Something for the Israelis

Oh my, it's been so long, I feel I really have to make amends somehow. So here's one way to do it, and thanks to Eyran Blumberg!

A guy is sitting in the bar in departures at a busy airport. A beautiful
woman walks in and sits down at the table next to him.

He decides because she's that pretty, she's probably an off-duty flight
attendant. So he decides to have a go at picking her up by identifying
the airline she flies for, thereby impressing her greatly.

He leans across to her and says the Delta Airlines motto 'We love to fly
and it shows'.

The woman looks at him blankly. He sits back and thinks up another line.
He leans forward again and delivers the Air France motto 'Winning the
hearts of the world'.

Again she just stares at him with a slightly puzzled look on her face.
Undeterred, he tries again, this time saying the Malaysian Airlines motto
'Going beyond expectations'.

The woman looks at him and says 'What the fuck do you want?'

'Ah!' he says, sitting back with a smile on his face. 'EL-AL'.

WorldMate Live hits 10,000 user line!

Well, with just 2 weeks on the air, we already have 10,000 people signed up! That's quite a kick-off!

And here's our first blogger review: Your Personal Travel Assistant

WorldMate Live goes... LIVE!

Well, we're LIVE. I was expecting to write a long piece, but the feedback from the announcement is virtually keeping me up at night answering people, so that will have to wait.

In the mean time, here's a link to the announcement: http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070925005476&newsLang=en

The system is now open and anyone can join for free - so sign up at http://www.wmlive.com now!

WorldMate at NBTA 2007

Last week we came back from the 2007 National Business Travel Association show in Boston, where WorldMate Live was demonstrated to a couple hundred corporations, travel agents and other players in the travel space. WorldMate Live was greeted with an "A-ha" by most - it seems like the need and the solution are so clear and evident, some people are surprised this wasn't invented sooner. We also gained some in-depth knowledge of the related pains of travel managers - the people who need to re-accommodate all those travelers who missed their connections, don't know how to get to their hotel etc. Basic elements of WorldMate Live that we considered trivial are for them big time-savers. For us, that's great validation to what we're doing.

The National Business Travel Association is by nature focused more on travel developments than technology developments. It's a show where you see more versions of business class seats and models of limousines than software systems. It also seems like this is exactly what many attendees preferred and responded to. How this serves the companies that send them there I am not sure I understand. The equivalent in the technology space is sending your people to attend a trade show and getting a report that they saw great new keyboards, mice and USB adapters.

Travel is an industry that was fundamentally impacted by technology in the last decade. Internet technology facilitated direct distribution (a critical element of the low-fare airline model), online travel booking by travelers themselves (which reduces costs on the one hands - and compliance with corporate policies on the other) and informed travelers (making better operational decisions - good for the company, not necessarily for the agent). This totally changed the business of travel distribution and specifically corporate travel management. A new trend in the industry is the "procurementalization" of travel management, founded on the simple precept - "why should purchasing flight tickets be fundamentally different from purchasing office supplies, shipping services or catering services?". These trends are essentially driven by technology introduced by companies like Rearden Commerce and GetThere. WorldMate Live, through reducing the dependence on manual assistance (over the phone) to travelers is another example of cost-reduction and efficiency-improvement enabled by technology.

My point is that the modern day travel manager should seriously "get" technology, and be interested in it. Otherwise, as a corporation you will probably get the most comfy seats, but miss the fact that you can shave a significant percentage of your T&E costs - either by reducing direct costs, or by getting more out of each trip so that less trips are needed and more time can be spent actually working. Some of the travel managers we met at NBTA were exactly like that - clever, on-the-spot, business-oriented. These are the people who will make a difference for their companies.

And as for the people who attended in order to compare the business-class dinners at the top airlines? Well, I hope they work for the energy sector. Or government, for that matter. Someone else's government that is.

iPhone musings

Well, I guess I'm very late. One thing about the iPhone and tech bloggers is it seems like if you haven't said or written about it, you just aren't one.

As someone who's seen a few ground-breaking product launches in this industry, I must say I'm not that impressed. Yes, it's a great product - for some. But cellphones are a one billion device per year industry. Theoretically, you can have five hundred handset models released into the market a year with the majority of them being successful and profitable. So what separates the iPhone from this pack? A kick-ass screen - yes. But that's not "Apple proprietary technology". Good industrial design - cool. Hype, well... The fact that Apple can stretch its brand successfully to a line of handsets is frankly less surprising than the fact Dolce & Gabbana can. Does that revolutionize the cellphone industry? Hardly.

What the iPhone definitely isn't is a good business tool. These rely mainly on messaging capabilities - secure push e-mail with strong text input capabilities. The iPhone's touch screen, great for zooming in on maps (assuming they're Google's) and viewing YouTube clips, is not text-entry friendly. The system also lacks of a robust push email solution, and the fact it's a closed platform lets no 3rd party contribute one, or any other horizontal application that cannot be delivered over a browser.

So - RIM has nothing to worry about. Neither do people like HTC, unless they see themselves as players in the gizmo space rather than business device makers. The iPhone's dent in the smartphone market (is it a smartphone? isn't a smartphone defined as a handset with an open OS?) will be limited to people who are actually media device consumers, not smartphone consumers. Yes, it's a big segment, and Nokia / Sony Ericsson / Motorola should take heed. But for now the iPhone will go no further than that sector.

.... Late addition - Dec. 14th 2008 ....

I am getting a lot of responses for this post still... I expect you may also want to read this subsequent post before commenting...

"He who would travel happily must travel light"
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

WorldMate Live - The Birth

Well...

It's been almost 3 years since the "WorldMate Itinerary" vision started forming. Three years of what sometimes felt like a totally Sisyphean struggle - to get funding, co-operation, people, access to information, and much of the time - to stay afloat. 2006 has seen us transforming - from a bootstrap to a start-up, and the last 6 months look like one long sprint to get where we're going. Well - we're just starting, but it looks like we've just cleared the first hurdle - with the release of WorldMate Live's private beta.

This blog will record the story from now on - the story of a new, and if may say so myself highly innovative, product. We will try to tell the story of what was done, say what we can about what would be done in the future, and learn from you, the readers, what should be done.

What is WorldMate Live? Well, in a nut-shell, WorldMate Live is our attempt to take all the gizmo technologies we're carrying in our pockets and really put it to use for the aid of travelers. If you've ever done any serious business travel, you don't need to be told what a stressful and tiring chore this is. As if going through a string of meetings with complete strangers whom you have to convince to take a gamble on you within 90 minutes is not a challenge on its own, an obstacle course consisting of late aircraft, closed airports, lost taxi drivers, mile-long check-in queues, rude attendants and noisy hotels was devised to make sure the busy executive is never bored. Well , we believe that knowledge is power, and with the right information delivered at the right time and linked to the right actions, we are able to empower the business traveler - saving him time, money, effort, but, most importantly - stress. The stress of not knowing where you are, and how to get to where you want to be.

How many times have you asked yourself:

• What is my gate number? Which terminal is that at?
• Will I make it to my connecting flight? If I'm stuck, is there another flight later?
  
• Can I walk from the station to the hotel, or should I take a taxi?
  
• Where is the hotel, anyway?And do I have a valid reservation? Where's that confirmation number?

Or the proverbial - where the blazes can a bloke get a bite to eat round here?

If you've been there, done that and got the scars, we want to give you a better way to travel. One where you know what's going on around you, even if you didn't have time to do your homework. One where you're not limited by the time / patience / intelligence of your travel agent, nor have to find 10 minutes and a hotspot to log on and do it yourself. When everyone else is forming a queue, you already got what you need. When everyone is asking questions and exchanging rumors, you already know. Our way, you breeze through travel - because you have an automated aid that helps you, every step of the way. That's what WorldMate Live is really about.

So - WorldMate Live is this service, where your mobile device knows where you're going, what flight you're taking to get there, where you pick up your rental car and where you park it at night when you go to bed. It automatically gets this information from your calendar, from e-mails you get from your travel supplier, and from dozens of sources on the Internet. It then wakes up to remind you of your flight, tell you where you've landed and how to get to your car / hotel / meeting, and when to catch that flight home, at last. And, if we can help it, it does so with class. Cause there's no act like a class act...

Will this blog usually be this fluffy? I guarantee it won't. Mostly we'll be telling you highly technical things, like when the next release is expected and what will version 6.12.001 contain. But we hope that WorldMate Live will become a good part of your life - such that from time to time, if you want to know where we're taking it, and why, or tell us we're great, or good, or wrong - you'll come back here.

June 28 2007 marks the release of WorldMate Live's private beta. For now, we're keeping it to ourselves and a few of our close friends. Very soon, it will be yours. After all, it's not about navel-gazing, it's about giving people what they want and need. We're glad to be kicking this off at last. Lets see where it gets us.