MondoWindow

The Year of the WISPYou know something is a trend when it needs...

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:15:00 -0400

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

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:52:00 -0400

“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

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:11:00 -0400

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!

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:49:00 -0400

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

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:19:24 -0400

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.jsby MondowWindow CTO Tyler Freeman ...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:42:00 -0500

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

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:29:00 -0500

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...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:36:00 -0500

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...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:53:00 -0500

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...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:25:00 -0500

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…

MondoWindow Wishes You a Happy Holiday!

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:30:00 -0500

MondoWindow Wishes You a Happy Holiday!

Looking back on 2011It seems like every single month in 2011...

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:46:00 -0500

Looking back on 2011

It seems like every single month in 2011 — MondoWindow’s first full year of operations — brought a cluster of significant milestones that, taken together, are shockingly impressive. But before we get to the year in review, here are three quick things we’d love you to consider:1) tell your friends, family, and colleagues how incredible 2011 was for MondoWindow by sharing this link.

2) as you travel during the holidays, check out http://mondowindow.com on your flights, and share it!3) socialize with us on twitter and facebook!

2011 was MondoWindow’s first full year of operations.

In that short time, we have identified two looming disruptions in the $6 billion in-flight entertainment (IFE) sector, placed ourselves at the center of the discussion about said disruptions, and connected directly with the key players who are inventing the future of IFE now. We’ve created the very first Internet property for the connected airline passenger, put it through three development cycles, and sealed the relationships we need to monetize traffic. We’ve designed the first-ever hybrid on-board/off-board interactive map (and filed a patent for it) and we are at work on the first geo-game designed for airline passengers. In the process, we’ve garnered some excellent press coverage. We might be the only people with any idea what the other side of the IFE disruption is going to look like.This is how it all went down:

January: We started the year with little more than a good idea and some great advisors, but very quickly we got together with our friends at Stamen to rapidly scale the MondoWindow concept into a full-fledged beta. Simultaneously, we undertook a content development push with a nationwide team of writers developing nearly 300 points of interest.February: An insane, rainy crush led up to MondoWindow’s very first flight on February 28 — our alpha test on a flight from SFO to LAX and back.
The first flight — February 28, 2011

In March we debuted to the public at South by Southwest in Austin. Greg presented MondoWindow at Federated Media’s Signal:Austin gathering and he and Tyler made dozens of critical contacts. We got some great press and came back to San Francisco with genuine momentum. April saw us continue the momentum when Greg presented at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0. That month, we formalized our relationship with JiWire to provide ads on mondowindow.com — a critical piece of our monetization infrastructure.

In May we hit the road. Tyler went to Europe where he had a string of key meetings and Greg hit the East Coast for another set. During the summer, we undertook another round of product development and UI/UX refinement. We got the blog up and running too, and it’s now our central channel to getting the Mondo message out through the various social networks.

September was insane. The dev team ably got MondoWindow v1.0 out the door just in time for Tyler to up the ante by having twins and then, incredibly, joining the team in Seattle just a week and a half later for APEX, the main IFE industry gathering.On the first day there, Greg gave the now-infamous Disruption Talk which, in one fell swoop, put us right in the radar of precisely the right people in the IFE industry. We also had the pleasure of visiting our friends at Bing (Microsoft’s geoweb unit), who provide MondoWindow’s map tiles and lots of informal support.

In October MondoWindow went to NBAA, the annual Business Aviation / Private Jet conference in Las Vegas — yet another eye opening experience.We moved into November and December with the product team quietly rolling out a suite of new social features, including Facebook Connect for user login and Facebook Places to allow travelers to see their friends on the ground and in their destinations. This is just the start of a very significant socialization build-out we’re planning for the new year and yet another suite of features that puts us miles above anyone else.

It’s been a wild ride and we are now in place to rock it in 2012. We’ve made it this far thanks to the dedication and generosity of every single one of you, and we are really eager to take things to the next level for all of us!!Greg, Tyler & everyone at MondoWindow

Holiday Travelers Love MondoWindow!

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:09:10 -0500

Several holiday travelers took Inc. Magazine’s advice and tried out MondoWindow’s interactive map as part of their in-flight entertainment.

A tweet from high above Arizona:

Others sent us some direct feedback. We received this photo from holiday traveler Lucy, who was stuck in an aisle seat on an overcast day.

Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2011 4:31 PM
“MondoWindow is mondo-cool! So neat to be able to see what’s below the clouds.”

We had plenty of responses, from Twitter, Facebook, even Linkedin, but this email is our favorite:

Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 4:13 PM
Subject: Mondowindow“Hi uncle Ty it’s Quinn and I just wanted to say that Mondowindow is looking great. I had looked at it a few months ago, but today I used the the latest version to track my dad’s flight home from Mexico and it worked great. It is truly incredible to be able to see essentially what he is seeing as he goes over places.”

Sweet! Quinn used MondoWindow to connect, in real-time, with his dad’s flying experience. It is almost as exciting as using NORAD’s Santa Tracker! Here at MW we geek out on maps. We eat, sleep, and dream all things geo.
Maps are fun; they are beautiful and help make sense of our travel experience and our world. Choosing a map as the core of our interface design was a no-brainer. We share a universal fascination when it comes to maps and travel; we just passionately take it to another level.

MW Co-Founder Tyler Sterkel explains this in a recent letter to our networks and friends: “Why a map? Location is the common bond of all travelers. A map is the only content that is relevant to absolutely everyone on the plane, and it’s the only content that is unique to the in-flight experience …. Everyone, at least a few times in the course of a journey, wants to know “Where am I?” and “When will I arrive?” … We were tired of the old ‘moving maps’ that you may have seen on long-haul flights that give you very little information or interactivity. We found an innovative way to track flights and present them in a compelling, content-rich user interface. We use the web to make your journey interactive, educational, interesting, fun, and social.”

Just as some holiday travelers did, we hope you use MondoWindow on your next flight. You might just find a town full wild biting donkeys to tweet about or share your flight experience with friends and family awaiting your arrival for the holidays.

socialize with us: twitter; facebook

Traveling for the Holidays?

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:21:00 -0500

According to the Air Transport Association, 23.2 million Americans are estimated to travel by air over the Thanksgiving Holiday, this year. Are you flying during the next six weeks of holiday madness? Does attending your next holiday party require you to board a plane? If so, we invite you to include MondoWindow in your holiday travel plans. Here are the tools (and steps) you will need:

1. Find out if your flight will have Internet connectivity.

According to our pal Brett “Cranky Flier” Snyder’s rundown of the current state of in-flight Wi-Fi (here is the abbreviated list):

Alaska - Yes! (but not to Hawai’i)
Delta - Yes!
US Airways - On some planes (Airbus A321’s, specifically)
Virgin America - Yes!
AirTran - Yes!
American - Hit or miss; you have to check the AA widget to find out
Southwest - On some planes
United & Continental - Only on their planes that run between NYC and LA or SF

For Brett’s detailed and expanded list check here.2. Connect on board.

Once you’re above 10,000 feet, open your Wi-Fi-enabled gadget (laptop, tablet, smartphone, whatever) and connect to the onboard Wi-Fi network.

Gogo has the lion’s share of the airborne connectivity business in the US (except Southwest Airlines), and they have a helpful guide to their coverage here. Check Gogo’s website for extensive pricing options. On Southwest, you’ll pay $5 per flight, period.

3. Use MondoWindow on your flight!

Point your web browser to www.mondowindow.com. Plug in your airline and flight number and be instantly connected to our live, interactive map interface.

In case you are a visual learner, like me, here’s a handy picture to help you out with this 3-step process.

We guarantee you will learn something new!

If you are lucky enough to have a window seat, explore the landscapes you see down there with MondoWindow. Regardless of where you’re sitting – and even if it’s dark or cloudy – MondoWindow will inform and entertain you and your seatmates with thousands of marked points of interest and photos about the real world below and about your destination city.

While you are exploring the world through the lens of MondoWindow, share your findings to people on the ground: FB Like, Tweet, +1, etc.

Don’t forget to send us a message.

We love your feedback. Good, bad, and ugly, we read and reply to every piece of mail we get. We are now actively collecting quotes, your quotes, not ones our marketing people made up.

Finally, tell your friends, your family, and your seatmates. Your MondoWindow experience makes an excellent Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas Eve or Kwanzaa dinner table conversation – trust us we know.

If you want to be profiled in our blog using MondoWindow during your Holiday flight, contact me, Content Editor, Sherri Nevins sherri@mondowindow.com and we will arrange for your debut!

socialize with us: twitter; facebook

Loco for Geo

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:47:00 -0400

Yesterday, I was on a panel at the Geo-Loco Conference in San Francisco. This was the followup to May’s Social-Loco event (where we won the Best Startup competition). It’s always great to get together with geolocation nerds, not least because everyone there intuitively gets what we do at MondoWindow. Everyone we talk to is an instant convert.

Even better, it goes both ways. We always meet tons of new startups doing fascinating things with location and, increasingly, people from within large organizations who are leveraging their companies’ strengths with thoughtful location applications and services.

Location based content and the geoweb are maturing rapidly

I first wrote about the geoweb for The Economist in 2007 and it has changed a lot since then: not only has real-time location merged with mobile to become standard-issue on all smartphones, but it is also developing into an integral aspect of social networks as well.

One result of this is that a lot of companies—both old and new—are now launching applications that allow some variation of chat or sharing other communications organized around location. That’s great news for MondoWindow, because one of our goals is to provide airline passengers with the ability for casual social interaction with the people they are flying over. We’ll be taking the first concrete step in this direction later this year with our next release (more on that soon!) and judging from what we saw at Geo-Loco, there is a huge crop of potential partners emerging in this once-arcane area. They ranged from the geotagged content libraries being developed by TagWhat to the interior maps created by Aisle411. Mingle’s business-networking app, Vibe’s anonymous location-centered chat engine, and sister app AskLocal’s social geochat are new entrants in a field being defined by the likes of LocalMind and MapChat. And Tackable joins the geo-photosharing world created by Pixamid and others.

This ferment is sure to shake out—lots of these apps do nearly indistinguishable things—but the important thing from MondoWindow’s point of view is that they are all getting people to talk about and share media related to location. In other words, more and more people are creating personal content that can appear in the MondoWindow platform. Anyone using these apps is telling the world where they are, and telling everyone nearby that they are available for casual social interaction. Our guess is that most of them would love to talk to someone on a plane flying overhead.

And there’s more: at Geo-Loco, a number of very large companies revealed location initiatives that work strongly in our favor. Whether it’s Google’s integration of Zagat, AT&T’s hyperlocal advertising, or new initiatives from Disney, Pepsi, Starbucks, or American Express, all of this activity dovetails nicely with everything we’re doing at MondoWindow.That’s always great from a feelgood perspective, just as it’s always great to be surrounded by people who fall in love with MondoWindow at first sight. But it’s more than that too: all this action in location-based social interaction helps us explain to our partners, far removed from the guts of the geoweb, what we’re about.

Most of our users and partners have never heard of the geoweb, and they don’t have to. Because there are places like Geo-Loco for the location brain trust to get together and check out each others’ work, the toil of organizing geo-information and porting social communities into physical space is happening invisibly. All users have to do is open up MondoWindow and in a flash see the world in a new way. Which is really why we’re doing this.

Greg Dicumsocialize with us: twitter; facebook

The In-Flight Use CaseWhat do you do when you get on a plane? If...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 01:38:00 -0400

The In-Flight Use Case

What do you do when you get on a plane? If you’re like me, you look forward to a time you can sink your teeth into something you don’t ordinarily get a chance to do.Whether it’s devouring an entire 500 page novel in one sitting on a trans-Pacific flight, working your way to inbox zero, or finally catching up on all 60 episodes of The Wire, for many people a flight presents a special opportunity for something different.

In other words, it’s a special use case.Think of this: when was the last time you sat in the same seat for five hours straight, with no particular task to do, and limited only to the props that fit in a backpack? I bet, for most of us, it was on a plane.

There are four key ways in which the airline passenger’s situation is unique:

they sit still and, except for brief walks to the bathroom basically don’t get up
they are limited to the small set of tools and materials they brought with them
they keep to themselves or the small group they are traveling with
and they are in transition, moving from one place and set of circumstances to another

These are pretty much ideal conditions for a deep dive into something you don’t normally have the time for—a real treat in our hectic, over-committed daily lives. If you like reading, that’s the obvious thing. If you like seven-hour black-and-white Hungarian nearly silent epic films, that would be great too. (And if you like to sleep on planes, good for you—I just can’t do it.)Me, every time I come across a long magazine story I want to read but don’t have the time, I just rip it out and put it in a folder I keep by my desk. Every time I fly, I bring the folder with me, tossing out stories as I finish them. (These days I use Instapaper for that too, but I am still working my way through the physical folder.)

image from Benny(no one) on flickr

For the airlines, this is the perfect setup for offering Hollywood movies. It’s content people are familiar with, it’s targeted to a broad audience, and each film eats up 90 minutes or more. It keeps people calm and docile and helps everyone get to where they’re going.

But there’s a catch: this scenario of a small clutch of Hollywood movies constituting the core of in-flight programming depends on limited options. Some people do, in fact, look forward to the talking dog movies. But my guess is that most on-board movie watchers either failed to prepare for their flights or are too fried from long travel itineraries to do anything more taxing then just stare at whatever appears right in front of their face.

Not quite desktop, not quite mobileWith the twin disruptions happening in IFE right now, it’s time to re-examine how people use their in-flight time. Something like MondoWindow can offer passengers a whole new world of possibilities. We are keenly aware of the special environment passengers experience and want to provide them with something worthwhile.

Using a connected device in flight is not quite like at-home or at-work desktop or laptop computing, which is task-oriented. Even though you’re moving, it’s not like mobile computing, which is goal-oriented. And it’s not entirely the passive consumption model of curling up on the couch with a tablet, either. So, what is it? Being online in the sky is similar to all of these things, yet not like any of them.

Our challenge at MondoWindow is to figure out how we can provide people with that compelling, personally relevant, deep dive while also offering them interesting content related to their immediate and ever-changing location. Some people find info-grazing to be sufficiently engaging: identifying names of cities or geographical features on the ground below or maybe reading the local newspaper as you fly overhead. Others like to go deeper, reading a sample chapter from one of the many books we offer before going on to buy the entire eBook right there in the sky. And some people like to listen to the audio books and soundscapes available within MondoWindow. I like to do all three—sometimes at once.

MondoWindow takes a familiar in-flight amenity—the moving map—and turns it into the entry point for a genuinely new experience. In that spirit, we’re starting from the tried and true in-flight personal entertainment options—looking out the window, reading a book, listening to some audio—and letting users decide where to go from there.

MondoWindow to attend NBAA 2011 in VegasFollowing our strong...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:50:00 -0400

MondoWindow to attend NBAA 2011 in Vegas

Following our strong showing at the recent APEX conference where we led the discussion of the current “disruption” of the IFE space, our next stop is the annual National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) conference in Las Vegas next week. This is easily the biggest and most important annual event for the business aviation industry with over 20,000 attendees and 1000+ exhibitors.

Trend To Go Wireless
Wireless connectivity promises to be a big topic at NBAA and I’m guessing that Gogo Biz™ the leading air-to-ground based Wi-Fi provider (owned by Aircell), will make a big splash. It will be interesting to gauge how various players, and niche sectors within business aviation, view the rapid emergence of wireless technology, and we are excited to be a part of the conversation.

Some companies already get it: Wi-Fi is a feature business customers expect when they fly. In 2010, XOJET was the first business aviation firm to announce that it was making its entire fleet wireless enabled; shortly after, NetJets announced that it would make a significant share of its large fleet wireless enabled over the next few years. And this is really the tip of the iceberg. Having wireless connectivity has quickly become a key point of product differentiation among business aviation operators. The innovators in the industry understand intuitively that wireless connectivity is a premium value added experience for their customers.

MondoWindow Hearts Business Aviation
And this is exactly why we are going to NBAA. MondoWindow’s elegant interactive moving map is a great platform from which to access a plethora of compelling points of interest, curated audio, social media, games that can ultimately, personalize the flying experience. There is simply nothing like it on the market and our platform garners strong interest from both commercial and private aviation.

MondoWindow Co-Founder, Greg Dicum and I will be meeting with key players at the conference, so if you want to connect with us too feel free to contact us directly at patrick.dippery@mondowindow.com.

Patrick Dippery, VP of Business Developmentsocialize with us: twitter; facebook

MondoWindow at APEX 2011

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:23:00 -0400

Interstate 5 Express, Seattle, WA 98101, USA

Well, that was basically incredible.

Last year, when Tyler and I went to the APEX Expo on a mission to suss out the in-flight entertainment (IFE) space, it was the absence of any discussion about the coming disruption of the space that convinced us we had to go for it and make MondoWindow a reality.

Fast forward to this year, and I was the guy starting that conversation. My presentation on the first day of the show turned out to be incendiary. The room was packed and, I’m told, there were audible gasps in the audience as I predicted that the days are numbered for both in-seat IFE systems and expensive Hollywood content. I predicted that within five years we would start to see the permanent end of those two business models. (Here’s an MSNBC story in which I lay it out).

In-flight entertainment–and the airline sector more broadly–is a very conservative business, with conservative social norms and a cosy status quo. In other words, it’s nothing like the Internet sector. So my fact-filled presentation, basically material I have presented many times at various geo-web and other gatherings, turned out to be very provocative.

I received two kinds of feedback.

Privately, several people from airlines and IFE systems providers came to me later and said “Thank you for saying that! I’ve been trying to make that case within my organization and nobody will listen to me!”

And more indirectly, I was later told by several people that more senior members of the IFE community considered me a bit of a crackpot. One person told me that “with predictions like that people don’t find you credible.”

What was really interesting, though, is that I found that our point of difference was around the disruptive timeline–not around the fact that it is poised to happen. Virtually everyone agrees that we won’t see significant new installations of seatback systems ten years from now. The question is when is it going to fall off the cliff between now and then?I don’t know if my provocative prediction of 3 to 5 years will turn out to be correct, but I am certain that we will see a significant shrinkage in the seatback market in that timeframe, even though more aircraft are being ordered than ever. It’s permanent structural change, so once it starts there will be no stopping it.

It might be hard to believe with the systems currently so ubiquitous, but it has happened again and again in other sectors, driven by the same two forces: consumer hardware and connectivity.Certainly there are some in the sector who get it: this year, seemingly out of nowhere, six or seven major IFE systems providers were talking about their wireless IFE systems designed to stream IFE content into passengers’ own devices. Several of these are going to be flight tested and deployed within the year–the beginning of the end for embedded IFE.

And that’s great for MondoWindow.We already know that the map is a key piece of any IFE system. It’s the only content that is relevant to absolutely everyone on the plane, and it’s the only content that is unique to the in-flight experience: you can watch TV or movies at home; you can only track your progress across the planet in flight.

So all of these new systems are going to need a map–a map that operates natively in web browsers, with no plugins or other hassles for users. A map, in other words, like MondoWindow.

We received a ton of interest from the wireless IFE providers; we’ve spoken to every single credible player in the market. I can’t wait to tell you what’s next…

Greg Dicum

Co-founder and President

The Disruption of In-Flight Entertainment

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:00:00 -0400

The concept of “disruption” was first articulated by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christiansen in 1995. He was describing something we have been seeing a lot of in the past couple of generations: a seemingly off-the-wall, marginal technology so radically transforms a sector that it obliterates everything that came before it.

Think CDs replacing LPs, or digital sensors replacing film. Think of newspapers losing virtually all of their classified advertising revenue to craigslist.

In each case, the new technology was a curiosity at first, but by the time it became established it was too late for the old players to adjust and once-unchallengeable companies tumbled into oblivion.To date, in-flight entertainment is the last major digital consumer space that has not been disrupted by consumer computing hardware and Internet connectivity. But that is about to change – fast.

First, airline passengers already carry aboard far more sophisticated hardware – laptops, tablets, and smartphones – than are found in any embedded in-flight entertainment systems. And unlike embedded systems, the passengers pay for this technology themselves; they upgrade it and customize it as they wish. Meanwhile, Internet connectivity in the skies is rolling out briskly. By 2015 it will be largely done, mirroring what happened with WiFi in cafés ten or fifteen years ago: it’s moving from rare to ubiquitous, slow to fast, and expensive to cheap.

Together these two trends are going to torpedo existing entrenched business models in in-flight entertainment, on both the hardware and content sides of the equation. Take a look at the presentation MondoWindow co-founder and President Greg Dicum gave at the APEX EXPO today. In it, he describes these trends in detail, and makes some predictions about the future for in-flight entertainment.

A future where MondoWindow is front and center.

Greg Dicum on the Disruption of the IFE SEctor View more presentations from MondoWindow

Credits for Greg’s 2011 Apex presentation can be found here:

MondoWindow_2011_APEX_presentation_research_and_image_credits.pdf Download this file

MondoWindow 1.0 is off the ground!We did it!!! We just launched...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:07:00 -0400

MondoWindow 1.0 is off the ground!

We did it!!!

We just launched MondoWindow v1.0! We adored our beta but now it’s time to move on.

Since we debuted the beta at South by Southwest in March, we’ve been gathering your feedback, building technology and content partnerships, designing, testing, and refining, and now it’s time to take the wrapper off a shiny new MondoWindow: the future of in-flight entertainment

What’s new? Here are the top six features we want to share with you:
1. Our map! It’s revolutionary and not like any other in-flight map out there. Our special trick: Real-Time information. Other maps are preloaded. OURS is live. It’s also larger and has a more accurate geobrowser than our beta version. Think of it like a glass bottom plane (without the fear of falling). You can see the landscape below you even if you are taking the red-eye! The middle and aisle seats just got more interesting! If you sit with your nose glued to the window you can now identify those nameless features, towns and mysterious places out there. You can direct your seatmate’s attention to information about the landscape instead of feeling trapped by their extended cat stories - although, to be fair, we love cats!

2. Curated content related to your flight path and your destination. See images from Flickr, read about towns and geographical features in Wikipedia, enjoy special audio stories including images and video from carefully selected content partners such as famous authors, articles from underground websites, Wikitravel, The [Un] Observed, Grist.org, Ask the Pilot, Flavorpill, Window Seat and various Posterous geoblogs. Our partnership list is growing as you read this and we will continuously have more to offer. We even have hundreds of detailed points of interest across the nation we felt deserved your attention. Now you can tell your friends all about Area 51, the Grand Canyon, or the Apache National Forest as you fly over. Our destination content will let you know where to eat, places to play and historical sites when you land.

3. Super social media integration. Share your flight with friends on Facebook or Twitter, geoblog with Posterous, add your geo-tagged Flickr photos to the map, interact and share photos and travel experiences with friends and family. Loved ones can track your plane as you fly.

4. Detailed flight information. “Are we there yet?” Our graphic flight information will tell you at-a-glance where you are, how long until you land and how high you are in the skies.

5. Supported by most browsers and mobile devices. We have worked hard to make sure that your iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac and PC are supported. No one will miss out. We are constantly working on broad support as technology changes so if it is not supported now, it will be soon.

6. A robust and flexible back-end built for the special use case of the in-flight experience. As a passenger, you don’t see this as much as experience it in the form of smooth functioning. But for in-flight entertainment it’s a big deal: besides the connected version of MondoWindow you see on this site, we have an alternative architecture that can be hosted onboard an aircraft, making MondoWindow the most advanced yet affordable in-flight map on the planet.

Welcome to the window seat!

www.mondowindow.com

Enjoy!