MondoWindow

The Year of the WISP

You know something is a trend when it needs its own acronym to describe it. So here goes: Wireless IFE Systems Providers = “WISPs”

If you’re part of the IFE industry, you know what I’m talking about: all the companies that are coming out with IFE systems that serve content wirelessly to passengers’ own devices. Those are the WISPs.

WISPs will be out in force at next week’s APEX EXPO in Long Beach: Lufthansa Systems (BoardConnect), Lumexis (WiPax), Tune Group (Tune Box), Siemens (Media4Sky), DTI (Wise), Panasonic (eXW) just to name the ones that have been publically announced. At least another dozen WISPs are in the formative stages: watch for a slew of announcements at the show.

Of course, this is no surprise to us at MondoWindow—the emergence of the WISPs is right in line with our predictions about disruption in the IFE sector. The presence of so many highly capable passenger-supplied computing devices in the cabin presents too much of an opportunity to ignore: let the passengers supply the cutting edge hardware, avoid expensive, heavy seatback units, and use ubiquitous web technology to serve them content in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

Simplicity is the essence of the systems the WISPs are buildingFirst, there’s a webserver on board the plane. Because certification for airworthiness takes so long and is so expensive, the head-end servers we’re seeing now are the equivalents of machines we saw on the ground several years ago: limited in terms of disc space and processing power, but certainly nothing to stand in the way of IFE deployment.

Second, there are a number of wireless access points connected to the server. In most cases, three to five access points are sufficient to provide every passenger on a plane with a good quality signal. In every case that I know of, WISPs are using this client-server model on standardized consumer devices, similar to the smartphones and tablets all of us use all the time on the ground. That makes sense: the majority of passengers are now carrying web-capable devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops), so why reinvent the wheel?
And this creates massive opportunity for MondoWindow. Our location services platform has been built using web technology from day one. It’s a browser-native moving map that, in addition to being hosted on the web at MondoWindow.com, can be packaged up and hosted on board an aircraft’s webserver by a WISP. Every WISP we’ve spoken to has “moving map” somewhere on their to-do list. But none of them are geoweb experts—it many cases the map is an afterthought. That’s why we’ve developed a set of products aimed squarely at the WISPs: we want to take the pain out of developing, deploying, and updating an IFE system’s moving map and instead turn it into a central feature—one that not only meets passengers’ demanding needs, but can actually be a source of solid ancillary revenues for both WISPs and their airline customers.
At the APEX EXPO, you’ll be able to experience MondoWindow OnBoard running on a certified server operated by our partners at TriaGnoSys (our favorite WISP!). Drop by their booth (#1067) to check it out, or get in touch to set up an appointment!Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I stand by my prediction from last year: by the end of 2015, there will be no new orders for embedded seatback IFE systems on aircraft destined for routes of five hours or less.

The WISPs will see to that.

Location-based Content is Fundamental to In-Flight Entertainment

“Geotainment” is quickly emerging as a distinct category of IFE.

MondoWindow and a growing number of other companies have recognized the essential nature of location-based content for fliers, and are taking advantage of new technologies to give people what they really want. We call it “geotainment”: entertaining, informative, and useful content about the real world, customized for the airborne armchair explorer. In the context of in-flight entertainment (IFE), geotainment is absolutely fundamental. The conventional moving map is always one of the most popular components of every IFE system that has a map. Why?

Because, with the possible exception of the safety video, the map is the only IFE component that is relevant to every single passenger on the plane. Even better, the answers provided by moving maps — Where am I? When will I arrive? — are constantly changing, driving passengers to revisit the map throughout the flight.Now, what happens when you answer those two basic “where/when” questions with deeply engaging content?
You’ve got geotainment. That five-second “where/when” query turns into an entertaining experience that provides deeper insights about the Earth and the passenger’s own journey. That engagement can in turn translate into ancillary revenues through offers targeted around the geographic realities of location, destination, and time (of day/month/year), as well as the passenger’s individual profile and preferences.We at MondoWindow have been hard at work building a platform specifically to serve interactive geographical content to air passengers.
MondoWindow uses the aircraft’s real-time location and destination as the building blocks for an entertaining and social experience built around the context of air travel. In fact, we’ve been refining geotainment concepts since 2004, when co-founder Greg Dicum wrote the first in his series of Window Seat books to help fliers understand the landscape from the air.We’re not alone in our efforts to delight and inform passengers with geotainment. Hidden Journeys, a project of the Royal Geographical Society, has curated gorgeous content from their own archives and from across the web corresponding to dozens of air routes around the world. Georadio is working on custom-produced, geo-coded audio snippets that provide real-time narration about the landscape below. Jetway Geographer is publishing printed guidebooks to the sights, stories, and histories unique to specific airline routes. Rocks from Above is a well-illustrated blog — a “geologic field guide at 35,000 feet” — with copious examples of landforms linked to Google Earth. In addition to Greg’s Window Seat books, America From the Air: A Guide to the Landscape Along Your Route is another book that makes use of printed route maps to interpret what’s below. Landprints: On the Magnificent American Landscape is a classic of popular geology from 1984, and it also includes common air route maps cross-referenced with the text. A very recent development in the genre is Skyhook Wireless’ recent release of an airborne location feature in its Android software development kit, which might enable a whole new batch of mobile developers to create geotainment apps for passengers.
Geotainment is quickly emerging as a distinct category of IFE. The geotainment trend is powered by two key factors. On the ground, passengers are already used to location-aware personal devices, geotainment apps, and web mapping. In the air, the rollout of WiFi networks and Internet connectivity provide methods of acquiring real-time location in-flight and of delivering location-based content to all manner of devices in the cabin.
(WiFi and/or connectivity are important because consumer-grade GPS chips in smartphones do not work in the sky nor at jet speeds; consequently, geotainment applications must acquire real-time flight location data via an onboard server or the Internet.)MondoWindow is creating the contextual platform for useful, beautiful, and profitable location services in the aircraft cabin. And we’re in increasingly good company as geotainment emerges as a dynamic center of innovation within IFE. In fact, we see this as yet another indication that our vision for the future of IFE is coming faster than anyone had imagined.
++ ++ Will you be at the APEX show in Long Beach in September? So will we — get in touch and we’ll get together!

A Tale of Two Conferences

Bei den Kirchhöfen, 20355 Hamburg, Germany

The past two weeks have been really gruelling. First, I went with Maneesh Sagar, the Chairman of MondoWindow’s Board, to the Aircraft Interiors Expo (AIX) in Hamburg. Just a few short days later, I was back in San Francisco at the Where conference. Both conferences are worldwide gatherings of key MondoWindow constituencies, but they could not be more different.AIX is the European counterpart to the September APEX show. As such, it attracts everyone in the world with an interest in what happens inside passenger aircraft—from airframers (not surprisingly Airbus had a huge presence) to airlines, from seat manufacturers to the people who make the bolts that hold the seats to the floor, and from caterers (poached scallops! vodka in a bag!) to in-seat power providers.

Maneesh makes a new friend in Hamburg.

And then there was in-flight entertainment. The IFE section of the huge show was like a conference in itself, and it was fascinating. There were the usual suspects, like industry leader Panasonic Avionics, whose notoriously closed-off “Death Star” booth reached new levels of arrogance, but there were also plenty of new entrants bringing a welcome exuberance to the show. In many ways, AIX 2012 was a major confirmation of what we at MondoWindow have been saying for some time: the emergence of consumer computing hardware in passengers’ carry-ons is creating the conditions for a new style of IFE that serves content wirelessly into passengers’ own devices. Indeed, Lufthansa Systems’ BoardConnect, which debuted to its first public demonstration, won a coveted Crystal Cabin Award at the show.

And BoardConnect wasn’t the only one. There were systems from established companies like TriaGnoSys and Lumexis, convergent systems from connectivity providers like Gogo, Row44, and OnAir, and new offerings from entrants like VT Miltope, Bizzability, and others.All of these systems stream content to users’ own devices, and all of them need a map. That’s where MondoWindow comes in. Even aside from our revolutionary content and features, at its core MondoWindow is the only full-featured, browser-native moving map in existence.

We received major validation at AIX when TriaGnoSys announced that MondoWindow’s hybrid, on-board hosted configuration would be available as an OEM component of their IFE systems. And we’re actively talking to just about every company in the space (if you missed us at AIX, get in touch).From “What?” to Where

While all this attention was very gratifying, it was a long time coming. When we first started talking about the MondoWindow concept at APEX 2010, we were met with blank stares and heads shaking “no.” But at the same time, we were floating the idea within the community of web geographers—the people responsible for things like Google Earth and a whole lot more. The Where Conference is that community’s annual confab, and the first time we went, in 2011, MondoWindow had just been launched in beta a month earlier. Everyone got it intuitively. The most common comment was “That’s so cool! I’ve always wanted that!”

Telling the crowd about IFE at Where. More pix here.

This year was no different: presenting MondoWindow to digital geographers is the easiest sell imaginable. I gave a short, punchy Ignite talk, bringing people up to speed on the latest in the IFE world, and all week long people came up to me and said what a great idea they thought MondoWindow is.As always the show was a blur of technology and content partnership opportunities for us. In addition to our existing friends and partners Stamen Design (whose team built MondoWindow’s core technology) and Bing (we use their map tiles), we had really great interactions with folks like ESRI (the granddaddy of GIS), DigitalGlobe (the provider of nearly all the satellite imagery you see online), and MapBox (who make the best online mapping tools around).

The Where conference was also a chance to connect with other startups doing interesting things with location. It was fantastic to be able to talk to the people behind really cool initiatives like the Public Laboratory (they make low-tech kits that enable anyone to do really high-tech things), Hover (a very very cool 3D world), Kullect (like Pinterest for the real world), MyCityWay (an app that enables city exploration), and Discoverful (another real world, real-time sharing app).All of these initiatives are potential partners for MondoWindow. With one foot in IFE and one foot in the geoweb, we’re in the unique position of being able to, on the one hand, provide a broader platform for interesting geo-tools and geo-content, and on the other hand, to bring airline passengers some of the most thoughtful, engaging and cutting-edge location services in existence.

It’s an utterly unparalleled situation: we are at home at both AIX and Where, with many friends and partners in both worlds. We’ve known this for a long time, of course—it’s our distinctive value proposition—but attending both conferences back-to-back, exhausting though it was, really brought things home for us: MondoWindow is IFE and MondoWindow is geoweb.

MondoWindow and TriaGnoSys!

Today we’re very pleased to announce that MondoWindow is now available as an OEM component on wireless IFE systems from TriaGnoSys.What that means is that TriaGnoSys’ customers—small fleets, regional airlines, and low cost carriers—now have access to the most advanced, web-native, in-flight moving map in existence. And, because of MondoWindow’s built-in revenue streams, in many cases we’ll be able to turn a necessary cost—the moving map—into a profitable ancillary revenue stream.

It’s a hybrid architecture, with MondoWindow’s core elements hosted on-board the aircraft. So MondoWindow on TriaGnoSys products does not require connectivity in order to present passengers with a full range of location services. When there is connectivity, however, we can take things to an unprecedented next level by incorporating social media, networked gaming, real-time news and information, and real-time e-commerce.We’re very excited to be teaming with TriaGnoSys. Even though they’re celebrating their tenth year in business this week at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg (where I’m writing this from, thanks to the wonders of jet lag), TriaGnoSys still has the nimbleness of a startup—something that lets the company see the appeal of doing things more than a little differently. (If you’re at AIX now, come visit at booth 6B5.)
Our joint vision is to offer the low cost and regional airline market—one of the fastest growing parts of civil aviation—the IFE quality and service passengers expect from much bigger carriers. At the same time, because many of these airlines are startups like us, there are many opportunities to work together with them to create never-before-seen custom implementations of location services combined with social media, games, and revenue streams. It’s very exciting!

-Greg

________________

Here’s an article by Mary Kirby of the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX).

My IFE: Trip Report

Last weekend I was facing a 10+ hour flight from meetings in Frankfurt back to MondoWindow HQ here in San Francisco. Worse still, the longest leg, from London, was on a United 747 featuring truly old school IFE: no seatback systems, no wifi, no power supplies. Nothing but early-window hollywood content on a few hard-to-see, distorted, maladjusted overhead monitors. So I took matters into my own hands, literally: i loaded up my iPad with a few movie rentals, updated Instapaper and my subscriptions to The Economist and the New Yorker, made sure I had a bunch of music and games on it as well. For good measure I also had my iPhone (more music, games, and reading) and my laptop (sometimes work is entertainment too). For climb and descent, when the devices are off, I knew I could rely on United’s Hemispheres magazine (it’s quite good, by airline standards, thanks to INK’s editorial team in New York). I also had a book and a few stories torn out of magazines that I’ve been meaning to read. And best of all, I had a window seat.

It was not a bad ten hours at all. It went something like this:Hour 1

As I said, Hemispheres Magazine isn’t too bad at all, and it’s not just because I’ve written for them in the past. This time I found an interesting article on post-boomers not wanting to take on high stress jobs that reminded me of a book idea my friend David Roberts from Grist has been contemplating. Naturally I wanted to send it to him — but couldn’t. I took the magazine with me and sent him the link later.Hour 2

Especially when it’s dense subject matter, I still find a physical hardcover book superior to an ebook. I don’t know why — it’s just the way I was brought up I suppose. On this flight I read the last couple of chapters of Steven Pinker’s eye-opening “The Better Angels of our Nature” — a look at the very encouraging long term historical trends in the reductions in violence at every level of human societies. I haven’t read anything more secularly uplifting in years, and listening to Ella Fitzgerald simultaneously didn’t hurt either. Hour 3

Time for a movie. Before my trip I had canvassed my Facebook friends for movie recommendations. I rented a half dozen from iTunes (around $3 each, the deal is you have a month to start watching each movie, but once you start that film’s gone in 24 hours). I found myself attracted to classics on this flight — I had never seen Citizen Kane before (even though somehow I already knew what “Rosebud” meant). In the middle of this magnificent film i figured out how to hang my iPad from the tray table in front of me, creating a DIY seatback system.

Hour 4

After the film, and a walk around, I took out my laptop and spent a good while editing photos from a family visit to my sister’s place in Jerusalem. If you’ve been there then you know the place is a photographer’s dream. It was a real treat to spend a couple of hours on the computer without facebook, email, IM, and all the other distractions fighting for mindshare. I created several wonderful panoramas, adjusted colors and contrasts (I always shoot RAW, which requires more post-production, but in my view it’s worth it), and edited it all down to a short, engaging slideshow for friends and family. For good measure, I put the slideshow on the iPad.Hour 5

Flying through my reading: a story from Harper’s on the gem trade (full of scammers), from the New Yorker on neuroscience and the perception of time (it’s strange), and the New York Times magazine on the whiskey Ernest Shackleton took to Antarctica (recently discovered and re-engineered: it’s delicious). Hour 6

In his book “Cadillac Desert,” Marc Reisnor wrote “I believe that anyone who flies in an airplane and dosen’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money.” A case in point: I glanced out the window to see the Alberta Tar Sands projects in all their horrifying glory: massive holes in the Canadian Taiga, stretching over an area that took easily 30 minutes to fly across. This is precisely the kind of gift I think is most important from the window seat: a firsthand look at the things most of us will never see on the ground — in this case I was able to see an important economic, political, and environmental issue with my own eyes, making it all far more concrete to me. (To be fair, I was hoping to see it — as the author of the Window Seat books, I’m a confirmed and well-informed window gazer, but one of the things we’re trying to do with MondoWindow is give everyone the opportunity to see and to understand things like this.)

Hour 7

A perfect excuse from some extended leg stretching: I embarked on a wholly unscientific survey of IFE use in the center block of seats in the back of the 747, a total of 54 seats. Here’s what I found:Sleeping: 10 (18%)
Reading a book or magazine: 6 (11%)
Watching the movie: 6 (11%)
Using a digital device: 11 (20%)

Hour 8When on earth is this flight going to end? Time for another movie, another classic: Goddard’s “Breathless.” It’s a fantastic film, but how on earth can everyone smoke so much?

Hour 9I spent much of the last hour gazing out the window. Coming back to Northern California at this time of year is light drifting into paradise: after the muddy browns of Europe and the stark planetary snows of the high Arctic, NoCal’s lush green hills, pockets of woods, and bright fields of mustard blossoms — all framed by cottony clouds in a lowering, golden sun — is like arriving in Eden.

Hour 10I landed, and proved my point: with a little advance planning, you can have all the customized IFE you can handle, and then some. In the future — the near future — I see this level of customization coming for everyone all the time; don’t forget, this experiment was conducted using just one of the two prongs of IFE disruption: my tablet. Add true broadband and IFE as we know it is over.

Screen Scraping with Node.js

by MondowWindow CTO Tyler Freeman At MondoWindow, we do a lot of screen scraping of sites like Wikipedia, Wikitravel, etc. for geo-located content, so we can include it as pins on the map. One of the best new tools for this is Node.js, since you can write simple scripts that use jQuery to parse the HTML of various sites and lift out those delicious bits of content amongst all the stuff we don’t need.

“Whoa, what are you saying there, Tyler? That’s a lot of code jargon.” Let’s have a little background for the un-nerd-formed: Node.js basically lets you run Javascript on a server instead of your web browser. jQuery is an extension to Javascript that makes things like finding certain bits of content in a web page really easy. Combining these two things in a techno ménage à trois with node.io, a data scraping framework, lets you do things which before you’d have to pay hundreds of lowly interns to burn out their retinas and cramp their mouse fingers copying-and-pasting certain parts of pages into a database/spreadsheet/colored paper.
For instance, let’s say we want to find all the pages on Wikitravel that relate to a destination near a certain airport. Wikitravel has an amazing community of contributors that have already gone through all the pages and tagged them with the IATA code of the nearest airport, using a special tag that looks something like “{{IATA|SFO}}” (in the case of SFO airport). Using node.io, we can take all the IATA codes in our airport database, and feed them one at a time into Wikitravel’s search engine, in the format of the aforementioned tag, like this.
Now you can see that on that page is a bunch of links with descriptions, a search box, ads, etc. This is where jQuery comes in. By telling jQuery a simple command like “$(‘#bodyContent ul li a’)”, we can isolate only the links on the page which are part of the search results (instead of links to ads, or descriptive text, etc.) Then we can follow each link, download that page, and save it to our database to show on the map. “But wait, Tyler, this search is all wrong! If I’m flying into SFO, I definitely want to know about San Francisco, but it’s all the way at the bottom of the page!”
Your are absolutely right, dear reader. So how do we find the most relevant page, instead of sending all those poor, unsuspecting tourists, fresh off the plane, to downtown El Cerrito? (Which, by the way, they would never forgive us for - I’ve been there and it’s not pretty.) The answer here, is a little bit of artificial intelligence.
Well, in this case it’s as close to “intelligence” as zombies are to Steven Hawking, but it will get us close enough. We add a little bit of logic to check the title of the search result link against the airport’s title and city it serves. By ranking each word in the search title by decreasing importance of airport name, the city the airport serves, and whatever else might be in there (“John Wayne”, anybody?), we can come up with a pretty good match of what is the most important article to show to someone heading to a given airport. For instance, SFO’s long name is called “San Francisco International Airport.” The actual airport is located in San Bruno, CA. By using our little pseudo-AI algorithm, we can match the words “San Francisco” to the link at the bottom of our search page, and therefore determine that it’s probably the page that people will find most useful. Of course, this is not foolproof, especially for those weirder airports, so don’t fire those interns just yet!
By running this script thousands of times a second, we can quickly gather all the relevant articles for our entire airport database with our new robotic intern overlord. This is the magic that Node.js provides us, and we owe it to those awesome open-source developers for providing such a neat and easy way to do the dirty work. In kind, we’ve decided to give back to the Node community by posting the source of our little Wikitravel scraper script. You can find it on Github: https://github.com/odbol/Data-Scraping-with-node.io
Go forth and scrape with zeal! Tyler is MondoWindow’s CTO. He holds a Masters Degree in Digital Art and New Media from the University of California (Santa Cruz). He is also a cyborg, equipped with performance interfaces of his own design.

Travel Tech: The Bigger Picture

Here at MondoWindow, we’re obsessively focused on the changes technology is bringing to in-flight entertainment. But there’s a bigger picture too: the in-flight experience is just one part of the much broader travel experience. It starts with thinking about going somewhere and includes developing an itinerary, booking flights, cars, and hotels, getting to and through the airport, flying, navigating and enjoying one’s destination, and then doing it all in reverse. The travel experience contains countless points that can be variously streamlined, energized, and obviated by the judicious combination of consumer technology, social media, and other forms of networking.

(ok fine — so i spaced and forgot to take a picture at the event. well here’s one i took some years back while doing a travel story for the new york times. it captures the excitement, yes?)

It matters because travel is one of the largest single industries in the world. Globally it’s responsible for almost $2 trillion in annual revenues and directly employs nearly 100 million people. Not only that, but travel is the critical physical piece of the broad social trends that are helping bring humanity together—something we need to do ASAP if we’re going to make it on this one little Earth.Anything that can make travel better—cheaper, easier, deeper, more engaging—is helping to streamline a huge driver of the global economy and one of the main forces in developing cosmopolitan cross-cultural understanding. Talk about a win-win.

The Bay Area is a leader in the next wave of travel technology—we’re developing the tools, content, and relationships to fundamentally reinvent the industry, and MondoWindow is just one small part of the scene.That’s why we were really excited to join Room 77 and Hotel Tonight in sponsoring the first-ever Travel Tech gathering last week. Hosted at Hotel Tonight’s offices, we designed the gathering to be a low key affair limited to people and companies working on travel-related technological innovation. Each company had two minutes to talk about what they are doing, and there was lots of casual mingling.

It was fantastic—the first time any of us had seen the entire new-tech version of the travel arc in one room. Picture it: we had travel planning (Afar, Jetpac, Wcities), booking (Room 77, Hotel Tonight, Liftopia, Viator, GuestMob), itinerary management (TripIt), backend (EzRez), intelligence (Atmosphere Research Group, LyonSHARE), transportation (Virgin America), in-flight (MondoWindow), and social destination services (TouristLink). Taken together, it was a glimpse of a very exciting future for the travel sector. I’m really looking forward to seeing how all these companies develop and change the way we engage with our planet!

If you’re involved in this emerging Travel Tech space we’d love to have you join the conversation. Anyone can check out the Twitter hashtag #TravTech and people who meet our criteria (not spammers, basically) can talk shop on the LinkedIn group. Stay tuned to those channels to find out about our next gathering too: TripIt will be hosting in a few months.

The Future of In-Flight Entertainment Part 3: IFE after the Disruption

part 1 | part 2

As I talk to people in the IFE sector about the emerging disruption in the sky, one thing becomes clear: disagreements are no longer about if it is going to happen but when. Anyone who is paying the slightest attention agrees that passenger-supplied computing devices and Internet connectivity in the airline cabin are going to forever change the IFE landscape.
Some people think it will take ten years, others five. My own view is that in 2015 we will see no new orders for embedded seatback IFE systems on planes with service routes of five hours or less. But for the sake of argument, let’s just imagine both passenger hardware and broadband in the sky are in place. Let’s for a moment ignore the very real technical and implementation challenges this will entail and talk about one day in the future. What does this mean for content?
Well, the first thing is that it means the “captive audience” is over—done, never to return. It means that any content an airline is providing to its passengers is competing for their time with everything on the Internet. As an airline, it would be absurd to attempt to outdo Google, Facebook, iTunes, Hulu, and whatever else is going to be around five or ten years from now. It’s simply not possible—it would be as futile as trying to fly from one continent to another on Twitter’s little blue wings. For consumers, this is a great thing: airlines are the experts at moving our bodies around; content and social media companies are the experts at engaging our minds. We get best of breed in both departments.

Flying is Special

And yet… flying is a very special situation, unlike anything else in most people’s lives. I’ve described elsewhere how this represents a unique “use case” for those of us providing engagement to the airline passenger. To summarize, when flying, passengers…

sit still for hours
are limited to what they brought with them
keep to themselves or their small group
and are traveling from one place to another

For an airline, this means successful, worthwhile IFE offerings passengers will choose even when they can do anything they want online have to address passenger needs within this unique context. Of the suite of things available in current IFE systems, I see only three things that are sure to survive and flourish in this transition: location services (like moving maps), in-flight shopping, and on-board social networking.

Let’s look at them one at a time:Location Services

You’ve all seen the Rockwell Collins Airshow 4200. It’s that basic map that shows a little cartoon of where your plane is. Besides the irrelevant outside air temperature, all it really tells you is where you are and when you are going to get where you’re going. This by itself is enough to make the moving map the most-viewed channel on the great majority of IFE systems.

Why? It’s because the map is the only content that is relevant to 100 percent of the people on the plane. And it’s constantly changing, encouraging repeated visits. No matter what changes happen in IFE or the passenger experience, traveling is about moving from one place to another, so the map will always be relevant to everyone aboard. That, of course, is where MondoWindow enters the picture. We take the passenger’s query “where am I and when am I getting to where I’m going?” and we answer it, just like a moving map (albeit at far lower cost). But we also leverage that query into longer, deeper engagement through geo-located content, games, and social interactions. And MondoWindow is already native to the systems and devices—browsers and Internet—that are going to be taking the passenger experience over from embedded IFE systems.

In-Flight Shopping

Think SkyMall and Duty Free. What makes these shopping experiences appealing? And more to the point, what would make them worth considering when you also have Amazon at your fingertips? It’s not price or selection, it’s context: both of these shopping channels are available only while you’re in flight, establishing the temporal scarcity that any retailer will tell you does wonders at getting people to buy (Limited time! Act now!). Not only that, but the delivery of the product is instant (in the case of Duty Free) or very soon (in some SkyMall scenarios).Combine that with the Internet and the daily deals model pioneered by Groupon and you have powerful in-flight content. And guess what? It’s already flying: at the end of last year, Southwest started offering a travel guide in a couple of their destinations (Chicago and Denver) that also includes in-flight-only deals for those cities.

On-Board Social Networking

Everyone on board a plane has in common that they are, well, on board a plane coming from the same place and going to the same place at the same time. That’s so obvious it sounds a little funny to actually point it out. Traditional on-board networking means, essentially, talking to your seatmates and the folks stretching their legs in the galley. Is that even IFE? It can be—Virgin America’s Panasonic-built RED system, for example, has a seat-to-seat chat feature. It never really took off like the airline had hoped for the simple reason that it flies in the face of social convention to randomly pick a seat number and start chatting.

It was, however, used to great effect in one interesting experiment in 2009 with a game the airline developed with Google called “Day in the Cloud.” In this game, passengers collaborated as a team to compete against the passengers of other aircraft. Suddenly, they had a reason to talk to one another.As people become more and more used to chatting with strangers based on shared circumstances and goals—we now do it all the time on Twitter, for example—bringing this social impulse to the special in-flight use case will be a successful and popular way of engaging with airline passengers.

Oh, and look—that’s happening already too! Planely, a Danish company, has devised a platform for on-board social networking. It allows people to connect with one another before and during flights based on shared interests—perfect for people traveling to the same event. The product has been around for nearly a year and the company is about to launch a completely revamped interface.Try the Future Today

Next time you fly and you have WiFi, try this: take your iPad or other device and use MondoWindow, shop (SkyMall or Gilt Groupe on Gogo, destination deals on Southwest), and connect with Planely. You’ll be flying into the future.

The Future of IFE at CES Part 2: EWC is going out the window

part 1 | part 3

Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, we got a firsthand look at the two forces that will fundamentally change in-flight entertainment: cheap, powerful consumer computing hardware like tablets, and effective in-flight broadband.

And we got something even better: a chance to ask the key people in the IFE sector what this means for their businesses. The panel put on by APEX and moderated by Jonathan Norris on Thursday afternoon was a must-attend for anyone in our sector. It included top people from all the players in IFEC as it is currently construed: Row44, Thales, Gogo, Paramount, Panasonic, Delta, and Lufthansa Systems.

The APEX panel at CES, left to right: Jonathan Norris (APEX/INK), Travis Christ (Row44), Stuart Dunleavy (Thales), Ash ElDifrawi (Gogo), Mark Horton (Paramount), Neil James (Panasonic), Bob Kupbens (Delta), Jörg Liebe (Lufthansa Systems)

Most of the panel was a great recap of the kinds of things we see discussed all the time in IFE forums: these companies are embracing technology, connectivity is rolling out smartly, and everyone is bending over backwards to cripple their systems so they can show early-window Hollywood content (EWC)—movies between theatrical and broad consumer release. “Streaming to a personal device makes us shudder,” said Mark Horton, Paramount Pictures’ Vice President, Non-Theatrical Distribution.

Say what?

It’s well-known that Hollywood has a piracy problem—any industry in the business of marketing digital assets has had to struggle with the matter of unauthorized (and thus unmonetized) distribution. Different industries have dealt with it differently: the music industry had the stuffing knocked out of it, and is consolidating a new landscape of business models; the software industry tacitly accepts some degree of piracy as the cost of being in the game.

Hollywood’s approach has been to fall back on its old game of buying influence and bullying other stakeholders. The biggest example right now is of course the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the draconian and unworkable legislation now before Congress that would (try to) fundamentally, and dangerously, alter the structure of the Internet. SOPA would allow copyright owners to leverage the Federal government to block access to entire domains without due process and on the flimsiest of evidence of copyright infringement.

(Not only does SOPA expose a shocking lack of technical understanding on the part of those charged with governing the United States, but it is likely to backfire by awakening a sleeping giant—the Internet lobby—which has so far been relatively uninvolved in politics. It’s worth watching closely.)

Hollywood Is Holding Up the Plane

In the IFE world, we’ve seen this same approach in microcosm: Hollywood insists that IFEC providers hobble their technology by limiting connectivity and limiting options for passengers’ own devices—in effect building the entire IFE experience around Hollywood content.

“We seem to be dampening the enthusiasm of others in the room,” Paramount’s Mark Horton noted at one point. But I don’t think he realizes what a dangerous position this puts his business in.

This approach presumes that EWC is the most valuable and important form of IFE an airline can make available to its passengers. It certainly was in the past: there was a time when the only place a member of the public could see a near-first run movie outside a movie theater was on board an aircraft. And at that time (the 1960s and 1970s), few people had options for watching movies at home at all. They came to the big screen, then the IFE screen, then they were unavailable until some of them ran a year later—just once—on the big TV networks.But it’s not like that anymore. Today, any of us can watch a movie in a theater, then watch it a few weeks later on Netflix, iTunes, DVD, or Blu-Ray on our TVs, laptops, tablets, and even phones. We can do it wherever we want, whenever we want, and as many times as we want (or more).

So the early window of a limited selection of Hollywood films pre-selected for us by our airline has far less appeal than it once did. Not only that, but we have other options, notably games (that industry’s blockbusters can be bigger than Hollywood’s) and the smorgasbord of things we can do with Internet connectivity.

If You Had to Choose…People still watch movies on planes to be sure, but I think the day is not far off when airlines and IFEC providers, when asked by Hollywood to choose between movies and connectivity, are going to chose connectivity.

It’s already happening for consumers. On the APEX panel at CES, Stuart Dunleavy, Vice President of Marketing & Customer Proposition at Thales said: “Ask my son—he would choose Facebook over movies.”Think of it this way: when was the last time you chose a flight based on what movie was showing? When was the last time you even knew what movies were available before the plane took off? Meanwhile, sites like Kayak and Hipmunk let us choose flights by the availability of WiFi.

Airlines are taking note. “We’re seeing a ton of preference for Delta because of WiFi,” said Bob Kupbens, the Vice President of eCommerce at Delta in response to a question at the panel. So where’s the value proposition for EWC?Ash ElDifrawi, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Gogo, summed up where I think this is headed: “People want content on their own terms. Just give them Internet and get out of the way.”

Which got me to thinking—what is IFE going to look like when both passenger-supplied computing hardware and broadband Internet are ubiquitous in the sky? I asked the panel that at the APEX session at CES, and some of the above is drawn from their responses. But I have my own ideas as well, as you’ll see in the next blog post…

(Back to Part 1)

The Future of IFE at CES Part 1: Disruption is coming right on schedule

part 2 | part 3

Last week, Tyler and I went to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Besides being huge (it’s the second-largest conference in the US, sprawling through all four halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center plus an outdoor plaza and the convention facilities of two massive hotels), mind-blowing (the new 3D televisions really are incredible), and fascinating (the tight warrens of Chinese electronics suppliers located away from the glitzy main halls never get any press, but I suspect that’s where a lot of the real business takes place), the show provided a glimpse of the future of in-flight entertainment (IFE).

It’s no secret that tablet computing is coming of age rapidly. After more than two decades of fits and starts, the triumph of the iPad has been rapid and astonishing. It’s hard to believe this now-ubiquitous piece of Apple magic was introduced just two years ago this month. Since then, of course, many able competitors have come on the market. The best are powered by Google’s Android operating system, itself growing explosively (the first tablet-only version of Android debuted with the Motorola Xoom less than a year ago).

Tablets, tablets everywhere
It turns out that one of the things tablets excel at is providing an IFE platform. The form factor is ideal for use on a plane: they’re not clumsy and prone to being crushed by reclining seats like laptops, yet they have much bigger screens and computing power than smartphones. They have great battery life and, compared to purpose-built devices, they are dirt cheap. American Airlines was the first to bring them to the cabin as part of an IFE system with a limited rollout of Samsung Galaxy Tablets just last month, and many, many others are right behind them.CES was crawling with tablets. There was Samsung’s massive presence (their booth was easily as big as some entire conferences I’ve been to), new tablet OS announcements from Google and Microsoft, and new tablets from the likes of Toshiba and Acer, Fujitsu and Pantech. And there was a blizzard of other Android tablets from big, but third tier, companies like Coby, the leading low-end electronics maker (if you haven’t heard of it, go visit Walmart), as well as dozens of no-name Chinese manufacturers who would be happy to slap your branding on a tablet for you. There was even one from the OLPC folks designed to be used by kids in developing countries. It’s powered by a hand crank. The unmistakable trend is more options, better features, and lower prices.

Samsung’s conference-within-a-conference.

(Conspicuously absent was Apple, the market leader with more than 80 percent of the tablets sold in the US, but that’s just how they roll: Apple never deigns to appear, even as attendees, at events they can’t completely control. It’s kind of creepy, because you know they’re walking around there in disguise.)
I’ve argued elsewhere that consumer digital hardware is a driver of disruptive change in the IFE sector. CES shows just what a tidal wave it is becoming: I wouldn’t be surprised if by this time next year the majority of passengers on key routes and in key classes (notably business) will be carrying tablets on board when they fly. In 2015 there are projected to be more than a quarter of a billion tablets shipped worldwide. On top of the additional laptops and smartphones in the cabin, this represents a fundamental shift in what sort of entertainment technology is available in the cabin: embedded seatback systems are on their way out.Broadband is ready to soar
The second wave of disruption to the IFE sector that I and many others see on the horizon was also at CES, but you had to look a little harder. In the outdoor display area, ViaSat was demonstrating the technology that is going to blow the lid off the traditional way of doing things in IFE: true satellite broadband.We tried it, of course. Through a single consumer-grade Ka-band satellite link, about a half dozen people were watching different HD videos, doing their email, playing games, trying out MondoWindow (it looked great, by the way!) and even uploading HD video all at the same time. It was immediately obvious that this is going to be game-changing connectivity when it gets to the airline cabin. And guess what? JetBlue plans to roll it out before the end of this year.
Taken together, these are the two disruptive waves that are already starting to transform in-flight entertainment. They’re rolling out incredibly fast, and there’s no stopping them. At this point, the only real question is what IFE is going to look like once every passenger has a tablet with a broadband connection.Personally, I think the first casualty is going to be Early Window Content. I’ll explain in the next post, right here…