Passengers flying Alaska Airlines will now be able to use these new services at the L.A. International Airport
Travelers are already using mobile commerce based kiosks to be able to check in through certain airlines at the Los Angeles International Airport, but these services are about to start expanding quite significantly over the next three years, starting with Alaska Airlines.
Both airports and airlines are expected to begin making considerable investments into m-commerce.
A new survey has shown that mobile commerce kiosks are expected to take off at many different airports and through a range of airlines. In fact, the survey showed that almost 90 percent of airports intend to make an investment into this type of mobile technology within the upcoming three years. This will be good news for tech savvy travelers who are rapidly growing in numbers.
These kiosks use mobile commerce technology to allow a passenger to check in using a smartphone.
Using this mobile technology, some of the largest airports in the world are giving travelers a way to obtain a boarding pass without having to check in with a gate agent. A recent survey conducted by SITA, a multinational technology firm, has shown that these kiosks are currently serving about 2.4 billion passengers every year. According to the chief exec at SITA, Francesco Violante, “This is the age of the connected traveler with nearly all passengers carrying mobiles, tablets and other devices.”
Some additional key findings from this survey have shown the following:
• Almost 90 percent of airport operators that participated in the study said that they had intentions to invest in kiosks, as well as self-boarding stations and self-serve bag dropping stations within the span of the next three years. This year, alone, airports are expecting to spend about $6.8 billion on tech.
• Nearly half of the airlines that participated in the survey are able to update passengers about flight issues – such as cancellations or delays – via mobile device. By 2017, that figure is expected to rise to 97 percent.
• Under 5 percent of passengers around the globe are currently using their mobile commerce to check in, but that rate is expected to reach the 15 percent mark by 2017.
Nextbit has developed a new service that enables Android users to store and sync all of their mobile data online.
What makes this particular mobile technology unique is that it also allows users to store and sync the state of the actual apps, which means that if a user was working on a photo that was only half edited or they were in the middle of game, they can pick up right where they left off when switching from a smartphone to a tablet or vice-versa.
Users can instantly move a project, task or game to a device that is nearby.
The service that has been developed by the startup, which is comprised of a team of people who come from Google, Apple, Amazon and Dropbox, is called “Baton”. The service from Nextbit is also equipped with a feature known as “Pass”. This lets users instantly switch whatever app they are working with to a nearby device, waking the device from sleep mode and immediately launching the app on it at the same state, right where a user left off.
In other words, Baton is a system-level service that essentially gives Android users the ability to hit “pause” on any app they are using and send the app in this paused state to another device where the user can then resume whatever they were doing before making the switch.
Mike Chan, former Google alumni and the co-found and CTO of Nextbit said “We live in a multi-device world, and yet it’s still too cumbersome to switch between our devices.” He added that they have “taken the cloud and deeply integrated it into the Android operating system itself to provide a seamless experience between your phone and your tablet without any effort from developers.” Chan explained the service during a recent demo the company gave at the Code/Mobile conference in California.
The mobile technology does not require app developers to do anything for it to work.
Baton is not unlike Apple’s Handoff feature that has been included in the company’s most recent desktop and mobile operating systems, which allows users to switch tasks between their different iOS devices. However, the major downside with Handoff is it requires app developers to add it into their applications, which not all developers have done. Therefore, it doesn’t always work.
Nextbit, on the other hand, does not require developers to support its mobile technology or even know that it is there. Baton has been designed to remove the steps of finding the app and the proper files when the user switches their task between devices.
