Fantastic chart showing what the last 12 US presidents did in their first 100 days in office:
Finalists in TUANZ Business Internet Awards 2007
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 !
SIGGRAPH 2007 Vid
Here is a quick vid I put together covering some of the neat things I saw at SIGGRAPH. Did it for a couple of presentations at work. Figured you all might like to see it…
I’m at SIGGRPAH
Its very cool. Check out http://travelgremlins.blogspot.com/
My first YouTube video
Just uploaded my first video clip on YouTube !
Its a bunch of 360 degree pans of European cities that we took on our recent trip. Because of the fast pace of change the compression really messes up the video :(
The actual footage looks very much better….
Texture Maps of Earth, Moon, Mars and Venus
Found these excellent texture maps (colour, bump, specular etc) of earth, moon, mars and venus. Very nice quality and free to use. Check out http://www.oera.net/How2/TextureMaps.htm.
Gonna have to do a space scene just for fun :)