Plane Conversations

Investment in travel applications continues. Social Flights continues to track the convergence of these technologies and demonstrate where we fit into the new travel paradigm. This article features Gidsy.com, the “activity-booker-meets-social-networking” site - claimed to be the AirBnB of travel. Notably they are location in Berlin (not the Valley), and their lead investor is none other than @AplusK.

screen shot from Gidsy.com

Venture capitalist tend to invest in businesses that they understand and businesses that they can influence.  Ashton Kutcher is well known for his influence in both old media and new media – but where is the connection between that and travel?…except that Ashton needs to travel to get to Berlin.  Perhaps herein lies the answer.

From  VentureVillage.

“What I love about Gidsy is that they are creating a movement and a strong, credible community of likeminded people,” said supporter Felix Petersen in an interview with VentureVillage. “It’s important that like-minded businesses and individuals in Berlin cross-invest and help each other out.”

On the other hand (from the same article)

Kutcher has invested in over 40 tech companies to date, some of which remain unnamed out of fear that his own publicity would overshadow the product itself. 

How important is access to information?

Access to locations and access to information about location is critical to both the success of the people who live there as well as the people who go there.  In this light, products like Gidsy take on new meaning and impact for communities and travelers.

Gidsy.com allows users to offer paid-for activities and courses to other members of the community, as well as full social networking integration. Initially launched for the Berlin area, Gidsy now covers Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco, with London to follow soon.  Gidsy’s business model (charging 10% of each transaction) differs from similar US services like SideTour in NY (which charges a higher 20%) and Vayable (available in six cities, charging a 15% fee).  How they will hold up against American competition is yet to be seen.

The Virtuous Circle

Basically, Gidsy allows people to book activities provided by real people.  After listening to a recent program of TrendPOV by Dr. Amy Vanderbilt and her guest Reinhold Behringer about Augmented Reality, Gidsy.com seems to create the underlying dataset to this next level of travel technology.  The ability to point your smartphone down a street and see what activities are happening is only an iPhone revision away. Proximity is a play on “location” and inherently invokes transportation. So it is easy to see that many applications and technologies are converging.

Back to Ashton Kutcher and travel

Airlines and airplanes are increasingly confined to major hub airports.  Because everything is scheduled and booked far in advance, there is relatively little richness to the data that would drive an augmented reality experience in an airport.  However, where schedules are fluid, and activities are localized, and people are being creative, new markets will inevitably emerge.

Not Trivial:

Social Flights provides the dataset and certification to publish flights out of smaller local airports with the flexibility of flying non-stop to other small airports.  Combined applications such as Gidsy, augmented reality, and Social Flights can open up a new world of travel opportunities.  Maybe the “Hollywood Augmented Reality” is not so far off the mark after all.

The Next Economic Paradigm is a very simple idea yet the overwhelming majority of people have absolutely no idea what we’re talking about.  The strangest part of this work is the knowledge that eventually this will become completely obvious to everyone and the transformation, from beginning to end, will take a very short period of time.

My greatest curiosity is imagining when and how this moment will arrive.

I recently saw the latest Star Trek re-boot where an old Dr. Spock encountered the exiled young Space Propulsions Engineer named Montgomery Scott who had been convicted of attempting a mash-up between warp drive and atomic particle transporting with the commander’s pet schnauzer – where the term “mash-up” was implied to be quite literal.

Um,…the dog wags the tail.

The epiphany came when the older Spock suggested that Scotty’s approach was backward.  Instead of assuming that Space was stationary and the spacecraft was moving, Scotty should assume that the Space is moving and the spacecraft is stationary.

In one fell swoop, all the calculations finally made sense.  A good theory became practical.  All those nasty side effects – like bringing the schnauzer atoms back together – were no longer a problem.  Lo and behold, the Federation was saved.

Of course everyone knows what warp drive is and what transporters do, yet the science involved with their actual construction of these devices remains intensely complex.  The same can be said for our financial system. Everyone knows how to buy a can of tuna fish, but the actual formulation of that transaction is intensely complex.

We have developed a vast set of processes, techniques, and infrastructure around the basic idea that markets are dynamic.  Everyone knows that markets change and move and they behave in many strange ways in response to price inputs, scarcity, surplus, legislation and ideology.

Meanwhile, people are defined by what they consume – like red dots and blue dots on a political district chart, demographic data points, owner/renter, winner/loser, jobbed /not jobbed, young /old, first class/coach, etc.

And that is just the way it is … and the only way it can be.

Now suppose Dr. Spock was to beam down and suggest that markets are static and people are dynamic.  Imagine everyone staring at the can of tuna just sitting there, lonely, dusty and static, doing absolutely nothing except being a can of tuna on a stationary shelf, in an inanimate “market”.

The epiphany is that human knowledge assets are completely and irrevocably tangible in every way, shape, and form. Humans allocate and trade social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital with each other in infinite ways, sometimes resulting in a can of tuna in a market.

All knowledge assets are tangible in the right exchange system.

I wonder what they will call it?

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