NB: This is guest post by Daniele Beccari, vice president at Isango and a technology consultant.
Mobiata, the mobile apps development company acquired by Expedia in November 2010, is adding a new component to their suite of travel apps.
Unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, where Android is seemingly everywhere, FlightBoard is a mobile version of the classic departure/arrival board found at any airport, now on Android, iPad and iPhone.
According to the company, the design is modeled after the departure boards at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.
The information on the board is refreshed every 5 minutes. The user interface is clean and simple, and flights can be exported into FlightTrack for permament tracking.
The price tag at $3.99 seems quite high for "just" an aiport board, but Mobiata is known for designing appealing user interfaces which might seduce more than one buyer.
Other existing Android apps from Mobiata include:
- HotelPal, also released very recently, which is a mobile hotel booking app. No surprise, it's build on top of the Expedia web services API. The design is clean, and the app integrates a location based map display. The inventory and rates are not particularly different from what Expedia can offer. The app is free.
- FlightTrack allows users to check their flight schedules, gates, delay status and seating. The app gets flight data from FlightStats, schedules from FareCompare (in turn pulling from OAG), and seat quality data from SeatGuru. Priced at $4.99, it's one of the most successful paid apps for Apple devices.
Elsewhere at the show, Motorola is pushing its docking station device for the Atrix 4G. It is essentially a way of plugging a phone into a hotel room keyboard and display system so that the phone becomes a desktop computer.
Here is a clip:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WkbpeePeCM
NB: This is guest post by Daniele Beccari, vice president at Isango and a technology consultant.