Technologies presented by Eric Basha at Enter 2008

The following three videos were presented by Eric Basha, head of Tourism at Microsft, at the Enter 2008 Conference in Innsbruck. Although many of these videos have been out for a while, I wanted to address each one and discuss them in the context of travel & tourism.

The first technology that Eric presented is the Windows Mobile Tellme application. The most obvious travel & tourism use of this technology is for the booking of destination products that are signed up for the service. For example, making a restaurant reservation or booking tickets for a local attraction. The example presented is purchasing movie tickets and inviting a friend using voice. The possibilities also extend into voice response for tourism attractions.

The next technology presented, and the sexiest one from a visual and tactile standpoint, is Microsoft Surface. This is an interesting technology because it takes the user interface to a whole new level. A table that interacts with devices and objects that are placed on it would be an amazing thing. Given how cost conscious restaurants tend to be, how realistic is it to have a restaurant equipped with a hundred highly interactive touch screen tables? Not sure about that, but that doesn’t discount the coolness factor of surface. I especially like the map integration.

Photosynth is a really interesting application. The idea of building a virtual environment based on user generated content is tremendous. I cannot begin to imagine the computing power that resides in Live Labs. That said, the travel & tourism applications for Photosynth are many and diverse. For example, imaging a group of friends all taking photos of their trip from different angles and perspectives and then creating a 3D photo album of combined photos. The opportunity to share and collaborate in a more interactive visual way gives users a richer experience of a destination. There is an opportunity for DMOs to gather and aggregate user photos for the purposes of providing a richer marketing experience for their destinations. Take a look at how Photosynth takes photos of Venice and pieces them together like a giant jigsaw puzzle into a three dimensional experience, really quite amazing.

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