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Internet of Things: turning flying into a more pleasurable experience using data

Sogeti Labs
May 08, 2013

When you know everything about your target audience group, what would you do? You would turn the pain in the neck products and services into cash cows. You would do whatever is needed to do to create competitor advantage, just like you do now.

“Everything that’s uncomfortable, inconvenient or just a pain in the neck about traveling, we’re trying to turn into a more pleasurable experience.” Robin Daniels, Living PlanIt
Turning the pain in the neck, that is what the London city airport is trying to do. With an overarching platform the London airport is trying to gather data to create a better customer experience. “A lot of what they’re doing is putting data together and creating information to give a better customer experience,” says Joe Dignan, a chief analyst for public sector technology at Ovum. With this platform the London city airport is the first airport to test machine to machine communications in the field of commercial aviation. So what does it do:
“Many of the more advanced features involve tracking passengers through a mix of face recognition and crowd-sourcing software that already exists in airports, plus the GPS that is already available in smart devices. For instance, a traveler who pre-orders food online or though their smartphone will be able to have it delivered to them as they arrive at the departure lounge. When someone arrives, sensors will detect that person’s frame, and will notify the F&B outlet to get everything ready”
Passengers can chose whether or not they “opt in”. I wrote about the Internet of Things in combination with airplanes and airports before in “Internet of Things will be the manager assistant of the future”. I wrote about how Virgin uses the 500 gigabyte of data they create every single flight. Knowing a lot more from you customers or company processes with (sensor)data is great, but you have to invest in embedded technology which creates all this data first. I would love to finish this blog with a quote from Microsoft’s director of facilities and energy Darrell Smith: “Give me a little data and I’ll tell you a little. Give me a lot of data and I’ll save the world.” Source

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SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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