The future of payments and loyalty is here now

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Imagine a world in which you easily pay without having to carry your wallet. You can manage who has rights to pay within your family and manage preferences easily from your mobile or web. Imagine the surprise and delight of being recognized automatically as you are  rewarded with personal content that regularly enhances your daily experiences.

All of this is available today, but so far only exists within Walt Disney World.  I’ve just returned from a family trip and the Disney Magic+ band was an amazing aspect of the trip.  The bands are linked to your account which tracks hotel and restaurant reservations, members of your traveling party and preferences you’ve set for things like FastPass+ or access to special events.  Once you are on site, the band serves as your room key, ticket to the park and FastPass+ gates as well as payment for just about anything you might consider.  I’ll get to the one (ok two) exception(s) I found in a moment …

My family arrived on Thursday and that day I carried my wallet as I always do along with phone.  It became clear very quickly though that the wallet was simply redundant and I left it in our room for the days that followed.  Entering the park is a simple tap on the sensor touchpoint which after a few seconds glows green to confirm you are clear to go.  Band wearers with payment capability are also asked to confirm their identity via a quick finger print touch for ID.  What’s interesting about that piece is that you haven’t previously conceded your print (unless you’ve been to the park previously though I doubt that’s used).  I’m guessing it’s used as a backup for a fraud check as you’d have a biometric print on file to review.

Inside the park, you can use the band to pay for anything you need or want along the way.  Food and souvenirs can be paid for with a simple tap and confirmation via PIN.  If a photographer snaps a pic of your family they can tap the band to map the image to your account. I noticed that the images were available within about an hour which is pretty amazing (and a bit unnecessary even) given the volume of traffic and level of activity the typical party has going on.  In restaurants with table service each server and many of the hosts have iPod touch or iPads with scanners mounted on the underside of the cases in which they sit.  When it’s time to pay / be ID’d the process is quick, painless and frankly a pleasure.

One of the more interesting aspects of the bands though is how you are identified while enjoying a ride.  At the end of many of the more exciting sites there’s a picture wall which shows you enjoying things … these images are automagically synced to your account as well!  While pretty much everyone runs over to enjoy the pictures, Magic+ users are informed the images are already waiting for them which is pretty amazing since there’s no action required.  The bands are RFID which allows them to be scanned from a bit of a distance … I’m not sure what frequency they run on, but it’s enough of a distance that you have no sense the scanner is nearby.  They enhances the impact of the images auto-syncing to your account.  While I did not witness this firsthand, I believe it would also enable Disney Cast Members (park and resort staff) to seamless wish people a happy birthday, anniversary etc which today is largely managed through buttons people proudly wear.

All in the experience was pretty excellent.  I did however run into two small glitches in the matrix.  The first was in a vending machine in our hotel.  The machine accepted bills and NFC payments, but not the Magic+ band which feels like a miss given the use in 99.99% of the rest of the park.  The other was when I had the concierge adjust and change a dinner reservation and was asked for my credit card to hold things.  This one was a surprise frankly as there was a card on file for our bands and rooms and really felt unnecessary – especially since payment for the meal out be managed through the band!

Quick note on the vending machine as well … As it offered NFC, I tried MANY times to get Apple Pay to work, but it failed and eventually took the NFC function offline (literally deactivated) after a few tries.  The machine actually suggested I use a softcard (ISIS) which was the first I’ve seen in the wild … after a trip back to the room for my wallet I was finally able to buy a bottle of water – with cash.

The Disney implementation of Magic+ bands shows how proper consideration can really deliver a high value, low friction experience regularly across quite a few use cases and is something I hope others will learn from.  When you can control the end-to-end it’s certainly easy by comparison, but it did cost Disney around $1 Billion to roll-out.  The best part was it was very clear that everyone around was able to use it, not just techie types.  Additionally and perhaps even more importantly while there’s a lot of complex technology in place, the experience was not technical but rather more personal and allowed more positive human interaction.

 

Traffic animated

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Just playing around with the Galaxy S IV camera…

(update doesn’t look like the phone to wordpress share includes the animated image.  bummer)

Massif Management: Surf Photographers

More Salty Pictures via slideshow at the link below. #solid.

This past fall, Jonathan Feldman formed Massif Management, a photo agency that represents a group of young surfers who are also photographers. “They’re ‘surf photographers’ insofar as they shoot waves and wave riders, but they’re also working across any number of different genres, from art and fashion to travel,” Feldman told me. “Still, for all these guys, surfing is an abiding passion, and I think you feel the presence of the ocean in their photos, even when they’re working away from the water. They make salty pictures.”
via The New Yorker.

Booking flights based on real-time rewards

Mileswise

I’m a long standing TripIt user and have largely been satisfied, though lately there’s been some rumbling in social media land about the loss of rewards tracking.  For whatever reason Airlines are removing Tripit’s ability to track rewards as their own apps become more sophisticated.  To be honest using Tripit’s rewards tracking feature is really secondary for me, but it’s still important particularly if you travel frequently.  As my job involves a good bit of travel opportunity and my interest in what airline to take is shifting (from AA to Delta) I’m a bit more conscientious of my potential status.

The Next Web just brought MileWise to my attention and it looks like a winner. It’s connected to Google owned ITA so you get a very comprehensive database of flight information combined with over 500 reward programs in a single app. You’ll be able to book smartly knowing you are earning the most or taking advantage of potential opportunities you’d certainly miss via more traditional bookings. I’ve been using Hipmunk as my initiating research stop and will likely continue, though once I’ve found a few flights of interest it looks like I’ll be dropping them into MilesWise before making and decisions. Tripit will likely remain my goto itinerary service as well …

Day 1 in Austin Recap

I’m digging Austin so far. SXSW events kick off today, so aside from my badge pick up and some check-ins (literal and virtual) yesterday was pretty light and gave me some perspective and the ability to scout around a bit.  Even with the light activity, my phones never stopped buzzing and there were more streams of notifications coming in than ever before.  Have to figure out a charging strategy … added an Enercell (thanks Ricky!) as a starting point.

Here’s a quick recap of my first day in town …

Farmer's Market Breakfast @ The Four Seasons
Mandatory visit to Mellow Johnny's
Shrimp Po Boy @ Perla's
The Sampler @ Iron Works BBQ

The travel industry needs a tech makeover

It’s been a while since I traveled and being back on the road I can see that things are exactly where I left them … pay for everything you do and if possible make the consumer pay again.

I’m carrying my laptop, iPhone, Blackberry and iPad.  All of these devices have wifi and I’m used to using them together throughout my days and evenings.  On the plane down I was able to connect via GoGoInflight which was great as I stayed current on a few work-streams.  The problem was I wanted to use both my iPhone and iPad and GoGo forces the connection through a captcha which when submitted disconnects the other device.  I was on a short 2hour flight yet GoGo still charged their normal rate …

At my hotel, the Hilton charges for wifi as well (so lame for hotels to do this btw) and again I can only connect a single device.  I’m not confident that switching my connection between devices won’t result in a second charge so I’m not even taking the chance.  Instead I’m relying on the 3G services as needed …

I used to travel with a travel router to hack around this BS.  I honestly forget that piece of gear this round.  At a business hotel during the week, why not just assume we all need to be online and build it into the price of the room and offer it up as a free service?  Perception changes a lot here.  I tweeted over to GoGo regarding the second device function and am anxiously awaiting some form of a response.

If this was a personal trip btw there’d be even more reason for multiple devices as bringing my family along would only increase the number of needed connections.

Twitter locations are being shared

buzz with twitter locations

I guess I’ve missed this previously, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that tweets posted with locations are fully shared to Buzz.  This is how things should absolutely work, but often times (like with foursquare) you have to click through to see the place rather than simply marking the post.

This tweet was posted via Tweetie 2 with location sharing on … in case you were wondering.

JetBlue Fails Their Own Digital Savvy Test

This morning I read about how JetBlue used Twitter to try and test the agencies pitching for their business.   I think it caught my attention as I had a Jet Blue flight booked for later in the day …  Well fast forward a few hours to that time and suddenly I’ve got a reason to reach out to JetBlue about my family’s experience today.  It wasn’t great.

On the way down to Florida, we were booked in 4 seats in row 1 and our last seat in row 18.  Not exactly stellar and something only a computer would do.  We had to actually forfeit the row 18 seat and checked our car seat once on the plane in order to make sure the whole family stayed together.  Traveling with three small kids can be stressful and not being together only amplifies the potential challenge of keeping everyone calm.  JetBlue has said (via the flight attendant) that they’d be looking to reimburse us for the lost seat … I guess we have to wait it out on that one.  I didn’t tweet it, but I’m posting it now.

Today was our return trip and while our seats were booked together, we were in the back of the plane.  Not ideal, but certainly acceptable -being together was the most important detail.  While waiting around for the boarding call, I tried to see if we might move forward a bit (we were booked 2 rows from the back).  I waited patiently and politely and stood quite when a passenger was called up from the back of the line to be helped first.  Her issue was apparently far too complicated and used up any available time for me.  Instead we got a gruff, there are no seats to move around (after the passenger ahead in line moved).  OK …

About 5 minutes later the pre-boarding call was announced and we immediately made our way over to the gate door.  The JetBlue attendant looked at our boarding passes and gave us an earful about not coming over sooner for the pre-board even though she had literally just announced it.  Instead of letting us on the plane, we were asked to stand to the side while other rows for main boarding started.  There were at least 3 other families who also found the same experience and all were surprised to find that there wasn’t a pre-boarding and that we were being scolded for not respecting the call (that had just happened).

I’ve traveled far too much to know getting angry with the person behind the desk never leads to anything good for you, but man the families were livid.  We all have small kids and definitely need more time to get on the plane, deal with car seats unpack etc.  Not today …   My family was cool.  We got on board eventually and I was able to get the car seat belted for my son, but one of the other families ran into an issue and started to get quite nervous about securing their child safely.  Joe (real name) from JetBlue came over to help but got testy with the nervous parent who was certainly pushing to get things resolved.  We heard Joe scold the dad by saying “I don’t come to your office and tell you how to do your job, so don’t tell me how to do mine.”  I can’t help but think that extra time we all wanted during pre-board would have been exactly what we needed right then.

Back to the original tweet test … I tweeted this as it was happening today – twice.  JetBlue?  No comment today … tomorrow won’t matter.  Let’s not forget this social media stuff is a two-way street, JetBlue.  Looking at you, @martysg.  Comcast and Zappos don’t need #sneaky hashtags, they pay attention and respond within a reasonable amount of time – sometimes surprisingly fast.

Google’s Favorite Places not quite that helpful

Today I caught a sticker in the sandwich shop by the office for Favorite Places on Google and decided to give the QR code a shot. Here’s what I got in return:

Sandwich Planet via Google Favorite Places

Reviews are helpful if I’ve never been t here before but needing to call or get directions (standing at the door) seems like a total waste.  Where are the daily specials, or perhaps a default to let me add my own review right away …   I was at least able to add it as a favorite, but I’ll need to open Maps on my desktop or Google Earth to get the benefit of saving it.  These types of services needs to be much more contextually relevant to matter.

Location, location, location!

In the past few years, I feel like I’ve tried just about every location service.  Some have certainly offered more than others, but one thing has been sadly consistent and that’s absolutely no consistency in access to your data.  If 2010 can bring one thing, I hope it’s a simplified and federated view into our location data.

Social location services are a very interesting area.  I’ve dabbled across various apps to try and find the magic but have come up short.  The potential is there, but because no one service or perhaps suite of tools enables

  • the right degree of privacy control
  • proactive friend notifications
  • base of users and importantly a way to contact each other either publicly or privately

A quick look back at the list of things I’ve tried in no particular order… Jaiku, Twitter, Latitude, Nokia FriendView, Loopt, Brightkite, waze, Stalqer, dopplr, tripit, fire eagle, Foursquare and Gowalla.  Of all these, only Fire Eagle and Dopplr currently talk and a quick check on Fire Eagle tonight revealed I am in Singapore yet I write this from Katonah, NY.  Dopplr actually knows that’s where I am but for some reason has not shared this info with FE … not that it matters for now.

There’s a clear issue with all of this.  There is no way to share my location data easily across services and situations.  Instead I have to explicitly state or open the app I want to use in order to have things update and shared across my social network.   Unlike status messages, location is not a subjective thing, it’s actual.  You can and should be able to share the degree of accuracy people see and Latitude does this well.  Even the two competing check-in services FourSquare and Gowalla do it differently… Foursquare requires and address if you want the place to be used by others while Gowalla places a pin on the map via GPS.  I prefer the GPS method personally as I almost never know or want to take the time to find the address to simply check-in.  If I fire Latitude up my location will be highlighted within a few moments, but that’s not something I can actually use.

Speaking of using … the three points I was initially making all clearly tie together.

  • I need to have total control over how my location information is shared.  I rarely want to show when I am in my home, but showing the town is cool.
  • With friends in the system, I want to know when they are close and see that as prioritized info in whatever view I’ve got within the app.  For some reason this is not the case with anything.  Latitude sorts randomly when you browse the map, Foursquare sorts by time and Foursquare, Gowalla and Stalqer give me updates on everyone regardless of where they are.  While there are some modifiable settings, it’s not even close to granular enough to be valuable in this context.
  • Having friends in the system is important and since this space is still fragmented there are too many options to choose from to find your friends.  Stalqer did an admirable job linking through Facebook, but Facebook doesn’t actually have a native location system.

Twitter and Facebook will probably duke this out in the end with some competition from Google.  Currently twitter supports location and you can geo-tag tweets via various mobile clients, but this information is so hidden from the main view, it’s essentially a waste to even bother.  Google has quite a few pieces behind the scenes, but so far has not taken them anywhere.  You’ll notice I’ve got a location widget on the sidebar of my blog which will show city-level views via Latitude.  Other than that Latitude is mainly a view only layer on Maps.

I’m sure 2010 will be a hype filled year for location services.  I’m really hoping we’ll see standards that will let these things work together.  I don’t want to entrust my location data to a single provider (yet) though if someone was able to develop the right open federation model it would make things very interesting.

Google Latitude Location Alerts

latitude location alert

On my way home tonight I fired up Google Maps to get an address and since I use Latitude, I was also activating my location.  I got an sms telling me my friend and colleague Will was “nearby.”  I received the image above in an email with a similar message …

I actually had forgotten I had turned on these location settings, and now that I see how they really function, I have a few suggestions:

  • 50+ KM is not exactly a practical range for spur of the moment meetups for starters.  Will was 52km away when the alert triggered …
  • There’s no contact number in the sms alert which forces a few more steps to contact (call or sms) the person

I love the idea of social location and if you follow me across various services I’m sure you’ve noticed as well.  What Google is doing is trying to make it easy through the use of location history, but it’s still unclear how that works without constantly opening Maps.  I can’t afford to let Latitude project my location in the background all day as GPS tends to eat batteries …   I’m wondering if there isn’t some sort of data partnership to be had with the various check-in services (or even Yelp!) to augment the more direct GPS tagging you do with maps.  The more data in the mix here the more valuable the results.

Btw – Will developed the Michael Ruhlman Ratio iPhone app – be sure to check it out!

gogo internet on american sfo to jfk

gogo internet on american sfo to jfk

That’s a pretty close to live speedtest coming from my flight from SFO to JFK and while the upstream is far from awesome, I don’t even care.  I’m cruising through mail, tweeting and (obviously) blogging with ease.  This is a completely game changing travel experience and something I hope goes to many more flights and airlines soon.

I should note the service costs $15/ flight but I am surfing free thanks to a summer promotion from American Airlines.

MetroNorth Bloggers

David Parmet just launched MetroNorth Bloggers which is a aggregator for the wait for it … MetroNorth Bloggers. If you are familiar with MetroNorth, you’d know that this is the primary commuter path for those of us living to the North of teh city in Connecticut and Westchester County.

The site looks like it will be a very cool way to see what’s being said in our local market and I’ve subscribed immediately. It’s great to track the conversations happening close to home. I hope this will actually encourage more discussion and even lead to some meetups as well. Thanks David!

Update on My Netbook Usage

Samsung NC10-14GW netbook

I’ve been using the Samsung NC10 as my main travel system (also carrying my work laptop) since the end of December and I thought it would be worth reporting on my findings to date.  In general, the NC10 performs admirably for every request I’ve made though it’s not hard to find the edge of the netbook limit either.

Since buying the NC10, I’ve traveled abroad twice and found that aside from needing to connect to my office’s VPN, I can do everything I need with ease during the course of a business day.  I can email, IM, video chat, browse sites, open office docs, play media etc.  The battery in Windows XP goes basically the whole day though I actually rarely run XP as was pre-installed.  Instead, I’ve been using a combination of Windows 7 and OSX as my primary systems – mainly Windows 7.

Both OSX and Windows 7 use more power, but are infinitely more pleasurable to use over XP.  I accept the lesser battery capability in return for user experience and will definitely remove XP when Windows 7 is properly released.  OSX is something I run when I want to use a Mac specific app like iPhoto though after this vacation I will probably not do that too much more moving forward with this current rig.  As much as I like running the Mac side of things, editing high resolution media is not very efficient on the current Atom spec.  You really need more horsepower and ideally a GPU to complement the CPU.  This would most likely reducer battery life further, but again it would be worth the sacrifice to let something this size serve as a primary computer.  I’d pay more for this privledge as well.

This past week, aside from shooting a few hundred RAW images of my kids, I’ve also captured a lot of HD video clips with a Flip MinoHD I received from my wife.  It’s basically impossible to playback these clips at full strength … they play fine in smaller preview scale, but fullscreen HD is just too much to ask for a low powered system in these initial netbooks.  While I would not be looking to edit or playback HD video or edit RAW images on a daily basis I actually lost track a bit that my computer was indeed a netbook.  Of course I know it’s a netbook, but since it really is an incredibly versatile system, I don’t really consider it secondary.  This last thought is something I think is pretty impressive … While the intent of the netbook as it was sold was as a low cost, reasonably powered computer you can actually do a ton of stuff with it – and not really consider the limits unless you start to venture into richer media.

For me, the netbook is still a very strong category of computers and I look forward to upgrading to a more capable system at some point this year when things evolve.  For a typical user these current and even the soon to be released computers will serve a very wide segment and after a few months of use, it’s not hard to see why they are selling well.  In these financially unknown times getting a lot of return on a small investment is a great deal.

Standing on the Beach

Today is our last full day on vacation and it’s been fantastic! The weather has been clear and warm and the kids have really enjoyed the beach, pool, boating and of course the playgrounds around Hobe Sound, FL.

Google’s Latitude kick starts social location

I woke up this morning to a few invites to join Google Latitude, which as is turns out is packaged into Google Maps Mobile 3.0. Once in the system I immediately saw how powerful this new service is going to be … While it is still very early Google and the Latitude / Maps team have done an excellent job bridging the service layers into the application which makes it very easy for existing Maps users to use. And that’s the real key here – there’s a massive installed base for Google Mobile Maps! This is less a new social network and more about adding a feature to an existing product millions of people already use. If Google decides to allow other location services to feed data into their system (and they probably will) it will only get stronger. This is big because the potential network effect  is instantly massive!

So what is Latitude – essentially it’s the ability to see your friends and search around the map once you find them. You can get a list view and then click through to see exactly (to the degree that info is shared) that person is and even what they are up to through a status line.  For the moment, the contact system is integrated into your GMail contacts and you can sort through the list by most contacted and even those you may have starred if you use an Android device. I could definitely see an option here for my Friend Connect contacts which would bring my social network friends and my contacts all onto the map.

On the desktop side, you can add an iGoogle Gadget which I’ve yet to do and will take a look at later. (have added it now and it’s quite nice if you want access from your desktop) The real power of this system is the mobile accessibility and that is definitely how I see myself getting the most from it. I’ve snapped a bunch of screenshots from the N79 so you can get a feel for how it works …

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All in all a very strong start for Google Latitude. I’ve verified my mobile number now and will have to see how that gets used. Perhaps for contacting people on go via the Map for in the moment planning which would be very cool.

Where’s the wifi on Metro North?

Aside from my own personal wifi, there is no wifi solution on the Metro North train and in 2009 it seems a bit lacking…  I spend an hour on the train in either direction though the average traveler (based on my observation) spends between 30 and 40 minutes per trip.  There are plenty of devices here – laptops, smartphones, and portable game systems.  Most of these things can connect over wifi and while most people are perhaps not obsessing over their RSS feeds or email, I would see a very reasonable pick-up on a connection if it was available.

I’ve reported previously on the Cablevision wifi which has popped up at various stations, but that’s impossible to use while moving.  Aside from a few dead spots (which could perhaps be filled by the carrier providing the service) wireless connectivity would be a killer addition to the commute.  I could see purchasing it as part of the monthly pass – right from the kiosk.  In fact that would easily work for a day pass just as easily …

This is the New York Metro area … I know we are not the most wired city in America, but it’s 2009 and things should be here by now.