning (preferably price-subsidized) sun-shading (sun-blocking/sun-reflective) fuels in the high levels of the atmosphere in order to reduce the intensity of the solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface.

 

Time for a social success story at Virgin America

After last’s week story called Virgin America’s social networking nightmare, I thought it was time to balance things with a more positive story. You’ve read how Martinair are using Twitter in an intelligent way, so now it is time to give Virgin America a run. If you are interested, just click on the quote to read the full story.

Bowen Payson, was from the airline Virgin America that has been using Twitter to outreach to their customers. Bowen began his session by speaking about the differences in their airline from a physical experience. From the black leather Recaro seats, to the mood lighting. Their on-demand in flight entertainment is just as high tech as their communication strategy. The Twitter story began without a strategy and unfolded and matured into more than 60,000 followers as I write this. Their main social contact, Nick Schwartz is the voice of the airline and loves social networking, partially because of his age. They try to keep a consumer centric voice and mind set, and work to make the experience better incrementally.

 On a totally different topic, I saw this news from AA this morning:

American Airlines announced today it is now providing customers in Canada the option to use PayPal when booking tickets on the airline’s Web site, AA.com. American, which began accepting PayPal for AA.com bookings in the United States in 2008, is the first and only airline in the United States to accept PayPal as a form of payment internationally.

At first I thought surely AA is not the only US airline accepting PayPal, and then I saw the last word – internationally. There is now no question that AA has the best international websites, but I didn’t realize that other US airlines were only offering PayPal domestically. PayPal have really made a concerted effort to crack the airline payments markets, but the feedback I’ve received from various airlines is that they are interested in low cost options to credit cards and PayPal are not perceived to be competitive in that area. PayPal apparently push other benefits, but outside of the US, it is clear that with a few obvious exceptions, that message is having a hard time cutting through.

 

Datalex 2009 results

The Irish internet booking engine company Datalex reported their 2009 results last week, but safer for me given my own employment just to quote the summary from elsewhere:

EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) fell from $2m in 2008 to just $100,000 and total annual revenue fell by 18% to $27.1m. The company attributed the fall in revenue to a reduction in demand for its e-business and consulting services and “a dearth of new business opportunities”

Earlier in March they announced that they were putting Panamanian carrier  Copa Airlines into production, but I did pick up one interesting quote in the Tnooz article at the time:

Jim Nation, regional sales director for Datalex USA, says the common platform “imports each airlines’ fares and rules to support shopping requests without the need to hit the host system and Datalex applies the appropriate fare family/fare branding attributes as defined by each airline, customizable per route.”

I try to be as fair and balanced as possible on this blog, as you can see from previous positive things I’ve written on Datalex, but on occasion I’ve mentioned the bad news as well.  

But it was the above quote that was most interesting. Storing all the fares and their application rules is no big deal, but the real challenge is matching the inventory with the fares to find the applicable fares over a given period of time. From the two articles I’ve linked to, it is not totally clear everything that Datalex stores, as they talk about fares and rules but also about not hitting the host system. Caches are definintely flavour of the month, especially with the new search paradigm the industry will move towards,  and I assume Datalex feed a cache based on their production traffic, but it may be that they have a regular feed from airlines and their partners. In one of the articles they claim that they can also return in their searches interline and codeshare, which would mean that they potentially cache as well any interline partners. Not hitting the host system potentially raises the issue of keeping inventory up to date and of showing correct availability, but especially on the latter point, this is where any cache really proves its value – all caches are not created equal, but this must be a challenge for buyers to understand when comparing systems.

 

Drop everything and check this now

Seeing as this blog is primarily aimed at people running airline websites, there is one thing you MUST do today if you do not already know the answer to this question.

Whose responsibility it is to renew your domain name, and on what date is this due?

South African Airways found out the hard way recently, and just the other day Foursquare suffered the same fate. The lost revenue and the egg you will have all over your face if this happens to you is just not worth overlooking this simple task. So please go and find out the answer now!

 

Are social business evangelists getting too far ahead of real business?

The Twitter crowd can be a tough one to please – just ask Umair Haque. But this week I spent a few minutes doing something I’ve never done before, and that is actually following some tweets live from a couple of conferences whilst being cocooned far away in Madrid. But before I get into a bit of mild criticism of the whole social media industry, let me pick out a couple of people for some praise – balanced criticism is very difficult in 140 characters, but the blog lets me be much more contructive.  

The first person is social business consultant and Headshift UK founder, Lee Bryant. A comment like the one below might put him in Bishop Shelby Spong class of heresy amongst his peers (ie. asking reasonable questions, but stepping on the toes of too many vested interests), but this is what makes it all the more impressive.

An issue to consider here is that practitioners are in danger of getting too far ahead of clients in their thinking around social business. If it takes, as I suspect it might, 3-5 years to really have an impact on the way large businesses are structured from a social business perspective, then people who simply write about this field are in danger of racing ahead of practice and becoming disconnected with business realities.

The other person, and I’ll be clear that I don’t know either one of them from a bar of soap, is Tim Burrowes. His post was titled:

Why I’m over live blogging (and I’m not sure about live tweeting either)

His thoughtful piece started with: I’m falling out of love with live blogging, and indeed live tweeting, from events. Too often, you end up being little more than a snarky dictaphone.

Tim’s article is highly recommended reading for all the people who were this week at a conference and who spent more time engaging with their smart phone than anything or anyone else! Not very smart in my opinion.

The two social media events I was keeping an eye on were the Eye For Travel event in San Francisco (a few of my work colleagues in attendance), and the Social Business Summit held in Sydney on Thursday (a couple of people I hold in high regard in attendance). Search Twitter for #swtravel or  #sbs2010 to see more, but in short, I’m a little concerned that on Twitter there is too much navel gazing amongst the “in” crowd who “get it” and occasionally a condescending attitude to many of the people they actually want to work with as clients.

John Lonergan as head of online sales at Qantas was presenting in Sydney. Here is a guy who is probably in the top three airline employed eCommerce experts in the world, especially if peer opinion is any measure, but someone who would have been an unknown to most of the crowd in Sydney. A couple of the tweats I picked up on his presentation follow (and no names, as I’m not into starting a flame war – besides, the tweets are more relevant here than whoever was making them):

Person 1: Qantas social media leaves a lot to be desired. Their FB stuff is a torrent of ads, @qantas doesn’t exist.

Person 2: David Lonergan from Qantas: “I am not a Social Media Expert” … amen. #sbs2010

Person 3: Qantas social media =”teen sx stage”- fumbling,groping in the dark, we’re very keen but not there yet. #sbs2010

Person 3 wasn’t actually being critical – I gather it was a joke John made, but the other two just shooting off quick comments via twitter gives no context or justification, other than implying that either a little dose of humility or not having an @qantas Twitter account means you don’t have a clue and shouldn’t be speaking on such a hallowed topic as social business. I think Person 2 is actually setting up his own metasearch site, so maybe that partly explains his apparent antagonism toward Qantas. But not quite sure how to explain his calling John by another name – maybe I’m missing an “in”  joke!

Regular readers of this site will know that I push the social angle more than most in the airline IT industry. If you are not a regular reader, here are a few links. Where do I start? Can airlines learn anything from Foursquare?, Guest Post: Martinair on Twitter, Living Social?, The recession has been great for social marketing, Moment of truth – Did any of my 2009 predictions come true?, What constitutes an airline “not getting social media” is extremely subjective, Questioning an Airline Social Media Strategy, Possible clues from Gist on the future of social networking or maybe So much money still sitting on the table in travel social networking. OK, some might seem a bit dated, but this space is moving so fast that occassionally last weeks post becomes todays fish wrapper. I’m hoping that my public record in this area at least entitles me to ask the same question as Lee Bryant posed at the top of this piece without being labelled as someone who “doesn’t get it.”    

The Eye For Travel event  tweet stream had a much higher level of incestuous navel gazing  – SBS in Sydney didn’t have a hope of competing. No need to lift individual tweets, but when you get the converted preaching to the converted and telling each other how the end of the world (ie. businesses that don’t do exactly as they say) is coming and it is they (ie. people who tweet a minimum of 10 times a day, each and every day) who will inherit all, you get this seemingly self fulfilling prophecy where anyone who raises the slightest question faces being burnt at the stake of social insanity.  

I’m sure a lot of very interesting stuff was being presented, but also I suspect that a lot of it was lost on those in the crowd who were more interested in blurting out inane tweets at a rate of knots. If you disagree with me, and didn’t read Tim’s article above, then please go back and read it before leaving a comment here that tries to burn me on that same stake. I am totally convinced that social is big, and will only get much bigger, but let’s not lose our objectivity in our quest to bring the broader population on board – it is OK to not slavishly follow every single hyped up trend and still squeeze the word “social” into your job title. 

To wrap it up on a lighter note, the tweet coming out of the Eye for Travel conference that almost made me fall of my chair with laughter is the one below – what more can I possible say! 

Person 4: Wait. Where is everyone? Is this thing over? I am still sitting here tweeting. Why didn’t anyone tell me!? #smtravel