It’s A Jungle Out There!

Happy New Year and we hope 2012 is an IFEC improvement over 2011! While looking for an image to accompany this Hot Topic, we scoured our files and found the fitting graphic theme in our coverage for the Wall Drug story we did this past summer. Our team thought with increasing inflation, the European financial mess, US political indecision, the Middle East turmoil, and the predicted Mayan Apocalypse, the “Do Lunch or Be Lunch” seemed fitting. Hey, if we cant predict the future, we are happy to invent it!

This coming summer we will celebrate 20 years in this crazy business and we surely would not be here without our faithful readers. We thank you and, in turn, you should express your gratitude to our sponsors who bring IFExpress to your in-box each week. Please thank them by buying their products!

Last year, digEcor released the results of a passenger survey they conducted. “While the response was excellent,” said Adam Williams, digEcor Marketing Guru, “a lot has changed since then. We conducted all new research and have created a report that is completely free. It is titled ’2011 Passenger Survey, An analysis of IFE, Wi-Fi, Content and ancillary Revenue trends among passengers’. In return, we just ask that viewers subscribe to our monthly newsletter that provides additional information, articles, etc. You can read about the report and see a short YouTube video introducing it. There is also a link to access the report directly.” Adam went on, “Based on the strong positive response that we received from our 2010 survey results, we decided to update all of our findings as well as dive more into some of the hot trends like connectivity. Our goal is to provide useful information to the industry, so we tried to cover a good assortment of topics. I hope that there are some tidbits in the report that you can take back to your team and use to help form opinions and make decisions. Also in the coming weeks, I’ll post additional information and explanations to our blog – Airline Solutions Insider.”

Lastly, we have been watching the phenomenal increase in passenger hand held PEDs that seem to be the go-to device for airline travellers… it entertains, it communicates, it stores, and it is becoming part of the IFEC landscape. So be it, which explains why we have been doing a bit of research on the app market in the last 6 months. Presently, our hard drive has over 1300 apps. Since, for some odd reason, we have been looking (and found) sources many of which are free or inexpensive. We thought we would at least share them with you each week. Presently we are concentrating on iOS and Android but we are open to suggestions for the future. We will look for aviation and IFEC apps, but more likely we will find good ones that entertain and increase productivity. Of course we will provide a link for downloads… at least some of the better ones. Stay Tuned and remember, “Eat Lunch or Be Lunch”!