In tribute to my long time hero, Steve Jobs, I would like to dedicate this blog post to him.

One of the greatest feat that Steve Jobs had achieved was how he recreated the entire ecosystem for the music industry.  While there are some striking similarity between the Music industry with the Travel industry (that they are both old, distribution channel controls most power), there are of course many differences to keep in mind.  So, what would Steve Jobs do, if he was to put his mind into reinventing the travel industry?

What would Steve Jobs have done if he were to recreate the travel industry?

iPod – the End User Device

The music industry change began with the Apple iPod, the first hard-drive based mp3 player that had people asking, “Why do I need to have 6 GB, when 512 MB is enough?”  At that time, the iPod was certainly NOT the first mp3 player – in fact, Apple was quite a late player into the MP3 device manufacturer.  However, their biggest selling point, 6 GB of space, won out many of the hard core music fans who at that time would at most half filled their iPod.

This provided room to grow.

The Travel Industry:

For the travel industry, the current iOS platform (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) provides a hand held device that is very capable of performing any travel-related activities.  From travel booking, researching, to taking photos, to sharing the travel memories, these devices are used.

iTunes - the End User Experience

Along with iPod came iTunes.  It started off as a program that transfers songs from ones’ computer to the iPod.  While it was a buggy program (it still is), it does allow easy synchronization and a way to reliably transfer the contents.  With this device distribution methods ready, people are free to rip out their own CD, as well as download (em hem, Napster) music and put them onto the iPod.

The Travel Industry:

This may be the most crucial piece that is currently missing from Apple’s pipeline, if they do intend to go into travel.  In fact, back in 2010, there was a news story broke out about the iTravel patent.  While it never really made into public eyes, it was nonetheless a very interesting report.

As the app is completely designed in Apple’s hands, designers can make it very user friendly, with performance and data efficiency, as well as practicality in mind.

iTunes Store – The Distribution Channel

The biggest game changer, however, is when Steve Jobs went to each major record label, and ask them to sell their musics PER TRACK and FOR 99 cents.  Both are radical concepts.  A CD typically has 12-18 tracks of songs, and costs around $20.  On a per track cost, it does work out to be about the same price.  The music industry, used to “bundle” a bunch of songs, hit titles, non-hit songs into ONE CD.  Regardless of whether the consumer likes the song or not, he or she will have to buy the entire CD for $20.

The $.99 per track model turned this paradigm upside down.  The hit songs are sold very well, and they are typically charged $0.99.  The not-so-hit songs, however, can even charge higher, some go as high as $1.29.  This caters to “the long tail” and hard core fans of the artists, who would collect every music that has been created by the artist.  By 2010, there were more than 10 Billion tracks available on iTunes, making it the largest single music source, and forever changing not just the music industry, but also media distribution industry such as books, and video shows.

The Travel Industry:

Much like the music industry, the biggest obstacle to recreate the travel industry is to change the mindsets of the distribution channels.  While music industry was entirely consumer focused and hence the mental shift can be purely made from consumer electronics, the travel industry involved a lot more hard cost.

For example, the cost involved to create a music track can range from very little (using a laptop, microphone) to very much (state-of-the-art studio, famous artists, etc) while most of the costs are soft costs.  By contrast, the cost to provide a plane ride is at least the maintenance for the plane, the flight crew, and the fuel.  That’s why for air travel, it is difficult to control.

The opportunity for cheap deals is when the flight / hotel room is almost full, and that the few remaining seats can generate many buzz or to help extract more revenue.

While booking is still mostly done with intermediary (GDS, wholesalers, travel agents, OTAs), or referral sites (Kayak, Google Flights), suppliers are now marketing aggressively to the direct consumers.

The intermediary, at this point, can offer consumers something that direct suppliers can not – the ability to change and modify their itineraries.

Genius – The advisor

Perhaps not many people are familiar with the Genius playlist.  But it really is what a Travel Agent/Advisor do for travel planning.  Genius starts with, “what do you have on your playlist”?  and then go on to suggest songs that are similar in taste.

An experience travel agent/advisor should do just that.

I must also note, that this “advisor” role maybe the weakest of Apple’s offerings in music.  Guessing what people want is never easy, and hence companies like Google build their entire business out of this.  With the reach of reading your email (gmail offering ads), browsing behaviours (google search record will be kept if you are logged in), social interactions (google +), Google has a very good idea of what YOU WANT.

And that’s why Google Flights/Hotel, and the concept of Google Travel is a very scary but potentially lucrative piece of the puzzle.

Related posts:

1. The State of Online Travel Industry (Part 1 of 3): The Typical Booking Experience
2. How the emergence of mobile had changed my travel

RIM Playbook

Earlier this week, Research in Motion (RIM) introduced a 7″ tablet device,  the Playbook.

Here’s why I think this is a great play from RIM, inspite of  the coming wave of iPad-killer devices.

1. RIM is hitting the right market - By continuing to market to the corporate market, and its ability to synchronize with existing Blackberry devices and servers, this will win over the heart of the IT departments,  while also continue to sell Blackberries to the corporate users.

2. Look at who are using the Blackberry phones: the corporate executives, marketing, sales, and IT workers.   I talked to several front line workers installing my Internet at home – they love using  the iPad for work but IT department never would allow it, well, now they have a new device!

3. The Playbook based its system off an fairly old, but stable and proven technology developed in QNX. As an engineering student in a Canadian university (I assume American universities as well), we actually learned to use the QNX as a real-time embedded operating system, circa 2000.  It is similar to Linux, but even more simpler and easy to program with.  Although QNX is an older OS, it won the approval of my vote as being a very stable system, with true multi-tasking and very flexible platform.

Now, some of the potential problems I can foresee with the Playbook,

1. 7″ vs iPad’s 10″ – the ability to type on the iPad gave it a huge advantage vs the recent announcement of the 7″ tablets, namely Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Playbook.  There is simply no way to type properly on the 7″ device! if you hold it in vertical, it’s quite big to “thumb it” too.  RIM may be better off by introducing a  10″ tablet and hit Apple directly.

2. Battery Life – with the smaller device, the Playbook’s battery will be physically smaller than the iPad – QNX has always been an OS in a desktop environment, so I am a bit skeptical about the battery performance in the Playbook.  Nowadays, 10 hours seems to be the standard for most tablet users.

3. Diversion from the corporate market – as I have mentioned in previous posts, I really am not optimistic about RIM marketing to the consumer sectors (Torch, Pearl, etc) because they are facing competitions from the iPhone – the ultimate consumer market guru, and a crapshoot of Android-based devices.  The Playbook needs to be focused and marketed to the corporate users.  Because to the general consumers, it’s about apps, apps, and apps.  Apple and Android had too strong of a head start.

So when will we see a tablet from Nokia? (No, it’s not the  N900)

I would like to end this blog post by siting a story (true story!).  It was back in 1999, and I was a co-op student working in Motorola.  Back in the days, there were two departments in the Richmond facility. The top floor with all the shiny new equipment and big team would be the cellular team making GPRS and  EDGE and UMTS software.  The small little department that I was in support for, was supporting for the DataTAC 2-way messaging system.  There were about 20 staff left or so, and we all worried about what is there to do because it was a  ”sunset technology”.  Think about SMSs, and WAP browsing, and who would use these 2-way pagers? One of the co-workers mentioned that a small little startup in Waterloo, ON is licensing the technology to build the device on, and we were all joking about how the entire team will need to move there.  Obviously, that little startup, became what RIM is today.  And seriously, I wonder if any of the DataTAC team went to work for RIM.  But the Motorola Richmond facility was later dismissed and the entire operation has been moved to China.

The moral of  the story – technology is only one of the small factors in a business – choosing the right market to attack is the key to win.

No related posts.

It has been exactly one week since I’ve gotten the iPad. And because this is the first product I ever owned and used from apple, i figured my experience may be of interest for many people who are skeptical of the latest hyped gadget. I got the 16g version and with only wifi.
Setting up
Since i am in Canada, and the ipad has not yet released here yet, I needed to setup a different account for the iTunes store in order to download apps. This is my first encounter with iTunes, and I really didn’t like it a lot. It was slow, tried to convert all my files to aac, and it bitched me about the us apps that I downloaded. Painful.

Using it
Many people asks me when would I be using it. My response: any time that I do not need USB support, flash, or camera.

I really enjoy reading on the web and having the tv on in the background showing sports highlight or the game. I used to do that with my laptop so it was a bit heavy after a while. I have a 13″ laptop and it weighs about 2.5 lbs. Still, it’s the form factor that makes it a winner. I can imagine the game shows on tv, say jeopardy, has an app that allows tv viewers to play along.

I also have a dock that i put right next to my laptop. I always have twitter on that gives me real time feeds. I also know that there is an app called iDisplay, that let the ipad be used as a monitor extension. Too bad it only works for Mac osx for now, but this will definitely be the app that I buy.

I downloaded a few game apps, like sudoku and air hockey, and just gave the ipad to my mom. After teaching her how to get back to the home screen and shutting it off,she was off to it for the whole evening. Amazing. I used to train computer illiterates so this is quite an interesting moment.

Reading in bed is great. Aside from the ibookstore, there are other free apps that allow you to download free books. Although those books are mostly the classical literatures, but they are actually that ones that I had always wanted to read but sometimes find it too troublesome to borrow from the library because I don’t know where they are at.

Watching videos is also great. There is the YouTube app, and even a youku app. For those who don’t know, youku is the Chinese version of YouTube, and they were known for lots of copyrighted materials.

I am getting quite good at typing on this iPad. This entire blog post is typed on it.

To answer a few critics:
No USB – it will be nice to be able to hook up memory cards, etc without the attachment. But it hasn’t been a problem for me yet.

No flash – most of the major websites had updated to this html5 format, so it’s not a big deal now. However, I do notice that most Chinese sites are very flash focused, so I’m sure it will be quite a trouble when I start to use it in china.

No camera – again, i have my laptop or cellphone to do this. Not a problem for me yet. Hard to type on – although I’m getting quite good at it, I do find that that are some weird stuff happening at the keyboard. For example, I always typed the z wrong, missing the ‘ , and I actually didn’t realize how many words I typed incorrectly until apple automatically corrects for it. If i typed something wrong, it’s very difficult to tap back to that word or changing a letter of the word. I needed to erase the entire word to change.

No multitasking – os4. That’s all i am hoping for. I really missed it when i cannot do instant messages when i browse. This is the only major problem that i have.

True problems that i found when I’m using it:
ITunes and the whole concept of it – this whole centrally located files concept have got to change. I don’t like to or usually w ant to sync up with my laptop.

Some of my emails aren’t showing up the right encoding- not sure if it’s because the senders encoding has messed up or what, but one in five emails i got in chinese is messed up.

The desktop is too cluttered – i downloaded lots of apps, so i have five different screens and its getting really difficult to find the right app. this I heard is being addressed ini the next big update Finger print smudges – it’s kind of obviously if you view it on the side.

Final thoughts:
I think this is a great device. Although it doesn’t have USB, camera, but that’s why I have my laptop for. I see it as a great companion to the laptop, where I watch tv and can also have the iPad on my lap, browsing or twittering(but not both at the same time due to the lack of multitasking)

For the 500us I think this is the version that makes the most sense. The hardware cost alone is around 250us, so there isn’t much profit margins for apple!

I also think that it is unnecessary to get the higher model because this iPad is meant to be used in a networked environment,like my home or office, or airport or coffeeshops. Pretty much anywhere. So, you can always get contents on the fly, download a new app, etc. Furthermore, I was able to use my nokia phone to tether my 3G connection. I also heard that there are lots of other options, such as verizon’s MiFi card which combines the 3G card with a wifi router in the form of credit card size box.

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