Today, All Things Digital made it onto Ad Age’s Digital A-List, which also includes Groupon, Buddy Media and Virgin America.

BoomTown loves Virgin America’s digital stuff (plus the hip food) .

Actually, Ad Age’s Nat Ives was very nice to us too, nailing what we’re about:

“All Things D has become a particular sort of powerhouse in the overheated space devoted to tech news. It’s part of Dow Jones, so it’s got that gravitas. But it’s got the speed and humor of a blog.”

Yes, quick and funny and very heavy–that pretty much sums up ATD.

You can read it all here.

Topguest, a check-in loyalty service that was founded just five months ago, has gotten $2 million in Series A funding, as well as nabbing well-known Facebook investor Peter Thiel as an adviser.

Investors in the round include: Thiel’s Founders Fund, as well as angels such as Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier and Naval Ravikant.

Topguest is exiting its beta phase today with partners that include Virgin America, Hilton, Wyndham Worldwide, Kimpton and others.

Using Topguest, those companies can offer deals, making large travel and hospitality loyalty programs social by plugging them into smartphones and geolocation.

Users check in with their existing services–such as Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook Places and Gowalla–in order to get benefits such as air miles for your Virgin Elevate account and hotel points for Hilton HHonors.

Topguest is competing in a crowded market, where a lot of such services are offering many kinds of deals.

The San Francisco start-up is most like another service aimed at retailers called Shopkick, where you get points when you check in to its mobile app.

Topguest said the differentiator is that it links into geolocation services already in use, instead of requiring another different check-in and offers points in already existing loyalty programs.

The crafty little advertising move comes at a time when Chrome needs a boost to take on the Web browser competition. Currently Chrome has 8.5 percent of global users, according to NetMarketShare, compared to 59 percent for Internet Explorer, 23 percent for Mozilla Firefox and 5.4 percent for Apple’s Safari. Yesterday, the new social browser RockMelt launched, and while the only people using it so far are avid followers of tech blogs, the company will obviously need to figure out a way to use some of its $10 million in funding and its investors’ experience building browsers to gain market share. (Interestingly, NetMarketShare says mobile browsing is only 2.8 percent of the market. Room to grow.)

Google’s in-flight Wi-Fi will be on domestic AirTran, Delta and Virgin America flights (which use Aircell’s Gogo service) from Nov. 20 to Jan. 2 (which is sadly 23 days shorter than last year’s promotion).

Image courtesy NASA.

The popularity of Twitter has fueled expectations that marketers could use the service to target relevant ads to consumers interested in real-time information about breaking events and other topics. Since launching its much-anticipated advertising products in April, Twitter has signed on more than 30 big-name brands, including Coca-Cola Co. (KO), Virgin America and Starbucks Corp. (SBUX), to test them.

Some marketers say that early results are promising but that advertising on Twitter remains an experiment. Other marketers, including PepsiCo Inc.’s (PEP) beverage brands and Best Buy Co. (BBY), who tested out Twitter’s new advertising products—some without cost—haven’t made new ad buys. Marketers say they definitely aren’t ruling out advertising on Twitter in the future, but that it’s still early days and they are figuring out what works.

“The jury is out” on whether Twitter can become a home for brand advertisers, said David Cohen, an executive vice president at Universal McCann, a media-buying agency owned by Interpublic Group of Cos.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

BoomTown took the corporate All Things Digital jet–aka Virgin America, seat 10A–up to Redmond, Wash., today to attend Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, which also includes a passel of media drones like me.

I will be liveblogging the event all day, which is essentially a cavalcade of top execs from the software giant taking the stage and showing off their wares.

There should be a little bit of swanning, since Microsoft (MSFT) turned in very good financial results last week, posting a huge increase in earnings and revenue due to the uptick in PC sales and the intro of the Windows 7 operating system. Losses at its Online Services division remained high, so thank goodness for servers and tools!

Here we go:

8:15 am PT: I was late due to the completely confusing streets of suburban Redmond, all of which look exactly alike, as does every building on Microsoft’s sprawling campus. I am a streets of San Francisco girl, obvi.

In the Conference Center, though, things had not started well past the 8 am start time, as we await the entry of investor dude Bill Koefoed.

U2′s “Beautiful Day” was playing over the sound system, which it was not up here in the Pacific Northwest this morning–it was kind of cold and gloomy, a la “Twilight”–but hopefully will be for sparkly Microsoft execs. We’ll see!

Finally, Koefoed came out and started in on feedback, touting the newly renovated investor relations site, which he is “pretty proud of.” It is nice looking, as are most of Microsoft’s hand-out materials.

In fact, he sent me an excited note last week, because I posted Microsoft’s pretty fourth-quarter slides.

Dear Bill: You need much better things to get excited about! Like the new Magic Trackpad from Apple (AAPL)! Wait, I mean Windows Phone 7!

Koefoed moved quickly to point out last week’s strong results, which is no surprise. When you’ve got lemonade, make more lemonade!

Then he outlined the various Microsoft’s eight “core” businesses, such as Xbox, Bing, Microsoft Office, Windows Azure and, of course, Windows, that the company will be going over.

That’s a lot of core, isn’t it?

Some questions to be answered: Business PC refresh and share momentum? Impact of iPad/slates? Windows 7 phone? Expense control?

Beautiful or not, it was going to be a looooong day.

8:42 am: A jaunty Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s COO, bounded out. He tried to get the crowd more lively, but this was not to be unless there was a lot more coffee.

I had great hopes for a goofy quote this morning from Turner, who declared at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference earlier this month about Apple’s antenna controversy: “It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that.”

I don’t know about you, but insulting a competitor by shooting off your own foot is a gift that keeps on giving to me.

In any case, Turner said Microsoft was now “leading with the cloud,” a move that the company had been resisting in the past. Now: All in!

He outlined all the various services for business customers. “We are the market leader in cloud services for business,” said Turner, noting Microsoft had been too quiet about the inevitable move of data and software services to big services in the digital sky.

(Actually, in its secret heart, Microsoft was hoping this whole Internet thing would go away and it would be back to a PC on every desktop, but that horse has left the barn, so it’s cloud time!)

Next up for Turner: The much deserved popularity of Windows 7. Of course, since Vista was Microsoft’s Antennagate–except much, much, much worse–it was not hard to be better.

Turner then moved on to bashing Google (GOOG) and other competitors. Turner put up some quotes from Jaguar employees, after the car company switched to Google for email and other services.

One said Google was like vinyl seats. Ziiiiing!

Next Turner victim: VMware (VMW)! He claimed its products were pricier and not cloudy enough.

As for Linux: Meh!

Oracle (ORCL): Customers don’t want to be locked into the land of Larry Ellison!

Cisco (CSCO): Just you wait, John Chambers!

9:19 am: Turner headed off and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie started in on his speech, titled “Reimagining Microsoft’s Future.”

That would be the client plus the cloud, natural user interface and something he called “working on your behalf.”

Mundie launched into his future-dude schtick, but he’s not exactly Alvin Toffler, so I started desperately mainlining the caffeine.

He talked about movable data centers, the “Internet of Things” and other cloud innovations, but there is no new idea here to blow your mind.

Is it too much to wish Mundie would talk about an invisibility cloak? Instead, it was the orchestration of data authority.

That will apparently be a new data marketplace product, codenamed Dallas, to shop for giant data sets and more.

Mundie than showed off some personalization-driven features in the Bing search service, which are also not new concepts.

For example, he showed a menu, embedded in a table, that might know what you like to eat at a particular restaurant you frequent.

This is what would be on my table and there is no need of a fancy computer table to know this: Donuts, donuts, donuts.

Speaking of which, FAM minions: Where the heck were my donuts?

Mundie then moved onto Kinect, once called Project Natal, the actually cool gesture interface for gaming that will be available for Xbox soon.

Finally, he finished up with a video clip of a medical triage assistant. Great, even less customer service from hospitals. The demo was flatly freaky.

The morning session wrapped up with a visit to the technology showcase to “expect the unexpected,” although I was not expecting that in any way, and then it was off to lunch.

Next up in the afternoon session: CEO Steve Ballmer at 1 pm PT.

While executives at both AdMob and Google are pulling out all the stops to convince federal government regulators otherwise, multiple sources close to the situation said that the pair now expect the Federal Trade Commission to try to block the acquisition of the small mobile advertising start-up by the search giant.

While the situation could change, of course, sources said that the lack of any kind of indication of clear direction of the inquiry this late in the game by FTC staff–which recommends action to its five commissioners–is a bad sign.

“The federal government is looking for a way to discipline Google in some way, because of larger concerns about its search power on the Web,” said one source. “And this is where it looks like it will try to show that concern.”

Action could come as early as this week, but is more likely next week, in the form of a request for a preliminary injunction to stop the transaction due to antitrust concerns.

As luck would have it, late last week on a Virgin America redeye to Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., BoomTown ran smack into AdMob Founder and CEO Omar Hamoui, who was on the same flight.

Unfortunately for Silicon Valley’s luckiest entrepreneur of 2009–he sold the San Mateo, Calif. start-up to Google (GOOG) for $750 million last November–it was yet another of a half-dozen trips back east so far that have taken on a less than pleasant tone.

Hamoui, who usually has a fresh-faced demeanor, was clearly looking a lot more haggard than usual.

He declined to comment in detail about the situation, only noting that, “I have been trying to explain our business, which is still nascent, to the FTC.”

That’s a big problem, of course, since Hamoui’s real job is to keep his start-up cooking with gas until it is officially bought by Google.

Along with keeping up with competitors–such as Quattro Wireless, which was bought by Apple in January–Hamoui is now hampered in hiring new staff for AdMob, as it waits in limbo.

That’s because AdMob has no currency now to offer engineers,

In addition, first pointed out by MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, since Apple (AAPL) lost out on its attempt to buy AdMob to Google, he’s also facing a less-than-cooperative company whose iPhone has been one of AdMob’s key devices to place ads on.

And Apple recently issued some new rules–thus far, unenforced–that could hurt AdMob’s ability to take advantage of the powerful iPhone smartphone platform.

Such growing rivalry is the main argument that Google and AdMob have been pushing, noting that the mobile ad business is still small and also pointing to a recent survey that shows the combined entity has only 21 percent of the market.

But that point does not seem to have moved the FTC, which has been asking for reaction of the deal from a range of sources, such as advertisers, even as Google has been soliciting official support from a number of tech sources.

In addition, lawmakers have also been agitating the FTC to act, along with intense lobbying by Microsoft (MSFT) and also public interest groups.

“The FTC really wants to do this and is in search of a legal theory that it can win with,” said a close observer of the situation.

Bloomberg also reported Friday that the FTC was urging the filing of an antitrust suit to challenge the deal.

In other words, big regulatory trouble for Google, and–more to the point–questions over the fate of AdMob.

“It feels like AdMob is going to suffer collateral damage for a bigger fight going on about reining in Google,” said one source.

And, until the verdict is in, here’s a video of an interview I did with Hamoui in late 2008, when life was a lot simpler and bureaucrat-free for him:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100503/close-encounters-of-the-regulatory-kind-admob-google-braces-for-the-worst/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100413/live-from-new-york-twitter-pitches-ads-to-madison-avene/ http://allthingsd.com/20100413/live-from-new-york-twitter-pitches-ads-to-madison-avene/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:39:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18537

Twitter has quietly been reaching out to marketers about its new ad platform for a few months, but now it’s a full-fledged marketing blitz. The messaging service rolled out its ad strategy to the press last night; today it’s going directly to the ad industry, via COO Dick Costolo’s presentation at Ad Age’s Digital Conference.

I’m not sure how much more Costolo will reveal that Twitter hasn’t put out already–or may be waiting to talk about at tomorrow’s Chirp conference. But since I’m here I’ll liveblog it anyway.

Liveblog

Costolo says he has been waiting five or six months to give this presentation. It’s time to walk through the rollout, he adds, making note of his “fascinating nontraditional” prediction last fall.

He explains the Twitter ecosystem. The ad platform has to go everywhere, not just to Twitter.com. He refuses to call the ads, “ads.” They’re “just tweets.”

“Promoted tweets,” that is.

He walks through the @hashtagtees example.

There’s a menu from which ad buyers can pick search terms and associate them with specific tweets they’ve already published.

Promoted tweets look and act like regular tweets except that they’re labeled as promotions and stay at the top of the Twitterstream.

A promoted tweet “combines earned media and paid media in one space,” Costolo says.

“Earned” media are free, Costolo reminds the audience. That is, if people retweet your paid tweet, there’s no charge additional charge.

The pitch continues: Ads are “real time,” and so are analytics–you can see how ads are performing second-by-second.

Twitter will start with Twitter.com search. That’s phase one. The plan will roll out more broadly, but the company is doing it this way because it wants a “thoughtful, user-centric approach” to figuring it out. “We will quickly expand into syndication…all of our syndication partners.” And here, Costolo specifically mentions UberTwitter in the list of partners.

Important: Twitter will definitely expand into the regular timeline at some point. That is, you will be getting ads in your stream whether you search or not. Ad-free Twitter is over.

Costolo talks about the “resonance” metric Twitter will use to figure out which promoted tweets show up and where.

Each ad partner will see a scoreboard with different metrics: Retweets, @replies, #tag click, avatar clicks, link clicks, views after RT.

Advertisers won’t pay for ads that don’t resonate with users.

Next, Costolo describes communication on Twitter as both “one to many” and as a “real-time interest graph.”

Pricing will start as CPM. Twitter is doing this because it doesn’t know how to correlate “resonance” with value yet. As the company figures this out, it will move to a pricing model based on ROI.

Here comes Porter Gale, VP of marketing for Virgin America, a launch partner. She notes that @jack is flying VA right now.

[You're not missing anything here.]

Um, here’s a free ad for two-for-one tickets on Virgin. Don’t really follow it but sure you can figure it out if you’d like.

And here’s Ellen Stone, SVP of marketing at Bravo.

She is also excited!

[You're not missing anything here, either.]

Stone describes some sort of live, real-time convergence between shows broadcast and users’ tweets. Makes my head hurt. Hope it doesn’t pop up during “Top Chef.”

Back to Costolo: More monetization coming. Commercial accounts coming after promoted tweets will “feather into this platform very very nicely.” One dashboard will manage both products.

Q&A

Will tweets be syndicated to Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), and other partners that take the stream?
Costolo says yes, without mentioning any specific search engine or media pub.

Will there be revenue-sharing with publishers and bloggers?
Yes, with developers and publishers. Costolo says Twitter will talk about this at its Chirp conference and focus on the syndication piece there. Revenue sharing will be “very transparent,” he adds.

Early reaction from consumers?
Yes, Twitter is getting a “wait and see,” Costolo notes. [From whom? Who's seen it?] The company will take its “learnings” from search and go forward. Twitter ads should be live and running now.

What CPM are you charging?
Twitter is playing around with different numbers, trying to figure it out. When a term is owned or created by a client, like Virgin America, should it have “rights” to that hashtag, whereby no one can outbid it? Some hashtags only have value at certain times. Like “Super Bowl,” which is only useful for a couple hours in the year. So we have to play around and test different kinds of pricing. “We don’t know the answer to that yet.”

What kind of reactions are you looking for from users?
Costolo says Twitter is looking to see whether people click or interact with ads and paying attention to the tenor of reaction: Positive or negative, etc. Think about the iPad launch this month. People were having battery issues. Someone could have jumped in in real time and bought a promoted tweet that dealt with that. Twitter’s hope is that when people see these, they’ll get why they work.

Please talk about search volume.
“Massive. It’s huge.” Will talk about hashtags tomorrow. But on Twitter.com, it’s a small piece of traffic. So we’re not maximizing revenue now. We’re figuring it out.

How will location work with ads?
“We think significantly.” There are lots of opportunities down the road. As this gets more sophisticated, will see opps for small and big business.

Will marketers be able to get resonance scores for companies that aren’t using promoted tweets?
Not at first. But possibly.

Will you share revenue with TweetDeck, etc.?
Yes. We’ll talk about this tomorrow so we can save something for those guys. Revenue-sharing will be very transparent. Costolo name-checks Iain Dodsworth of TweetDeck and Loïc Le Meur at Seesmic.

Finished up. I will have some questions for Costolo myself, a little later this afternoon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100413/live-from-new-york-twitter-pitches-ads-to-madison-avene/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/ http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:40:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18035 Many Web publishers are scrambling to make some or all of their sites “iPad ready,” which basically means stripping their homepages of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash. Some, but not all, are being rewarded with a shout-out from Apple, via a page that identifies “iPad Ready” sites.

Here’s the list of publishers Apple (AAPL) says “deliver content that looks and functions beautifully on iPad”:

CNN
Reuters
New York Times
Vimeo
Time
Major League Baseball
The White House
Virgin America
Sports Illustrated
Flickr
People
TED

Apple acknowledges that this isn’t a complete list of iPad-compatible sites–both NPR and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, are overhauling their pages for the gadget–and it’s unclear whether Apple has any criteria for calling out these sites in particular. (For the record, I’m told that All Things Digital should work just fine, too).

But for whatever reason, the list appears to be particularly heavy on sites owned by Time Warner (TWX). CNN makes the cut, as do Time Inc. magazines Time, People and Sports Illustrated.

One other note: Check out the description Apple uses for each of the sites it calls out and you’ll see that “iPad-compatible” doesn’t mean “completely free of Flash.”

In many cases, Apple can’t say that all of the sites’ videos will play on the gadget. Just “most” videos, or “recently published” ones.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100401/time-warner-gets-the-ipad-seal-of-approval/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091114/weekend-update-11-14-09-keeping-your-heads-and-data-in-the-cloud/ http://allthingsd.com/20091114/weekend-update-11-14-09-keeping-your-heads-and-data-in-the-cloud/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:30:42 +0000 Drake Martinet http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=29024
If you follow AllThingsD, and Weekend Update hopes you do, then one thing you’ve come to value is the special way the staff gets around the world to cover the important stuff and report it straight from the geek’s mouth. This week, our bicoastal brigade brought the tech news as it happened, and in Boomtown’s case, from 30,000 feet.

Kara came out swinging this week over Meg Whitman’s insistence that the Skype acquisition by eBay should be put in her “win” column. Whitman, former CEO of eBay (EBAY), is running for governor of California, and Kara had her spin detector set to maximum. Speaking of dystopia, Kara covered the release of Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.” Auletta posits that Google (GOOG) is more Spock than Kirk and lacks important emotional intelligence. He made similar accusations about another subject of his recent works: Microsoft (MSFT). Insert sarcastic gasp here. Kara rounded out the week with a flight aboard the airship “Broadband,” aka Virgin America. It seems as though Facebook is everywhere these days, and on this day in particular, Facebook was just a few rows behind her in the person of a PR guy from the company. The moral is that maybe the greatest thing about that speedy in-flight Internet is farming out the awkward seatmate talk to your email inbox. Kara did get an invitation to Facebook’s Washington, D.C., offices out of the deal.

Digital Daily opened the week with an invasion of droids. No, John wasn’t stuck in front of an Xbox playing Terminator; he was covering the release of the first 100,000 units of Motorola’s (MOT) newest iPhone competitor. John also covered Apple’s (AAPL) opening of a “significant store” in New York this week, which may shed light on the company’s future retail strategy. John sees potential for the newest store to serve as jai-alai palace, should the whole iPhone thing not work out. And just in case Kara’s story about Google’s lack of feeling wasn’t frightening enough, John brought us a look into the search giant’s designs on the software space occupied by Microsoft Office. While Google claims to have no plans for domination of office productivity, it sure seems like it would like to paint the whole cloud Chrome.

Peter gave us the cold hard facts about the projected costs of the coming AOL spinoff, as he began the week in somber tone. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AOL estimates losses will run to nearly $200 million and end employment for up to 1,000 people. Nothing gets Peter up from that kind of low quite like a good session with “The Office,” and this week’s episode was just too good to pass up. The team at Dunder Mifflin did a little Wall Street Journal paywall pole-vault right on screen. Commentary on recent “Murdochian” events or not, Peter thinks it’s just good TV. MediaMemo covered the pending AOL spinoff from the other end this week and addressed the biggest problem in the room head on: AOL is going to enter a space it hasn’t filled since the days when the sound of “you’ve got mail” meant you were high tech. Google runs the yard now, which will make it harder for AOL’s old dog to play with the comparatively young pups.

Most people think bigger is better, but in the strange world of tech columnists, small reigns supreme. Walt’s Personal Technology column this week covered three new laptops with some very sleek features to please the holiday consumer. New offerings from Toshiba, HP (HPQ) and Lenovo came under the Mossberg microscope, and all were pronounced impressive, if a bit pricy. Walt’s semifavorite is the Lenovo, but his preference for the slim, light design admittedly came at the heavy expense of limited battery life. The trip to Mossberg’s Mailbox this week yielded answers on pressing questions from potential Motorola Droid owners, a person hoping to make the move from a Palm (PALM) PDA to an iPhone, and from an older computer user thinking about making the switch to Apple’s new bigger-screened iMac. Over at The Mossberg Solution, Katie reviewed the new BlackBerry Bold from Research in Motion (RIM), which seemed to have 10 percent more features and a similar reduction in size. The newest model wasn’t quite as Bold as its predecessors, Katie found. Many features originally reserved for this higher-end model have been passed down to the rest of the product range. Her advice: have a look at the Tour or Curve 8900 before going Bold.

Tune in next week to get the 30,000-foot view on the wide world of tech from the road-ready AllThingsD team. Let’s hope we can get Wi-Fi on that flight too.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091114/weekend-update-11-14-09-keeping-your-heads-and-data-in-the-cloud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091113/flying-the-digitally-friendly-skies-gogo-google-and-the-facebook-pr-guy-in-17d/ http://allthingsd.com/20091113/flying-the-digitally-friendly-skies-gogo-google-and-the-facebook-pr-guy-in-17d/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:11:20 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=20597

So, BoomTown–who cannot be unplugged from the matrix for very long without breaking into a cold sweat–was pretty excited to have free Wi-Fi on my Virgin America flight to Washington, D.C., early this morning.

The service from Gogo Inflight Internet is free since earlier this week until Jan. 15, courtesy of Google (GOOG), on Virgin, as well as at 47 airports. It usually costs anywhere from $6 to $13.

Like the search giant, other Web companies–presumably wanting to goose usage and, more to the point, their brands–have also leaped in.

Delta has a promotion with eBay (EBAY) on several hundred planes for a week around Thanksgiving, and Yahoo (YHOO) is footing the bill for anyone using computers or smartphones in Times Square in New York for one year.

Pretty much what the government and big cable and wireless companies should be doing, but let’s not look a digital gift horse in the mouth.

So far on the flight, the Internet has been pretty solid, although video plays even slower than my Comcast (CMCSA) connection at home.

Also, electricity on the flight has been in and out; when it doesn’t work, it pretty much negates Internet use on a long flight.

But more interesting, as most who use the Web in the air seem to feel, is the ability to make a lot of online connections, including with people on the same plane.

While I was no fan of the goofy seat-to-seat connections offered on some airlines, I did get an email from a Facebook public relations guy sitting in the row behind me on the same flight asking if I wanted to meet the social networking site’s DC staff.

Without ever seeing him I now have a meeting on Monday with them, so–apparently–mission accomplished!

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091113/flying-the-digitally-friendly-skies-gogo-google-and-the-facebook-pr-guy-in-17d/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080619/internet-a-gogo-airlines-to-offer-in-flight-access/ http://allthingsd.com/20080619/internet-a-gogo-airlines-to-offer-in-flight-access/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:01:00 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080619/internet-a-gogo-airlines-to-offer-in-flight-access/ Attention, laptop-toting U.S. airline passengers! You are either about to become much more productive and happy, or to lose one of your last refuges from the digital deluge that afflicts your life.

Beginning this summer, as soon as next month, wireless Internet access will arrive in the passenger cabins of some commercial U.S. airliners.

On these Internet-equipped planes, any passenger with a Wi-Fi enabled laptop — or a cellphone with Wi-Fi — will be able to do almost everything he or she could do online at home or at the office. That includes surfing the Web, using email, having instant-messenger text chats, downloading and uploading files, and streaming video and audio.

In fact, I did all these things a few days ago on a test flight using the new system, called Gogo. During the flight from San Francisco to Denver, on a small test jet, I could operate online as if I were sitting at my desk, or in a Starbucks. I used Dell (DELL) and Apple (AAPL) laptops, a BlackBerry (RIMM), a Windows Mobile phone and an iPhone to perform all the most common online tasks, while soaring over majestic mountains and glorious national parks.

I sent and received emails on Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook and Apple Mail, including messages with hefty attachments. I conducted IM chats on AOL (TWX) Instant Messenger and Google (GOOG) Talk. Using all the major Web browsers, I called up dozens of Web sites, and watched video clips on Hulu and YouTube. I downloaded photos, songs, PDF files and Microsoft Office documents. I used all the Internet functions on the iPhone, and on the Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phone.

One important caveat: Gogo is a data-only system. It doesn’t allow phone calls and will block all services that allow voice conversations to be made over the Internet.

Gogo will launch on three American Airlines (AMR) routes, likely in July. The first planes to use it will be American’s 15 Boeing 767s flying between New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Later in the year, Gogo will be available on all of Virgin America’s small number of routes, and possibly additional American routes, if the first deployment works well. It’s supplied to the airlines by a Denver-based company called Aircell, which says it is in negotiations to offer the Gogo service on several other major U.S. airlines by next year.

The Gogo service will cost a flat fee of $12.95 for flights of three hours or longer, and $9.95 for shorter trips. You log into Gogo as you would any commercial Internet service, registering on a special Web page. Aircell plans to allow advance sign-up, so you’d only have to enter an ID and password on the plane. No add-on software, hardware or cables are required.

A few Web functions will be offered free from Gogo, including access to the American Airlines Web site, to Frommer’s online travel guides and to a limited selection of articles from The Wall Street Journal.

Gogo isn’t the first in-plane Internet service. A few years ago, Lufthansa (LHA.MU) offered a satellite-based service from Boeing (BA), mainly on over-ocean flights, but it was canceled.

The service operates at respectable, if not blazing, speeds — similar to what you’d get on a cellular broadband service or a slow home DSL line. On my test flight, download speeds varied from 266 kilobits per second to about 1.4 megabits per second, with the most typical speeds hovering between 500 and 600 kbps. Upload speeds were between 250 and 300 kbps. I found that most of the tasks I tested, except for streaming video, felt smooth and normal.

Speeds could degrade on a large plane with scores of people online simultaneously. But Aircell claims it has the technology to make my experience representative for anyone doing common tasks, such as Web surfing and email. During my test flight, eight laptops and six Wi-Fi-enabled smart phones were using the system simultaneously. All registered decent speeds, except for a couple of minutes when the plane was crossing between the zones controlled by the company’s ground-based towers.

Aircell gets Internet access to the planes through a network of 92 towers scattered across North America. These essentially are cellphone towers, carrying a high-speed cellphone data signal, except that the Aircell antennas point up, into the sky. A receiver on the underside of the aircraft picks up the signal, which is then distributed through the plane via Wi-Fi.

The companies say Gogo is safe and won’t interfere with the plane’s operation. It is government-approved, and pilots can shut the system off should they deem it necessary.

Gogo has some limitations. The service plans to allocate its capacity so that low-bandwidth activities like Web surfing and email take priority over high-bandwidth ones like streaming video. That means you may find video to be slow and halting.

And Gogo is a North American, land-based service only. It won’t work over the oceans and, for now, it won’t work on other continents.

But for U.S. travelers who want to stay connected in the air, Gogo does the job.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080619/internet-a-gogo-airlines-to-offer-in-flight-access/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070914/andy-jordan-on-a-plane-instant-messaging-much-much-worse-than-snakes/ http://allthingsd.com/20070914/andy-jordan-on-a-plane-instant-messaging-much-much-worse-than-snakes/#comments Fri, 14 Sep 2007 07:01:10 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070914/andy-jordan-on-a-plane-instant-messaging-much-much-worse-than-snakes/ Ok, here is my personal nightmare: Having a stranger sitting next to me on an airplane chattering endlessly throughout a flight, when all I want to do is read, watch a movie or sleep.

Now, horror of horrors, there is a service on Virgin America where passengers can do seat-to-seat chatting. WSJ.com’s Tech Diary video blogger Andy Jordan tries it out and finds most people really don’t want to be bothered, although that does not seem to stop some from bothering anyway.

Also a problem: the touchscreens irk the people in front of the chatter, what with all the poking (which is icky enough on Facebook).

See for yourself:

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