The future flight experience

June 16, 2011

by LIOR ZOREF @lior

Yesterday afternoon I saw Eran Gefen’s status which said that he is on a flight from New York to Los Angeles and has Wi-Fi on the plane.

I immediately called him on Skype and we had a smooth video call while he gave me a peek at the view from his window.

Wireless Internet on airplanes is not a new thing. The first attempts were made many years ago and apparently they were ahead of their time.

But recently, step by step, airlines are providing Wi-Fi in all classes for a reasonable price between 5-10 dollars.

You can question whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing (I admit that I like being disconnected from the world for a few hours), but you can’t argue with the fact that this is an outstanding opportunity for new type of applications.

After my conversation with Eran, I wrote this status and that began a fascinating discussion on the development of applications that would revolutionize the flight experience.

Here are a few examples:.

* Search for someone to share a cab with after landing. For singles – search for a date while in the air.

* Get to know other passengers on the plane according to their professional or personal interests. Possibility to combine that with LinkedIn and automatically see who else on the plane is in the same field.

* A game to rate the flight attendants and the pilot. The winner gets a like. A competition who falls asleep first J

* Newspaper and magazine exchange.

* Online Duty-free shopping. In the U.S. you can buy duty free and receive the product by mail.

* Augmented Reality app with Google Earth providing a view under the plane to see what exactly you are flying over. You can also tour the area.

* And of course the whole concept of Cloud Computing takes on a whole new meaning when you are actually inside the cloud…

I am sure that there are many other ideas. Are there any entrepreneurs in the audience? It smells a startup…

Enjoy your flight.