Indian Railways plans an ambitious tech overhaul, HotelTonight hints at a change of course, and other stories all make our shortlist for the Scan on February 27.
New technologies, apps and partnerships
The Indian Railways website will boast a next generation reservation system by this year end, the new site will significantly improve response time, easy of use and load on the site. The new website will support 7200 ticket reservations per minute (current: 2000/minute) and 120,000 concurrent users (current: 40,000 con. users).
The new Indian Railways application will take advantage of advanced fraud control and security management systems. Also, the government is planning to cover large number of trains under Real Time Information System (RTIS).
Australia-based hotel distribution switch SiteMinderhas scored another major client with the news that China's invitation-only luxury travel startup,Zanaduis plugging in to its Room Distribution Exchange (RDX), to gain direct access to hotel reservation systems globally.
OTA ebookers claims today to have launched the first "bucket list" application on Facebook, and says its survey of 2,000 Britons found that 34% of them have an active "bucket list."
ALK Technologies, a leading provider of navigation and GeoLogistics software, launched its navigation app "CoPilot" for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. Integral real-time 'Live' services include ActiveTraffic Yelp, Wikipedia, and Google Search to keep drivers fully informed on the road.
Next Gen Dine, mobile restaurant point of sale software for iPad, now supports Merchant Warehouse credit card payment gateways, this is in addition to existing gateways Mercury and USA ePay.
New York Public Library is in the process of digitizing approximately 45,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present. The library is transcribing the menus, dish by dish and planning to release an API and data exports in the coming weeks. The ultimate goal is to get the whole collection transcribed and to make the data available for exploration and use by researchers, educators, chefs and other interested folks.
Is HotelTonight going Oyster-style? The same-day booking app has posted a want ad asking for professional freelance writers to review hotels. Hmm...
Touristlink.com, a social travel platform that connects travellers with local travel providers has launched features that allow a small business owner to list private campgrounds on the site alongside their social profiles.
Campground hosts will be able to upload information and pictures. Travellers will be able to ask questions and interact with the hosts before planning a trip, see the profiles of other travellers who have visited a particular campground in the past.
Regulatory hurdles
Another blow for Indian carrier Kingfisher Airlines that's been grounded since October 2012. The Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation has decided to withdraw all of Kingfisher Airlines’ international flying rights (for Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Dubai and the UK) and domestic slots, effective immediately, which in turn will be handed over to other Indian carriers.
New insights, negotiations and resignations
Ooyala, a video analytics & monetization platform provider, released its Global Video Index: 2012 Year in Review, offering key insights into how viewers watch video online around the world:
- Viewers watched live video 18 times longer on desktops, five times longer on tablets and four times longer on mobile than video-on-demand content in Q4.
- Hours spent watching streaming video on tablets and mobile increased 100 percent in 2012
- iPhone users watched twice as much video on their phones than Android users did in 2012
- Approximately one third of total time spent watching tablet video last quarter was with premium, long-form content running more than 60 minutes
Andrea Ragnetti, CEO of Alitalia has resigned after only one year at the helm as losses widened last year at the Italian airline. Losses in 2012 rose to € 280m from 2011's € 69m.
Frontier Airlines is playing hardball in its negotiations with Expedia.
Merging the back-end tech systems of American Airlines and US Airways could take years, say the pros who might gain business from it.