From Cell Phone to Mobile Sensor Platform

No one would disagree that the cell phone is quickly evolving into a personal mobile computing device. Thinking of a cell phone in terms of a mobile sensor platform helps solidify the true nature of the evolution of mobile technology we are witnessing around us. What makes a mobile device a sensor platform? With A-GPS becoming standard, the ability for mobile devices to sense location is obvious, but the device could sense other things as well such as temperature, motion, barometric pressure to just name a few. In addition the ubiquitous nature of broadband wireless connectivity which is... Read more »

Sabre’s new Cubeless Social Networking Platform

Sabre introduced a new enterprise level social networking application today. American Express was named as an initial distributor of the application expected out later this year. The announcement is important for a number of reasons. This is the first significant social networking application created by a travel organization targeted at the internal corporate community. The Cubeless application is a brand new platform developed by Sabre Studios designed to facilitate communication to and between travelers, travel arrangers and other key corporate stakeholders. Though the precise ROI may be... Read more »

Agent POS platform

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to talk with Steven Bloom from SkyGate a Danish travel technology company. SkyGate has developed an agency POS platform called NewPort. The conversation and demonstration provided further evidence that the need for an enhanced point of sale platform for travel agents is a universal requirement throughout the global. For European travel agents, there has always been a requirement to deliver so called “backroom functionality” to the desktop due to the multi-source nature of European travel inventory and the need to drive invoices from the agent desktop.... Read more »

Circos debuts at Demo 2008 - a Kango competitor

Demo 2008 is the annual event where start-ups get to do a brief pitch to potential investors. Circos is a new qualitative search engine: According Tech Crunch: “Circos most like Kango, which has also taken on the task of categorizing hotels based on user reviews. VibeAgent also has a search engine for its own site that will search hotels based on qualities. While Kango auto-generates tags after pouring through user reviews, Circo lets users search for any qualities they’re interested in. The engine then grades and ranks the results by each quality on an “A” through “F” scale... Read more »

InsideTrip - A new spin on the Mega-Travel Search model

A new meta-search company, InsideTrip was mentioned today in Tech Crunch. The model is the now familiar multi-site airline search pioneered by SideStep, Kayak, Farecast and Mobissmo (not to forget the original pioneer, FareChase which only recently was put on the front page of Yahoo! Travel ). The twist is a rating system that evaluates the quality of a given selection based on three specific categories - speed, comfort and ease and 12 so-called “pain points” such as number of stops, security wait time, legroom, aircraft type, connection time, and gate location. Users can indicate... Read more »

Alaska Airlines - Jenn Virtual Assistant

Alaska Airlines has introduced an avatar interface called Jenn on its Website. My longtime blog readers will recall me mentioning the historic Knowledge Navigator video that was introduced at MacWorld in 1989 and my belief that an intelligent assistant would truly be a killer app for the travel industry. Even though the Navigator concept eventually led to the disappointing Newton, the concept of having an avatar assistant continued to be tried. Way back in 2000, Eurovacations (a site created by Rail Europe Group and U.S. tour operator Avanti Destinations) introduced an avatar to assist in travel... Read more »

InsideTrip - A new spin on the Mega-Travel Search model

A new meta-search company, InsideTrip was mentioned today in Tech Crunch. The model is the now familiar multi-site airline search pioneered by SideStep, Kayak, Farecast and Mobissmo (not to forget the original pioneer, FareChase which only recently was put on the front page of Yahoo! Travel ). The twist is a rating system that evaluates the quality of a given selection based on three specific categories - speed, comfort and ease and 12 so-called “pain points” such as number of stops, security wait time, legroom, aircraft type, connection time, and gate location. Users can indicate... Read more »