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.

Dear friends,

This is the Sandbox newsletter for December. Because most of you have already received a newsletter from us in the past, we moved all the administrative stuff down to the last section, so that we can start right away with the good stuff

Reading time is about 5 minutes.

I. OPEN YOUR EYES

Never before in the history of man have we had access to so much information, so much data so easily as we have today. Thanks to the internet, we can get our hands on an incredibly vast amount of knowledge about nearly anything. And it’s not just about access: Anybody can add his own data to the pool, making it grow at an amazing rate.

But, to freely quote a great movie: With great data always comes great confusion. The sheer amount of information makes it impossible to process and to comprehend for any human being. But luckily, there are creative solutions to the problem that can be summarized under INFORMATION VISUALIZATION – the topic of this newsletter.

Now, of course, there has been visualization before the internet: charts, graphs and maps have been around for a long time. But the web not only enlarged the data pool to be visualized – it also gives us innumerous tools to visualize, often interactively. It’s safe to say that we’re only at the beginning of this, and that we are rapidly moving towards a new form of visualization-based information processing.

A good introduction into the vast field of information visualization is this talk (ca. 30 mins) by Eric Rodenbeck, founder of the great design agency Stamen, who showcases some of their work in the field. Consider the Digg Labs that provide several ways to display the activity on the news aggregation site Digg, for example as a swarm or a stack; or the Trulia Hindsight project that displays the development of urban areas over time. Both visualizations allow to very quickly capture a data set that would have been impossible to fully understand in text form because it is either changing in real time (like Digg) or just incredibly vast (Trulia).

Another magician of visualization is the “internet artist” Jonathan Harris. He gave an amazing talk at TED that gives a good overview of his work, but we recommend that you also go and look at some of the projects. Our favorite is “We feel fine”, that displays the current “mood” of the blogosphere by searching the world’s blogs for the phrase “I feel…” and then aggregating whatever comes after. With this, you can learn for example that the blogosphere feels 3.7 times as happy as usual at the moment. Of course, you may question whether one can quantify feelings just by searching blog posts for certain phrases. But the important thing of Harris’ project is that it turns a vast and anonymous data set – the blogosphere – into something tangible and experienceable and thus creates a sort of intimacy. Recently, the website Twistori applied Harris’ concept for data from microblogging service Twitter.

Visualization, combined with statistical data, also helps to close some of your knowledge gaps and debunk a lot of myths. This is the goal of the amazing Gapminder, a simple but very powerful visualization tool that allows you to explore the correlation between hundreds of statistical indicators from UN statistics. Gapminder was built by the team of Hans Rosling – and of course, there is a TED talk to watch

Finally, visualization methods can also be applied to search (and find) information on the web. One great tool is Cooliris, a browser plugin that lets you browse pictures and videos on the web in a stunning 3-D gallery. And a cute one is Amaztype that displays search results from Amazon by forming the keyword you entered with the cover images of the results.

(Special thanks to our designer Thierry Blancpain for a lot of inputs on this section!)

II. DON’T LOOK BACK

We’re proud to announce our partnership with the LIFT conference that will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, from February 25-27. LIFT explores the social consequences of new technologies, and the 2009 edition is inspired by the question “Where did the future go?”

Sandbox and LIFT will co-host a dinner during the conference, where a select group of talents from the Sandbox network and LIFT attendees will come together to discuss some of issues of the conference in more depth. We will send out invitations to the dinner shortly, but if you plan to come to the conference or are in or near Geneva in February and feel that you should attend, please contact us!

LIFT also offers a 20% discount on the conference tickets for the members of the Sandbox network. Just use the promotional code “Lift09special20″ when registering at http://liftconference.com/user/register.

III. WATCH CLOSELY

As always, here follows a list of tips and links we found interesting in no particular order.

MusicBox is the Master thesis of Anita Lillie at the MIT Media Lab. She develops a tool that visually displays your music collection. Thanks to Alex for the link! (and yes, we could also have put this in the chapter on visualization…)

If you’re a writer, there are a lot of prices you want to receive, but the Bad Sex Awards probably are not among them. Handed out every year by the english magazine “Literary review”, they award badly written passages with sexual content. Have a loot at this year’s winners.

Photographer Richard Howe took pictures of every street corner in Manhattan (around 11’000 in total).

Telescopic Text by Joe Davis is a great way to tell a story on a website. It starts with “I made tea” – but there are more layers to the story.

Recently, Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Tipping Point” and “Blink”, published his new book “Outliers“. While the overall message seems sort of obvious to us (success is not only the product of talent, but also of chance and cultural heritage), the book is entertainingly written and packed with anecdotes that illustrate this point.

IV. TALK TO US!

We love to hear from you – whether you’d like to comment on something you’ve read here, send us an interesting link or just want to say Hi. You can simply reply to this e-mail, or you can connect to us on our webpage, on Facebook or on Twitter:

http://www.sandbox-network.com
http://www.facebook.com/pforti?ref=nf#/pages/Sandbox/12153422357
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…AND FINALLY, HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

We would like to thank you all for your support in this last year. We wish you all merry Christmas, a happy new year and look forward to seeing you in 2009!

Your Sandbox team: Antoine, Christian, Fabian, Nico and Severin

This newsletter is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/ch/