A little soapbox for me to stand on and rant from.
mPass for the iPhone is now available. If you are a lucky iPhone owner then you can download the application here or visit the AppStore and search for “mPass”
For those of you who are iPhone-impaired (like me), here are some screen shots:
This animation was put together by a couple of the guys in my team here at Air New Zealand.
Happy Holidays everyone…
Air New Zealand Saves Christmas — cartoon from Photon Studios on Vimeo.
BTW see if you can find the easter egg @ http://www.happyholidaysfromairnz.com there may be something in it for you :)
_Update: If you are having issues with mPass then please send email to onlinebooking@airnz.co.nz. The nice folk at Air New Zealand will be happy to help you :)_
I’m quite pleased with this bit of work: mPass allows you to download your boarding passes for Air New Zealand flights onto your mobile phone. It generates a bar code that you can then scan at their kiosks to check-in or at the gates to board. Pretty cool if I must say so my self. Its all part of Air New Zealands new domestic travelling experience.
If you want to download mPass then visit http://airnz.mobi using your web browser on your mobile phone and click on the “Download mPass” link.
Here are some screen shots of the application running that captured off my Nokia N73:
Also if you are at the airport and use the new gates try and get a look-see at the application with all the pretty coloured cells (which show the status of passengers on a flight) that is attached to the gate, I worked on that one too :)
If you are an Airpoints member then check out http://myairnz.com this was put together by some of my team mates. It gives you instant access to your bookings, airpoints info, weather, news, arrivals and departure times, events and much more.
Why do I always look so silly in photographs ? Sigh…..
Grabaseat now has an official blog.
The intro text reads:
“Welcome to the official grabaseat blog. Here you will find behind-the-scenes information and great ‘insider’ tips for grabaseat.”
Should be interesting to see what info lands up there. Check it out at http://grabaseatnz.blogspot.com/
Very very cool.
We won the e-Commerce category (the ISIS booking engine), the experimental category (for How Far Can I Go) and “The Best of The Best !” award for the How Far Can I Go application.
Checkout the TUANZ site for more info and the other winners.
This is pretty cool. For the last 3 years I’ve been working as the architect with the Innovations and Ventures department at Air New Zealand.
Yesterday we found out that three of our projects are finalists in the TUANZ Business Internet Awards for 2007 !
The projects are:
Grabaseat (Advertising & Marketing category)
For those of you who haven’t seen grabaseat (GAS) it is a site that has daily discounted fares sometimes as low as a dollar.
This site has been very successful, in May this year we hit 1.9 million visitors a month and the latest “grabaseat on tour” promotion run in October saw a further 30% increase in the number of visitors !
The Air New Zealand ISIS online booking engine (e-Commerce category)
This is the one I am most proud of. Its the cornerstone application developed by Innovations and Ventures.
Its the most complicated system I have every worked on, not such much the user interface (which is very cool with AJAX and the like) but the quoting and pricing engine behind it.
Coming up with a price for a plane ticket is horrendously complicated and mathematically, an unsolvable problem. ISIS not only does it but it does it incredibly fast and smoothly which is what you want in a $1billion sales channel :)
How far can I go? (Experimentation category)
One of first ideas we came up with when we started working on the ISIS engine was to turn the usual conversion with a booking engine on its head: rather then picking flights and get a price, wouldn’t it be better to pick a price and get told what was available ?
That is what How far can I go? does. Even better it has very very cool user interface where you move a price slider up and it shows you everywhere you can go for that price on a cool map zooming map and the price points for the next 6 months. Love it.
I’ll keep you posted on how we do. Hopefully we win em all !
A cool time lapsed video of an Air New Zealand plane getting a new paint job to promote their holiday stores rebranding.
And they have a neat gallery of holidays to :)