The MoPR Blog

Image courtesy of: PopCollector.

Delta Air Lines announced this week that it will be the first and only major US airline to offer broadband Wi-Fi access on its entire mainline fleet.

It’s about time.

Members of the founding team here at MoPR remember all too well the highly successful (and well covered) launch of enterprise roaming on the Connexion by Boeing service,  an in-flight Internet service that was piloted with a series of international airlines.

Members of our team were instrumental in launching the service, garnering a significant amount of buzz for the new offering and even winning a few coveted industry awards for the PR program.

But it takes more than stellar PR for a product to truly take off (pun intended) and Connexion by Boeing never did. In August 2006, Boeing announced that it would discontinue its Connexion service, stating that, “the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected.”

When the announcement of the close of Connexion came down, some industry watchers cited the cost of the service as the largest barrier, while others were of the opinion that offering a power source in the seat was necessary if we were to use our computers to access the Internet for longer flights. Others recognized the huge financial burden that the airlines had to absorb when taking a plane out of service to complete the install of Connexion equipment. It was likely a combination of all of these factors that killed Connexion, coupled with the lack of availability on any major US airline.

Now enter Delta, two years later, and all the wiser. Delta will partner with Aircell’s Gogo service that will allow passengers to access the Internet via laptops, smartphones and PDAs. The fees are set to run $9.95 for flights under three hours and $12.95 for longer trips. This is less than the Connexion by Boeing service, and really not too bad considering most airports charge around the same price for in-terminal service.

The only foggy part is the timing. Noting “sometime next summer,” Delta isn’t too quick to give out specifics.

With this news and the acceleration we’ve seen since 2006 in mobile device adoption, it’s a safe bet that the number of business travelers will spike aboard Delta flights once this Internet offering takes effect. With the cost of flights on most major carries mirroring one another (and rising daily) travelers are now searching for the perks. Granted, not everyone will have the choice of traveling on the luxurious Emirates A380. Still, it doesn’t mean that passengers should have to sacrifice all luxuries when they board a plane. In an economy where airlines have resorted to charging for not only checked luggage and sodas, but also pillows and blankets, it’s good to see that at least one airline is looking to offer perks above and beyond (even if they come with a fee).

Are United, Continental, US Airways, and United far behind? American Airlines has also been testing the idea of using Aircell, but only on 15 of its planes. The other major carriers are throwing around the idea, though none have committed the way Delta has to an entire fleet.  It will be interesting to watch as Delta’s competitors scramble to keep up. But then again, that’s what we passengers need: A little more competition in the skies.

JetBlue has Wi-Fi on just one international aircraft, but does offer 30 or so channels of live television via DirecTV in every seat on a large number of their domestic flights.

We wonder what is more compelling, live TV or access to the Internet?  Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

I drive the 1974 MGB I drove in college (it was only 12 years old then). I restored it last year, and when I did I put in some improvements. I replaced the twin SU carbs with a single double-barreled Weber carburetor, put in an electric fuel pump and an electronic ignition system. More importantly, I put in a stereo that plays MP3 CDs and connects to my iPod. The Bluetooth hands-free earpiece, as dorky as it may look to some, allows me to talk and shift. As for mobile technology, that’s as far as my MG goes.

My friend Blair has a small British car too. Blair is a network architect and always has the cool toys before anyone else does. Blair is the first guy I know to connect two monitors to the same computer; different applications show on each one. Blair got a Mini, before everyone else did, and it has all kinds of fun stuff in it. I like the GPS system in his car. It’s not the first one I ever saw (the first one I ever saw was in 1998, in the Porsche of a different network architect who also got all the cool toys before everyone else did) but it’s placed on the dash in a way reminiscent of James Bond’s Aston Martin. He also has a Bluetooth handsfree system, but his is voice activated and connects to his sound system, giving every call a kind of “speaking with the Lord” quality.

Big deal, my sister’s minivan has all that stuff too (yes, but with far less cool factor), BUT she has a moving theater with DVD and 5.1 surround sound. Okay, a little bit more cool factor.

You know what I need in my next car? The Internet. I want my car to talk to the Internet. Use a Global Positioning System (GPS) or a Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) to tell a whole mess of computers where I am and come back to me with everything I need. For example, like where I am, what’s the traffic like ahead, what restaurants are up ahead, what do people who ate there say about them, how many of them can seat me and three colleagues at 7:00 pm, are there any hotels nearby that have last minute deals.

With the Internet, I could use my voice activated hands free with surround sound automobile Skype client, or voice chat with my buddies.

Put a printer where my glove box used to be (honestly, I don’t wear gloves) important documents can be sent via a network directly to my car. Last minute changes used to be made at the office, at a Kinko’s or some other location situated someplace other than the parking lot where your meeting is. Not anymore. The last minute will someday soon mean the minute right before.

Except for the printer in the glove box, I’ve used the Internet for all the examples above. Although I did print a document on a printer in Redwood Shores, California from a hotel in London, England.

A car connected to the Internet can get its own software updates (in case you didn’t know it, there is a ton of software managing your car right now, unless like me you drive something old).

When will we see these cars? If you’re reading this column, chances are you know or at least presume that car companies are already deeply involved in R&D of cars that feature Internet devices.

Daimler Chrysler worked with Sun Microsystems on a concept car – The Dodge Super8 Hemi – equipped with a Java and Linux-based Infotronic system, which they described as “a state-of-the-art embedded computer system, which was designed to satisfy the never-ending thirst of tomorrow’s automobile drivers and passengers for Internet-based data and information. The goal of the Infotronic system is to provide Infotainment, ‘edutainment,’ and entertainment services that meet the lifestyle of each individual driver or passenger.”

Dr. Wieland Holfelder from Daimler Chrysler explained: “We believe our vehicles provide more than just transportation: they provide personal mobility to reflect our customers’ lifestyles. Therefore, when a change in lifestyle occurs — such as the ubiquity of the Internet — we try to reflect that change in our products.”

This concept car came out in 2001 and Sun has been talking about Java and Internet in cars since the 1990s. So why has it taking longer than five years for someone to give me what I want in my car? Is it that far fetched to leverage “the ubiquity of the Internet?”

A company like iPass today can pretty much deliver you all the wireless broadband you need to make a car like this useful today. Between its 3G service and its aggregated Wi-Fi footprint, the company can deliver virtually ubiquitous coverage for where the vast majority of people with cars are driving in America.

Of course, unlike a laptop in Starbucks, cars tend to move fair distances in short spans of time. So what happens when a car moves from the hotspot of one network into the hotspot of another? Well, the session drops.

Not necessarily. With a mobile VPN from companies like NetMotion Wireless working together with connectivity over the iPass network, Internet sessions are maintained even as a device connects to networks of different providers or even different technologies.

The ingredients are there. I’m sure HP or Epson already has a glove box printer in the works too.

What do you think about the car as an Internet device? We’d like to hear your opinion. Please leave your comments.

technorati tags: MoPR mobility public relations PR media relations
del.ico.us tags: MoPR mobility public relations PR media relations
icerocket tags: MoPR mobility public relations PR media relations

So, we’re spending a relaxing weekend at the beach. I’m working of course, using the hotel’s Wi-Fi connection (that’s how I relax) and my family is enjoying the sunset from the hotel balcony. My kids are listening to tunes from my iPod. Sheryl Crow’s Lifetimes comes on and my daughters both agree, Sheryl Crow is great. So I switch the iPod from playlist to artist mode, and they listen to a bunch of Sheryl Crow songs. All I Wanna Do comes on and they start to dance, telling me how much they love that song.

I love that song, too. I recall the album and the video very well and start trying to place it in time from memory. “It can’t be!” I exclaim to myself. So I Google it (free hotel Wi-Fi rocks!) and it can be. That song came out in 1994.

Whenever I encounter a moment like that, when something that feels like it should have happened just yesterday turns out happened more than a decade ago, I start to wax nostalgic about how the world has changed. This is one of those times.

Today I can get virtually any data I want delivered to my laptop virtually anyplace I am. If I’m sitting at a hotel, I can download and play almost any song ever recorded and pop it into a playlist on my iPod. I can tell my friends about the cool new song I just downloaded using email or instant messaging. And if I want to learn more about the artist, I just Google her. That’s today, in a world being blanketed by 3G and Wi-Fi high speed wireless Internet connections, municipal mesh networks and nearly ubiquitous commercial hotspots, like the one at my hotel. But that’s today.

In 1994 I was listening to music on CDs that I had to buy from a store. If I wanted to create my own playlist, I had to use cassette tapes. In 1994 I had an application called cc:Mail that allowed me to send text-based notes to colleagues (who worked for the same company I did and were inside the same building I was – it wasn’t exactly e-mail). If I wanted to look something up, I had to use something called an “encyclopedia” – a set of leather bound books which alphabetically presented you roughly 10 percent of the world’s important facts. Although my father used to sell these books door-to-door, the closest one to my home was at the public library. In short, I never looked anything up.

1994 was the dark ages.

But I remember something else from 1994: it was the year Metricom activated its first municipal wireless data network in Cupertino, California.

I wasn’t an executive back then, just a mere worker bee. So I could only admire the big boys with their fancy toys and imagine “someday, that’s going to be me.” Toys like the IBM ThinkPad 750 (which came with a built in CD ROM! No, you couldn’t record music on it, but it made installing software SO much easier) and 120 megs of RAM (which was a lot back then, trust me). There was still no email, but if there were, you could now use your notebook computer to send and receive messages using Metricom’s Ricochet MicroCellular Data Network, the first-ever muni wireless network!

It wasn’t cheap. Today Wi-Fi modems are built into notebook computers as a standard feature off the assembly line and you can get free Wi-Fi access in lots of locations, like my hotel for instance. And Wi-Fi can be as fast as 54 Megabits per second (but it’s probably likely that behind the access point is only a 1.5 Mbps DSL line).

But in 1994, there weren’t even that many notebook computers. That was the first year Apple sold the Powerbook. And modems of any kind weren’t a standard feature. If you wanted to connect even over a dial-up connection, you had to insert a card.

But still, the notebook held out the promise of mobility, and in 1994, Metricom wanted to help deliver that promise with a cellular-based data network for portable computers. First, you needed a modem. Metricom sold theirs at a discount to subscribers for the low low price of $495. If you recall cell phones of twelve years ago, they weren’t exactly the tiny palm sized devices we have today. They were big and had thick antennas, and so did the Ricochet modem.

But the modem could attach to the laptop, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. What’s more, it was so obvious you were using a wireless data network, that having that big, clunky box with the thick antenna sticking up actually made you look cool! Remember, only executives and rich people had wireless Internet.

Once you plunked down five bills for a modem, and a sixth one for service activation you had to select a service level. In 1994, there were four:

“Economy” - 2.4 kbps for $2.95 per month; “Standard” - 9.6 kbps for $9.95 per month; “Executive” - 19.2 kbps for $19.95 per month; and “Premier” – Unrestricted bandwidth for $29.95 a month (wonder how fast unrestricted was?).

Okay, let’s stop for a moment for a quick math lesson. 2.4 kbps? Let’s say it’s 1994 and you want to download the MP3 of that hot hit song, All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow, over your Ricochet network. The file is about four megabytes. A byte is eight bits. Your Ricochet connection can download 2.4 kilobits per second. How long will it take you to download the MP3 of All I Wanna Do to your computer?

It’s a trick question. There were no MP3s in 1994. But if there were, it would have taken you approximately 3 hours and 42 minutes to download one song. By comparison, if you were staying at the same hotel I am on the Oregon coast, you can download that song in about 35 seconds.

Fortunately, there were no great bandwidth demands in 1994 as there are now in 2006. No one was downloading music. You probably didn’t have email as we know it today, and if you did, probably no one else to whom you wanted to send an email had an account anyway. There was no Yahoo!, no Google, no MySpace, no Amazon.com. There was no World Wide Web (although in 1994 a fellow by the name of Marc Andreesen of a little-known company called Netscape predicted the World Wide Web would become a commercial success). In fact, I’m not sure what you could use the 2.4 kbps connection for in 1994.

Even so, here is how Metricom described itself in that June 1994 press release announcing the Cupertino network:

“Founded in 1985, Metricom is a leader in digital, wireless data communications networking technology. The firm, headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif., has developed a license-free, high performance, low-cost regional data communications network system that can be used in a broad range of personal computer and industrial applications.”

Industrial applications?

Metricom promised 30 regional networks by the end of 1996.

In 1997, by the time I had reached a certain professional status whereby I was issued a notebook, we were light years ahead of where the world was in 1994. I had email accounts at work and at home and there was a commercial World Wide Web (still no Google yet). And it was in a meeting in 1997 where I learned the great value of wireless Internet.

On one end of the table was the CTO of the company I worked for, on the other end his director of network architecture – the only two people at this company to have the Ricochet wireless Internet service. In between were two industry analysts who sat opposite me. Every so often during this meeting either the CTO or his director would tap on the keyboard and the other one would smirk. You see, by 1997, we also had instant messaging. But that will be the subject of another post.

technorati tags: MoPR mobility public relations PR media relations
del.ico.us tags: MoPR mobility public relations PR media relations
icerocket tags: MoPR mobility public relations PR media relations