The newsletter for May: Innovation in air travel & Dinners everywhere
May 12th, 2009 by SandboxWe just sent out our newsletter for May. In it, fellow Sandboxer Simon Rohrbach talks about innovation in the airline industry, and we give you the usual selection of good stuff we come across. Read the whole thing after the jump; and if you want to get our newsletter in your inbox every month, just click here.
Dear friends,
This is the Sandbox newsletter for May 2009. In the first section, fellow Sandboxer Simon Rohrbach takes a look at developments in the AVIATION INDUSTRY. After that, we give you a short update on what has been going on at Sandbox in the last months, and at the end of this newsletter, you’ll find our usual “interesting stuff we came across” section. Reading time is about 10 minutes.
GOING GLOBAL – DEVELOPMENTS THAT WILL TRANSFORM AIR TRAVEL
by Simon Rohrbach, simon@simonrohrbach.com
I see the civil aviation industry as one of the most promising ones in the near future. Even though it is ruled by a set of restrictions imposed by regulations in security and environmental affairs, I firmly believe that civil aviation is an area full of potential for exciting developments, considering the traveling trends ahead of us. Being a regular flight commuter myself, I would like to anticipate some of the changes that might await us from a service and product angle, put in the consumer’s perspective.
Before the flight
Many long-distance commuters today complain that they have to book all their flights separately. Indeed, the process of booking a flight is too inefficient for the needs of regular travelers. Being able to purchase a set number of open flights with open return options would make traveling by air much more flexible
and enjoyable, given that a sufficient number of flights per day is available to handle peak times.
The widely spread concept of the Smartcard might be a suitable solution to enable the model of flexible air traffic – a credit-card-sized value card deducting a certain amount of money whenever a traveler touches a wireless reader to board a train, or, in this case, a flight.
At the airport
For airlines, the airport is a bottleneck – they have to get as many passengers as possible to the airside as quickly as possible. Self-check-in machines seem to be a suitable approach to resolve this issue while keeping personnel costs low – but the current solutions with unintuitive, confusing interfaces can hardly be considered as a viable solution. Rather, they leave many travelers confused and helpless. So what is needed is a more flexible, personalised solution for dealing with travellers – one of them might just be what the Microsoft Office Labs team recently published in the latest part of their Envisioning series (video here and images here), a collection of future forecasts around technology and lifestyle: A context-sensitive touch-surface card in the size of a credit card, providing personalised advice to their carriers, such as check-in time and gate and even a map showing the way there.
After the flight
Although flights are a very safe form of traveling nowadays, many passengers feel that there is still a great deal of uncertainty involved. Hence, we can often observe others and ourselves sending texts to our loved ones to inform them that we have landed safely on the ground.
Resulting from this need, services like ArrivedOK and Delaycast are starting to emerge. ArrivedOK for example lets air travelers define a set of people that are automatically notified via personalized texts, e-mails or Twitter messages whenever the air traveler has arrived at his destination. Delaycast allows air travelers to look up flight delays in advance and hence avoid arriving at the airport too early.
This level of transparency and communication is yet unknown for many air service operators. It is however absolutely possible that airlines will soon start to adopt such concepts, if not even acquire these companies or partner with them to provide a better service.
Conclusion
There are many exciting developments that await us. Most of the technologies mentioned above are already in use today – it is just a matter of turning them into meaningful services. This, however, will take patience and many more people willing to go global.
WHAT SANDBOX HAS BEEN UP TO LATELY
The Sandbox online platform, connecting our members and establishing a global dialogue between them on multiple subjects, has launched in a first version just a few weeks ago. We’re currently testing it with select members, while we are preparing to start accepting applications from new members. Stay tuned to our blog to receive updates. We were also busy connecting our members in the real world: We hosted Sandbox dinners in Zurich, Geneva, Singapore, San Francisco, New York and London. We also co-hosted an event on entrepreneurship at New York’s Columbia University.
Simultaneously, Sandbox has started to work closer with corporate partners. We’re consulting with a multinational company in the field of social media, and have successfully run a focus group for a major bank on Generation Y. If you’d like to know more on how Sandbox could help you, please get in touch!
INTERESTING THINGS WE CAME ACROSS
- Still think advertising is about making TV spots and billboards? Then you should read all about The Wexley School for Girls (hint: it’s not a school).
- Much has been written about the difficult future that newspapers face. But few texts have been as comprehensive and thoughtful as this essay by Clay Shirky. If you’re in the media business, it’s a must-read.
- We have been very excited about the astonishing growth that our good friends from Poken, a Switzerland-based startup, have experienced. Poken produces small tokens that act as “virtual business cards”: If you hold two Pokens together, they exchange a signal; once you connect your Poken to your computer by USB, you can add your new contacts on various social networks.
- This may well be the best idea we’ve came across so far this year: The Laid Off Camp in New York, a gathering for people “in a career transition” to connect and empower.
- Speaking of the crisis: Guess which industry sees its sales spike as the world economy stumbles and comes to a grinding halt? It’s candy.
- Our friends at innovation agency Atizo asked us to point out the motorcycle innovation contest that they’re running for BMW. You can submit your ideas on the website and win money and other prizes.
