Hotel Check-In Process

Many a times during my business travel, I have waited in line to check-in to my hotel room.  I have always thought that this is an area that needs improvement.  With mobile apps and today's technology, this whole operation can be automated, especially for regular registered guests.  This is a great opportunity waiting to be realized.

Several hotels have already started on this journey and trying to catch up with other industries.  Starwood properties has  already installed smart locks that can be unlocked using their mobile app.  That is one step forward.  Hilton is following suite.  Meanwhile, Marriott has an app for check-In, but you still have to get a physical key card from the front desk.

There are many aspects of travel that can be frustrating.  Especially for road warriors who travel often.  Time is of essence and we want to get what we want fast and move on.

Here are a few things (selective) that a road warrior would need online:
- Ability to check-In
- Ability to use cellphone as a key
- Ability to view available rooms (within the class of room booked)
- Ability to see pictures of the room
- Ability to choose a room from the available rooms
- Ability to be notified when the room is ready (for first occupancy or subsequent, after house keeping)
- Ability to order room service or other services
- Ability to contact concierge to get local information or a virtual concierge

These are a few things that come to my mind.  Of course, you may be thinking that I am anti-social and do not want to talk to people.  That is one of the main reasons I said these were selective.  I could choose to chat with the front desk while checking in (if they are free), or dash straight to my chosen room after a long red-eye flight.  I have been in many situations where I didn't get the information I was looking for or I had to wait in line to get serviced. 

Choice to the consumer is the future.  Given the available rooms, why can't I choose which room I want based on the information presented to me?  I have been in too many situations where I was assigned a room next to the elevator or the ice machine even though I had asked not to.  Empowering the consumer removes all these issues and gives the power to choose.

Hotels can not only reduce their operating costs, but can also make the experienced consumers really happy by implementing these optional services. 

Image courtesy: elitetraveler.com, Marriott

Wireless charging

Ever since I bought my first electric toothbrush several years ago, I wondered what it would take to incorporate similar wireless charging capabilities into phones, wearables, gaming controllers, etc.  The toothbrush doesn't have any exposed electrical contacts.  You just place it on its base station and it just charges using induction.  What if we could use similar technology to charge any other device.  Throw your phone on a mat and it charges itself.  You don't need to worry about carrying your cable.  you could potentially charge any kind of device on a single mat.  Wouldn't that be great?

Well, several companies are already making such chargers using inductive or resonant charging technology.  One of the reasons for the slow takeoff is the competing effort of three bodies: Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), Power Matters Alliance (PMA) and Wireless Power Consortium (Qi). 

Good news is that A4WP and PMA decided to merge this week.  Yay! 

As long as we have fewer competing standards and hopefully, everyone will agree to just one standard.  This will pave the way for wireless charging to charge ahead and make a breakthrough.  Having one standard will allow the utopian charging pad which can be used to charge any kind of device. 

Looking forward to wireless charging on all the devices in the near future. 

Wearables and Classics Fusion

2015 seems to be the year when wearables will be finally embraced by the mass consumers.  Montblanc kicked off the new year with the announcement of its eStrap wearable.  Coupled with the automatic, this is the perfect marriage of a wearable technology with the classic timepiece.  This will surely get the watch aficionados who are also into technology drooling. 

Image courtesy: Montblanc

Here is some press coverage of the watch.  Love to see more fusion of wearables with classic consumer goods in order to spur broad interest.

Drone's eye view

I recently watched a tourism advertisement for Pisa and the short video featured a beautiful leaning tower of Pisa shot from the air.  The Piazza Del Duomo, Cattedrale di Pisa and the well manicured grounds looked fantastic.  The aerial video was also shot on a beautiful sunny day which enhanced the beauty of the location.  I was bowled over by the visuals, and wondered how I was not enamored by the sights when I actually visited Pisa this summer.  I went over my pictures and videos and they were all different because they were either shot at eye level or below.  Whereas, the promo video and photos were all shot from an airborne camera.

The same can be said of any tourist attraction.  They all look fabulous from the air or any vantage that we cannot easily achieve as tourists.  Look at the picture of the Status of Liberty from the air.  Compare that to the eye level shot that we all take.  Imagine capturing yourself peering through the crown of the Liberty from this angle.  Wouldn't that be wonderful?

With the advent of drones, this is all possible.  Camera equipped drones allow us this new perspective when shooting still or video images.

Imagine shooting selfies and shooting yourself in Hollywood style aerial videos while you roam and sight see your favorite tourist spots or while you enjoy your favorite adventure sport.  It can be made possible with the latest generation of camera equipped drones.

Today, you can walk into a city like New York, San Francisco or Paris and rent yourself a bike or a Segway.  Likewise, what if you could rent a drone and shoot aerial imagery or shoot yourself from a different perspective.  In the past this would have meant that you needed to fly an aircraft (either a plane or a chopper) to capture these unique perspectives.  Even if you did that, you wouldn't be in the frame since you are flying.  So, renting and piloting a drone would make this possible.

But, there are problems with this approach.  What if several tourists want to rent drones at the same time?  What if they don't know how to fly a drone?  What if the drones get lost?  What if the drones slam into obstacles or other people?

So, renting drones to drone-illiterate people is not feasible.  There needs to be technology improvements in drones to make this possible.  The drones should be auto-pilot capable.  Given a flight path, the drones should just fly in those predefined paths.  In order to make it interesting, the drones should also be capable of tracking the camera towards a target, be it the sight (like Statue of Liberty) or a person (tourist renter or adventurer).  It will be cool if a drone can fly around in a predefined path and whenever it points the camera at you, it pings you through a buzz of your cellphone.  The phone can tell the drone where you are, as well as double as an indicator to you that the drone camera is looking at you.  This will give you an opportunity to wave at the camera or do something deliberate.

For this idea to be feasible, drones also need the ability to detect as well as avoid each other.  They could create a field around themselves and sense each other and make sure they don't collide.   The other big problem is the battery life.  Most of the small drones have a short battery life of less than 10 - 15 minutes.  This would mean that the drones should also be capable of docking and recharging themselves or even better, swapping their battery automatically.  Once we have these technical capabilities, it will be much easier to build a business case around them.

Now, with the FAA looking into the usage of drones and putting restrictions on commercial usage, there needs to be an exception for pre-programmed drones since they are no longer operator controlled. 

Image courtesy: commons.wikimedia.org

Dynamic real-time maps

I-5 bridge over Skagit river collapsed last night.  I read about it today morning.

Since lot of people will be driving over to Vancouver from Seattle for the long weekend, I wanted to check out the damage and how it is going to affect the travel.  I go to Google maps and voila, Google has already done the work for us.  Check out the image below to see how Google has already updated the map so that the break in the freeway is shown.  It would have been cooler if they indicated the breakage of the bridge, rather than a missing segment on the map.   

Now, look at Bing maps and see what it says.  As per Bing, you can still drive over the (broken) bridge, and nothing is wrong!

Now, I went back to Google maps and asked for directions from Seattle, Wa to Vancouver, BC, expecting to see something cool.  Here is what it returned:

Hah.  Google messed up.  So, now I am wondering if the I-5 breakage (shown in Google maps) is a bug in Google maps or whether it was updated based on today's news.  If the map WAS updated based on the news, kudos to Google.  But, they need to take it one step further and feed this information to the routing engine too.  Why stop half way?

Wouldn't it be interesting to create dynamic maps that are hooked into the news and update based on the current conditions, like breakage, bridge/road closures, etc?  There are lots of avenues to get this information and feed it into the maps.

I am looking forward to such innovation.  We do live in interesting times.

Design Innovation (or not)

I wanted to talk about design innovation, thinking out of the box, and pushing the envelope.  This is what every company (at least, consumer goods companies) is striving to become good at.  You can innovate like crazy, but still not solve the problem if you lose sight of your primary goals.  I think that is what is happening to the Tesla Model X.

As you can see in the Model X Reveal video, Elon Musk talks about the problems addressed by the new design:

• More stylish than a minivan
• More spacious than a SUV
• Ease of getting a child car seat into the car
• Ability to stand inside the car
• Ability to easily get into the third row without folding the second row

The design is super sexy because we don't see it often on the streets.  We have only seen gull wing doors on sports cars and super cars.  Now, you can have it on an SUV that most people can afford!  BTW, Tesla calls this design 'Falcon Wing' since it flexes in the middle in order to minimize overhang.  A cool bit of engineering and innovation. 

Really cool design. 

What is not that cool is the fact that the design only solves a few problems and creates a lot more issues.  It does solve the virtues that Elon mentions.  But, it does create other issues:

• Letting rain water into the cabin.  Remember, rain rarely comes perfectly down.  It is always blown by wind and comes down at an angle
• Letting snow fall into the cabin.  If you ever lived in snow country, you know what I am talking about
• Forget snow falling into the cabin.  Anyone who has shoveled snow knows how heavy snow is.  A few inches of snow on the roof would mean that the hydraulic/pneumatic mechanism on the door would fail to even raise the door.  In fact, it could even break the mechanism
• Inability to mount a roof rack.  An SUV without a roof rack.  C'mon.  I know Tesla packs a ton of cargo space (including the 'frunk'), but I can't carry 3 bikes or a canoe inside the cargo space
• What about older homes with low ceiling garages?  You cannot even open the doors while inside the garage
• How safe is this feature?  Most car roofs are designed to support the weight of the car body (when it is upside down) with the doors shut (Now you know why it is important to remember to lock the doors).  With the buckling Falcon Wing doors, are they strong enough to hold the weight of the base?  Maybe, they are, considering the fact that the Model X is pretty light compared to its gas counterparts
• Opening area when the door is open is huge.  Of course, it allows one to stand inside the car, but who would want to do that?  With this large opening, your hard working A/C will have to work extra hard to cool/heat the cabin every time you open and shut the door

One of the main reasons minivans have sliding doors is to solve a lot of these issues.  If the main purpose was to solve the issue of loading car seats, and loading passengers into the rear seats, Tesla could have come up with a better and cooler sliding door.  Falcon Wing doesn't seem to cut it.  It is a cool fashion statement, but not practical in a lot of geographies.  Fashion statements work in niche products (like super cars).  But, if Tesla is aiming this at the mass market, Falcon Wings are not the answer. 

If the main problem to solve was the passenger loading, there are a ton of other ways to do it.  By innovating on the seating.  Maybe, by swiveling the middle row seats so that the seat faces you when the door opens.  This will aid in easily attaching a car seat.  It will also get the backrest out of the way and provide more space to get into the third row.  There are a lot of other ways to solve the problem at hand, AND not create additional problems.

Talking about out of the box thinking, here is a company that has created one of the lightest EVs around.  Check them out:

Image courtesy: Tesla Motor Co.

Memoto use-case

Ever since I read about the Memoto lifelogging camera, I was wondering where it can be effectively used without intruding on privacy of others.  Google glass is already facing scrutiny even before its launch.  Same holds true for Memoto.  How would the world react if you walked around with a video camera in hand recording everything in view?  The difference now is that you are wearing a tiny camera masquerading as a pair of glasses or a necklace or a clip.

Today, we were visiting one of our friends and their month old baby.  We started talking about how they should capture every fleeting moment of the baby's childhood and how precious it is.  That is when it struck me that this is a perfect use-case for Memoto.  Clip a Memoto to the mother's dress and it takes a snap every 30 seconds.  With the mother spending a majority of her time with the newborn baby, chances are she will capture some really candid fleeting moments.  No more running for a camera when the baby smiles, no more running to get your smartphone when the baby takes the first step.  Memoto does it for you.  In fact, you could even hang a Memoto onto the crib to record everything that the baby does.

This use-case is perfect since it is private and you are not recording anyone else without their permission.  Once you have the images, you can determine what to do with them and how to use them.

Oh, just make sure you remember to take Memoto off when you to to the bathroom :)