PhoCusWright Identifies Seven Emerging Themes for Travel Industry

Be on the lookout for these themes derived from the most creative and innovative minds in the business. The Travel Innovation Summit at The PhoCusWright Conference will showcase the travel industry’s hottest, most innovative Web and mobile-based applications. In assembling this first-ever event featuring innovators from around the world, seven key themes emerge. Following is a preview of the next big wave of ideas that will shape the travel marketplace over the next 12 to 18 months. The growth of pure Travel 2.0 businesses is slowing-dramatically. The Travel Innovation Summit demonstrators,... Read more »

PhoCusWright to Showcase Hottest Travel 2.0 & Mobile Innovations

The PhoCusWright Conference, for the first time in its history, will be featuring a special summit dedicated to spotlighting the hottest innovations is mobile and web travel technology. The inaugural Travel Innovation Summit will feature 24 handpicked companies from around the World who want to demo their innovations to some of the most influential leaders in the travel & tourism industry. In their own words: Early-stage, emerging and established companies are invited to apply based purely on their innovative accomplishments, regardless of organizational size, age, sector or location. PhoCusWright’s... Read more »

Android + Travel = Location Based Services

Mobile applications are not really my passion, but I have to say that after playing with my wife’s iTouch and viewing the latest videos about Google Android, I am truly excited about what the mobile web has to offer. I had a discussion with my colleague Phil Caines just today about AirG, a Vancouver based company that has developed a mobile social networking platform. It is very cool but I wondered how sustainable the model is given that mobile technologies will eventually support regular web applications. Phil’s argument was that our mobile market (North America, Japan, and Europe)... Read more »

Boarding Pass on your Mobile - Don’t forget to Charge

Continental Airlines is now testing the use of electronic boarding passes on mobile phones as part of a pilot project. According to the New York Times, the technology being tested uses a two dimensional barcode stored on a mobile phone which is scanned by a TSA (Transporation Safety Authority) agent and cross referenced with photo id. There is strong support for this technology because the two dimensional barcode uses a much higher level of encryption than the standard 1D barcodes (like UPC codes). The two dimensional barcodes can also store a much larger amount of data including (but not... Read more »