Podcasting and Inflight Broadband
Nick found an intriguing link yesterday - intriguing at least for us as participants in the evolution of internet access on airplanes. Jason Calacanis is definitely bloggeratti, and he was clearly having some fun with being able to surf the web while fielding offering from Lufthansa flight attendants - as his podcast even more aptly demonstrates.
As Connexion By Boeing, for whom we do periodic usability testing on the web-access interface, has maintained, having internet access on a plane changes a whole lot. Calacanis himself expresses this in his podcast: the plane used to be the one place in 21st century life where you were essentially unreachable for hours at a time. Sure, there are airphones here and there - but (at least in my experience) the quality of that service vs. the cost is not even in the same ballpark relative to IM, email, wi-fi and cellphones. So, prior to CBB’s invention, planes were - despite crowded conditions - oases of solitude/off the grid.
Now that that may be starting to change, the question is how? And what else might have to happen? Calacanis points out that people have no idea what he’s doing, talking to his computer. If you were trying to sleep next to him - or do a webcast of your own - would that work? Amtrak, hardly a paragon of efficient travel, has actually adapted an interesting strategy on its Northeast Corridor. They label certain cars “quiet cars” where cellphone use is eliminated or severely restricted. In effect, this creates a new set of passenger that cuts across class lines. That is, economy class, business class, or first class lines: call it “connected class.” Right now, this consists only of early adopters like Calacanis, on (really) one airline. But at some point, it could theoretically be anyone with an internet enabled device. Especially if Verizon and United really get in the game as they claim they will.
This will challenge the already challenged usability environment for both planes and such devices - which, I suppose, is terrific news for firms like ours. But it should also be terrific news for the user, because the more routine pressure is placed on corporations and products to conform to intelligent standards of usability, the better.
JF
June 15th, 2005 at 1:10 am
i’ve made a video for calacanis:
http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=aaahm
;)
June 15th, 2005 at 8:45 am
We hope the above video will be taken in the spirit with which we assume it was done: gentle fun. And, NB: we don’t have any connection to the auteur(s). But caveats aside, we think these filmmaker(s) should have selected not the pauses, but rather more airplane-centric aspects of the video. After all, you could have done this particular edit job with any podcast. Given that this was a podcast on an AIRPLANE, the satire should have reflected that (a file of flight-attendant-interruption clips, or passenger-confusion soundbites) . That’s our movie critique du jour.
JF
June 15th, 2005 at 9:02 am
By the way, “nck” is NOT “Nick” — just three letters that one might easily end up with by randomly tapping one’s index fingers on the keyboard. Like “asdf.” Just so there is no misunderstanding.