Masabi » Mobile

VACANCY: Java Server Developer – Develop something amazing and Useful

Ben Whitaker — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:16:51 +0000

Masabi are currently on the lookout for a server developer to join our team working from our London South Bank office.

Firstly: NO AGENCIES OR RECRUITERS! We are interested in pro-active candidates who are motivated enough to find us by themselves.

DEVELOP SOMETHING AMAZING AND USEFUL
Ending the pain of queues at Railway stations, Masabi is an award winning and established leader in mobile applications, focussing on mobile transport ticketing – turning anyone’s phone into a train ticket and ticket vending machine, eliminating queues and relieving stress for passengers everywhere.

See the 1 minute video below to get an idea about what we do. We’re working together with the industry giants The TrainLine and Atos Origin, giving the product the legs to get out into market.

Skills we look for in every candidate: passionate, clear thinking, flexible, confident working in small teams, fluent in English, and London-based, you’ll have a desire to be both critical and receptive to the input of other team members. Masabi offers the ideal candidates an exciting work environment with plenty of opportunity to excel in an exciting growing business solving a clear customer need with a working revenue share business model.

You must be a flexible JavaEE developer with experience using Spring, Hibernate, web services and creating interactive web front-ends, who is happy to work with various databases and webapp containers.

Of value, but not essential: an understanding of secure systems, clustering, automated testing (beyond unit tests!), experience in agile practices, working with remote teams from partner companies deploying products. Technologies you will be working with: Tomcat behind Apache, Weblogic, MySQL, Spring 2.5, Hibernate (via Spring extensions), Linux, proprietary SOAP APIs.

You will work alongside our existing server developer, as well as our tester and client developers and external customer teams.

Candidates selected for interview must have excellent English skills with the ability to think concisely and communicate clearly with others, which will be tested at interview.

About Masabi’s offices:

masabi offices

We work out of a funky loft office in a converted brick warehouse shared with some PR types, a couple of blocks south of the Tate Modern in Southwark. It has excellent transport links, sitting equidistant from London Bridge, Southwark and Borough stations in an area which is being redeveloped with some great lunching facilities, nice bars, world class modern art and a convenient river. Proximity to Borough Market is excellent news for gastronomes, if less good for their wallets. See http://www.masabi.com/find-us/

Again, please, NO AGENCIES! Really. We mean it.

If you’re confident you’re not an agency and are in fact the perfect candidate for us, please email us at jobs@masabi.com with a CV and covering letter, or phone Ben for a chat on 0207 981 9781.

Making Mobile Commerce Relevant for the Man on the Clapham Omnibus

Ben Whitaker — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:29:46 +0000

This is a re-print of an article we wrote for the new Mobile Money Exchange community forum set up by the GSMA

Making Mobile Commerce Relevant for the Man on the Clapham Omnibus

The unpleasant reality that we’ve learnt from 8 years working in mobile:

Just because you can do something with mobile technology

does not mean that users will adopt it;
does not mean that companies will promote it.

There has to be a compelling user benefit, or significant user pain to persuade somebody to try a new technology.
There also has to be a compelling business benefit, (preferably with a year-one breakeven these days) for the service to ever get the marketing and promotion it needs.

A surprisingly accurate quote from Douglas Adams sums this user adoption barrier up nicely:

everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

(acknowledgement to Faris Yakob for bringing this insightful quote to our attention at the Cellcom Conference in Israel)
This gem from Adams proved almost completely accurate with my own deep suspicion of blogging, twitter and facebook, compared with a colleague a few years younger who likes blogging and facebook but still rejects twitter as the work of the devil. Rather typically, neither of us has ever sent an MMS message or made a video call.

So, as a result of that:
An average mobile user uses voice and text messages.
An average business user uses voice, text, and email.

Newer technologies like Mobile TV, MMS, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Facebook are not mass-market user requirements outside of media land and the internet youth – so what can the mobile industry do to get the normal mobile user into using m-Commerce or more advanced phone features?

Normal people only try a new technology if the old way of doing it is painful enough to make them get over their fears and give something new a try. The trick is that it is exactly when the user is in pain that you must offer them the improved mobile service – they won’t bother to sign up later on the internet.

mock-up of the ideal location to advertise a new mobile service - next to a big queue, and at the point of most customer pain.

We are following this exact mantra with the Mobile Ticket Machine that we are building at the moment for some of the UK Railway companies. Late-running customers regularly miss their trains – queues are a frustrating pain point for them. It is in these painful queues that we display adverts to persuade normal people try using their phone to buy the ticket – and then use their phone as the ticket, never having to queue again. We make purchasing streamlined, without any usernames and passwords to get in the way, and use technologies like SMS fallback to ensure reliable access. Immediate servicing of the customer is the main requirement.

Our early trials in 2007 with Chiltern Railways on mobile ticket purchasing via credit card revealed a startling result – many of the mobile ticket trial users were not just middle-youth technophiles. Going against our stereotypes, we discovered they were older and more female, on average, than we expected and had never before use their phone for anything but voice and SMS. The potential benefit of avoiding queues in the future was enough to make them willing to try five new technical steps in one go:

They were sent a WAP push
They progressed to a WAP page
They downloaded and installed an application
They entered a Credit Card number into the application
Then used their phone as a ticket.

Staggering, really – these people had never had any motivation in the past to download ringtones, logos or games and certainly no desire to do Twitter updates. Note that the service didn’t target just smartphones – it was available on standard phones as well, because a service with mass-market appeal should be available to the entire mass market.

After trying a mobile application for the first time because of significant need, a user will have a lower barrier to trying new mobile technology for less critical things in the future. They have already faced their fears and learnt the tricky steps to download an app and make a mobile purchase.

A discussion of the business case (and the related business politics) for mobile rail ticketing is another article in itself. Suffice to say that the service has to have a measurable effect on Cap-ex and Op-ex for the Rail Operators, be acceptable to a multi-franchise ecosystem of seperate and competitive companies, and also enable a quick and cheap “soft rollout” launch to prove interest and benefits before significant hardware Cap-Ex commitment is incurred. This can be contrasted to the stalemate existing with the chicken-and-egg issues of NFC service rollout.

Mobile is not the mini-internet. It was essential that this particular project offer a mobile service, not just an extension of the internet. It offers a complimentary service to in-station ticket machines and staffed wi
ndows, which still account for well over 70% of rail ticket sales in the UK, whilst solving problems for the customer in a way that fits tightly to their existing habits. It was never expected to compete with the web, or service web customers when they were away from their PCs.

I think that many of the future mobile commerce success stories will involve providing more traditional self-service options in the physical world – certainly, mobile banking in the developing world is an established success in this mould. Cramming the internet experience onto the small screen may miss the point of mobile entirely.

NFC Roundup – 2009

Tom Godber — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:19:11 +0000

After many trials, NFC has been on the cusp of launching in Europe for some time now. It is regularly brought up in conjunction with mobile ticketing, which has been one of the key use cases always quoted for the Felica NFC system available in Japan for some years now.

The potential is huge, and at Masabi we greatly look forward to the day we can start using it for transport ticketing – but where do we stand, in late October 2009?

UK Operator Support

O2 last did an NFC trial in 2008, and almost exactly a year ago they stated at a Mobile Monday NFC event that it had gone so well they were looking to run another trial at some point in the future. We haven’t had that trial yet.

A mobile phone feature requires operator subsidy to gain traction, because no manufacturer will foot the bill for the electronics on their own. Therefore, the number of NFC-enabled handsets currently available from each UK operator tells us a lot about where NFC lies along the feature adoption curve:

O2 – 0
Vodafone – 0
Orange – 0
T-Mobile – 0
Three – 0

Carphone Warehouse, the UK’s biggest indepedent high street retailer, also currently sell no NFC-enabled handsets.

NFC-Capable Handsets

GSM handsets with NFC launched by handset manufacturers:

Nokia – 3 commercially available, first in 2007
Samsung – 1 named prototype in 2006, others hinted at
LG – 1 prototype
Sony-Ericsson – 0
Apple – 0
RIM – 0
Motorola – 0

NFC Predictions

Which year will NFC take off?

“NFC use will start to accelerate ” – predictions for 2008 (Nokia blog, Jan 2008)
“In the US, expect 2008 to be the year that NFC breaks out” (NFCNews, Dec 2007)
“2007 will be critical for NFC technology” (ABI Research, Apr 2007)
“The momentum behind NFC is growing rapidly.” (NFC Forum, Feb 2007)

How big will the market be?

“by 2012, some 292 million handsets — just over 20 percent of the global mobile handset market — will ship with built in NFC” (ABI Research, Apr 2007)
“Mobile phone based contactless payments will facilitate over $36 billion of worldwide consumer spending by 2011.” (Strategy Analytics, Oct 2006)

It’s easy to be cynical about 20% of handsets having NFC in 2012, as we start to roll into 2010 without any NFC handsets on sale – but once NFC handsets start shipping, how quickly could they be adopted?

Phone Feature Adoption Curve

In 2000 Sharp launched the world’s first camera phone, which was a bit of a novelty. By the end of 2003, 25-35% of handsets had some sort of camera on them. By 2007, M:Metrics stated that 75% of UK handsets and 51% of US handsets had cameras – 7 years after the first launch.

Arguably, cameras are a more obvious feature for a mobile handset than NFC.

The first handset commercially available outside Japan with integrated NFC was the Nokia 6131NFC, launched in 2007. At the end of 2009 we still have no operator subsidised NFC handsets, which suggests there is little chance of matching the camera adoption rate, with 25-35% at the end of next year.

From this quick comparison, we can assume that we are either still sitting before the start of the NFC adoption curve, or the NFC adoption curve is very much flatter than that of phone cameras – more like mobile TV, say.

Conclusion

When it comes, NFC has some great potential in niche markets like mobile ticketing. At Masabi, we’re greatly looking forward to it. But right now, as a company principally interested in mass-market technology, we’re not holding our breaths.

Ticketing via Local Webapps

Tom Godber — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:27:00 +0000

We’re finally able to show off some of the work we’ve been doing recently on local mobile webapps – interactive web pages which can be saved and run even when you’re offline.

Our mobile ticket sales app is now available as a local Java app for mass market handsets, and a local webapp for Android and iPhone – offering all the same functionality, security and slick branding:

What Is A Local Webapp?

With the latest HTML 5 and Google Gears APIs support on Android, iPhone and Palm Pre, you can provide a fast multi-screen interactive app with local storage (to store tickets you have purchased), which behaves like a native local app and is accessible even when the phone is offline. Here’s how to store the app for later use on an iPhone – reached by clicking on the ‘+’ icon in the footer:

Why Webapps?

Traditionally at Masabi we have always written local apps in Java, because they offer the best mass market user experience for the sort of ticketing and financial services we provide; it’s only with the advent of handsets with fast, HTML 5-capable browsers that we have been able to explore the webapp route. We plan to use local webapps for many of our iPhone and Android products for two core reasons:

With the proliferation of new platforms causing even more fragmentation in the mobile apps space, the Safari browser used on both platforms is actually the safest way to reduce fragmentation and streamline maintenance and development;
There are some big advantages to the unrestricted installation of a webapp via the web, especially if your business model is not compatible with the rules or revenue shares of the relevant App Store; it can be hard to justify to a customer the extra expense of a dedicated app when you cannot guarantee the app will ever be allowed on the store or device.

Fortunately, it is easy to take a local webapp and wrap it up as a native iPhone or Android app, so we can make all of the services available through the relevant App Stores as well if that is what the users want.

It is worth noting that at Masabi we are producing free mass market services which pay for themselves through transaction fees, so the App Store’s billing system isn’t an issue for us – your mileage may vary…

Does It Feel Like A Normal App?

Webapps can very successfully replicate the look and feel of native apps, with quick scrolling between screens, button styles and the like.
Below are screenshots of the user selecting an option from a list, and a date from the calendar:

These clearly follow the style and usability conventions of the built-in iPhone apps. With CSS targetted to the device through our DeployME server, we reskin the same application easily to adopt Android conventions and styling as well.

Global Messaging 2009 – Mobile Ticketing and Payments

Tom Godber — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:39:00 +0000

I’m just back from presenting at the excellent Global Messaging 2009 event in Westminster, on the subject of what makes a good mobile service in the context of mobile ticketing and payments:

Global Messaging 2009 – Mobile Ticketing and Payments

View more presentations from Tom Godber.

It covers some of our standard reference points, like the need for a mobile service to address a user pain point and actually perform better than the alternatives to be used. I think this really applies to selling train tickets from the handset, something that a pure deliver-only model fails to achieve.

Masabi at Global Messaging 2009

Tom Godber — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:20:00 +0000

I’ll be giving a talk on Secure Payment and Ticketing Applications at day 2 of Global Messaging Congress 2009 on Wednesday at the Queen Elizabeth centre in Westminster, so if you’re at the conference please come along, and I look forward to meeting you afterwards! I’ll post the slides up here as well, for anyone who is interested.

MoMo London Demo Night summary

Alex Anderson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:15:00 +0000

Last night Ben presented at Mobile Monday London’s demo night round the corner at IPC’s office behind the Tate Modern. Ben was presenting our mobile train ticketing solution, and it seemed to go down pretty well. Also there was a great roof terrace and free beer – almost enough to make me code a TouchWiz widget in Samsung’s Innovation Quest widget competition!

Our slides from the night:

Masabi – Rail Ticketing demo at MoMo London

View more presentations from Masabi.

Here’s a quick rundown of all of the presentations for those who couldn’t attend:

Vopium

Nice voip solution, fully integrates with phonebook and routes calls through multiple different channels. Smartphone-only, but if it’s seamless then it could work.

Peepr.TV

Webcam hosting service, allowing streaming to mobile. Can be adapted for premium webcams as well; doesn’t work on my SonyEricsson K660i.

0870.me

Finally, an *open* API for remapping 0870 phone numbers to cheaper alternatives.

Photofit

Fun iPhone app which lets you mix up the faces of your friends. Normally used by people in the pub; possible synergies with the Met.

Total Hotspots

Find wifi hotspots from your iPhone. Hopefully it will be possible for mass-market phones too at some point.

Audioboo

Audio blogging app for iPhone. I don’t have an iPhone, but apparently Brian Clough does.

Artilium

Presented an easy-to-integrate LBS platform

Proxama

Demonstrated an NFC wallet application for the Nokia 6212 (has any network picked this phone up?). Could also probably work on the Nokia 6131NFC. Trialled with Vodafone last year; mass uptake by 2013? Read Masabi’s thoughts on NFC here.

Ookl

A platform for interactive learning at museums, using mobile phones. Go try it at Kew Gardens or the National Maritime Museum.

Singtones

I really need to try Singtones, as apparently it can correct your Karaoke singing.

Corebridge

Corebridge have an integrated mobile/web CRM solution. Unfortunately their presentation was let down by the lack of signal in the building.

Spoonfed

A neat crowd-sourced location-based recommendations site for venues and events.

Masabi

We presented about selling train tickets on mobile using our pocket ticket machine. Read more here. Some screenshots of the app we actually demo’d:

Unfortunately many of the presentations were let down by a lack of mobile connectivity at the venue. Slightly surprising for a corporate building in central London; perhaps they should get some femto-cells in there? For the app developers, SMS failover has its uses!

I’m normally more self-effacing than this, but it wasn’t me presenting and it was nice to get some really positive feedback from our industry peers:

@edent: “Masabi get it right – open standard & works on low end phones. There’s a world outside of iPhone #MoMoLondon”

@fj: “masabi I love you, marry me. You get mobile. #momolondon”

@kaihendry: “Enjoying the Masabi presentation of buying rail tickets from the mobile. Now will it work on my Android G1? On the Web? #momolondon”

@gslondon: “Masabi demo of their rail ticket purchase system was impressive”

Jag from O2: “This was the best demo of the lot – and they were all very good I have to say, but this one really stood out in terms of being very well thought out and executed.”

Thanks, everyone!

Carnival of the Mobilists 177

Tom Godber — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:04:00 +0000

Carnival of the Mobilists 177 over at A Consuming Experience included my last post on Sony-Ericsson, thanks! As always the Carnival covers a whole range of great articles, check it out for the best in mobile writing.
Incidentally I met Improbulus, who runs A Consuming Experience, whilst screening entries for the Vodafone Clicks competition last week with Helen Keegan – a very interesting evening with a few great entries we will be hearing more from in the future.

Speaking at Train Communications 2009

Ben Whitaker — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:53:00 +0000

Another chance to meet up with Masabi, when we speak on the Thursday afternoon of Train Communications 2009, held at the Royal Horseguards Hotel, near Charing Cross in London on 11th June 2009.

http://www.traincomms2009.com/

(This conference used to be known as the Wifi on Trains conference.)

Among the presenters will be train companies from India, Japan, Taiwan, the US, the UK and across Europe, including Indian Railways, Department for Transport UK, Virgin Trains, Thalys, National Express Trains, Arriva, NTT, Japan Rail and Orange

Masabi will be talking about mobile ticketing, credit card transactions, and the infrastructuire issues and design approaches to mitigate those issues when rolling out robust distributed authentication systems in an operationally challenging environment, such as rail and bus.

If you want to schedule some time with Ben at the event, please drop him an SMS on +44 7788 895 894.

ITS Transport Standards Seminar – summary

Ben Whitaker — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Write up of the recent Intelligent Transport Systems‘ Seminar on Standards in UK Ticketing Wed 27th May 2009:

[ WARNING: The top third is mobile ticketing, the rest is more general transport stuff ]

Chair: Chris Queree, ATOC (Association of Train Operating Companies)

Speakers:

Ben Whitaker, Masabi

Andy Donelan, Virgin Trains

Grant Klein, Detica

Mark Cartwright, RTIG (Real Time Information Group)

Roger Slevin, DfT (Department for Transport)

Masabi got to speak first, and played a potentially unpopular opening card by pointing out the marked difference in Capital Expenditure between the expensive rollout of a smart-card system, and the much cheaper rolling out of a barcode ticket system.

Specifically, because of the fact that self-print and mobile delivered barcode tickets all have a human readable version of the ticket alongside the machine-readable barcode, means that in initial rollouts the vehicle guards can simply check the tickets visually, the same way they check existing paper tickets.

Occasional spot-checks of the e-tickets can be made by texting the manual ticket number to a central service, and a small number of shared scanners that guards or stations can use on rotation.

Permanent rollout of scanners and gates can then be staged for areas that see large volumes of e-ticketing, but completely avoided in those areas that only see a low frequency of e-tickets.

Smart-cards by comparison have no visual indications at all, and even the card owner cannot know what is on the card without a machine to interrogate the card. Any area that wishes to use smart card must be fully equipped with scanners before launching the service, meaning that the full capital expenditure must be comitted before the first users can start.

It was also pointed out that in London there is a significant financial penalty for people that refuse to use Oyster, with many fares being twice as expensive on a paper ticket. The proposed national ITSO smartcard system for rail tickets will almost certainly not have such a price difference (if any) to drive uptake.

We also haven’t got to the bottom of how a national rail smartcard journey would be purchased by the consumer – I think you would still need to buy on the web, or queue at a ticket machine at the station to configure your journey before collecting it onto the smartcard, which won’t reduce queues at all. (Oyster-style charging is not an option outside London.)

Masabi’s presentation then got into the main topic of the new RSP barcode standard for UK rail tickets on mobile and self-print, highlighting some of the enhancements that provide better security, robustness, and cross-sales opportunities than previous barcode standards, and encouraged operators and other ticket sales companies to find ways to exploit it more.

The 3rd party opportunities come from the fact that under this scheme you can freely give away the ticket scanning software and public security keys, so that Coffee Shops, Retailers and major attractions like Alton Towers can all integrate ticket scanning and validation into their EPOS (tills) and gates (as long as they have an off-the-shelf 2D barcode scanner), and be able to read/verify the new rail tickets and any cross-sale entitlements that are inside, such as your early morning coffee and bagel, bought at a preferential rate, or alternately your group purchase of a weekend getaway including a music gig entry in one ticket.

Masabi also showed off a bit of their mobile ticket sales product, and the opportunity for it to reduce rush-hour queues at stations, and reach out to users when they are most in pain and keen to try a new system, i.e. when the queues are long, or when the ticket machine is broken – that’s when a (non-geek) consumer will try a new way to purchase and travel.

(For people that haven’t heard of it yet – the Masabi Mobile Ticket Machine allows a customer to buy a ticket straight from the phone, using a credit card, and then get the ticket on the phone. They don’t need any sign up either, they can do it straight away, from the queue.)

Masabi Rail Ticketing ITS

View more presentations from Ben Whitaker.

There were a lot of questions from the floor, getting into the anti-copying and some of the low end (legacy) handset support issues that the new ticket standard addresses.

Then Andy Donelan from Virgin took the stand to tell everyone about Virgin Railways’ success with barcode ticketing, this time focussing on the printed barcodes, and their part in “driving down distribution costs”.

He said that consumers had been very keen on the new system, so the initial pilot has been rolled into full production use since September 2008 across all of their routes, taking over 4M in revenue, with over 1000 e-tickets sold per day.

For clarity – currently Virgin’s printed barcode tickets are only valid on advanced tickets on Virgin-only routes. Virgin are now in discussions with Train Operators such as Cross Country that they share routes with to agree to honour each-other’s barcode tickets too, so that these restrictions can start to lift, and more routes and fare combinations will be supported by the barcode format. (author’s note – paper barcode tickets and mobile barcode tickets share the same format and the same scanners, so every rollout of paper barcode paves the way for mobile too.)

He also revealed that as a long-distance route, their proportion of tickets sold on line was 35% – far higher than the national average of 12%, and they expected that to continue to grow.

Their strategy was to enable remote booking as much as possible to easily expand their sales capacity, as they can’t increase the number of ticket windows at their stations to cope with increasing demand.

One of the benefits Virgin found with the user-printed paper barcode ticket, (much larger than standard card rail tickets in the UK) is that they can contain the full travel terms and conditions of the ticket, which makes it easier for revenue enforcement officers (guards) to say that the traveller should know exactly what they are entitled to, in a way that the very small existing tickets do not. For our international readers, the “conditions of carriage” or rules of the railway ticket vary by route and ticket in an almost impossible to understand way, and there are large fines for mis-understanding the special restrictions known only to guards and railway experts.

In good news, they have had very few customer support requests about their e-tickets.

Interestingly, their initial trials of hand-held barcode scanners at Euston faced issues from dropping off-line when they went underground, so this would certainly be aided by the new off-line scanning capable ticket standard that has come in since they started their trial on previous on-line only tickets. It is exactly this sort of resilience that we have added to the standard to make it practical for real-world rollouts.

Andy agreed with the points that Ben had made, and saw mobile and self-print as complimentary, each suiting slightly different use cases, but both useful in servicing the travelling public, mobile especially suiting business travel travellers, self-print more for infrequent travellers.

The chair, Chris Querry summarised the morning talk by observing that barcode is growing of its own accord on it’s own commercial merits, but he could only see Smartcard gaining much ground through legislation and franchise commitments forcing it to happen. “People will vote with their feet, or more likely their barcodes about which e-ticketing platform to use.”

The next talk by Grant Klein from the hosts, Detica, covered some of the reporting and tracking requirements of e-ticketing, allowing more accurate data to be gathered about how many travellers there really are, and what their habits are. With paper tickets, just like cash transactions, all you can be sure of is the number of journeys, but you have no idea about how often those journeys are the same person – etickets instantly give you all of the benefits of loyalty cards in this respect for tracking users and building a history.

Chris Querree then gave a run-down of new public transport standards work in Europe, helping attendees to make sense of where each of the seperate, overlapping, and sometimes cooperating standards bodies is going.

From a ticketing point of view, I noted down the UIC 981-2 standard being used in Europe for long distance train tickets, CEN TC278 WG3 SG5 for ticketless travel, and security on self-print to follow up on later, but anyone else wanting to find the details on more standards work should get hold of Chris’s actual presentation.

Mark Cartwright from the Real Time Information Group (RTIG.org.uk) talkup us through the efforts to unify access methods for joining transport and journey information accross multiple sources and viewing platforms, to support web and physical signeage and querying, such as the in-bus shelter wait-time indicators, and the unified journey planner websites.

Roger Slevin then took the final speaking slot to fill us in on some of the work that DfT were involved in, mostly on the passenger information side, following on nicely from the RTIG talk.

Relevant standards covered in Mark and Roger’s talks were NeTEx (network and ticketing exchange protocol), DJPS (distributed journey planners), and IFOPT (with things like stop place models, alternate names for points of interest, where parking is etc). In the UK NaPTAN and NPTG are useful components too. With all of these people can model joined up transport much more effectively than ever before.

As a “how far have we got” statement, basically most of the South East of the UK now has a unified journey planner, and we should get in touch to find out more about it, or to gain access to the data.

There was some discussion about what shared standards there might be for exchanging this transport data, and the Google Transit Data format is gaining ground. Journeyweb in the UK may also be pushing a potential XML standard to get behind too, with EU-Spirit as a compromise against some competing European efforts, some of whom don’t seem to be as eager to work with other parties.

The closing remarks basically summed up pragmatism over idealism, and in the debate that followed there was only one lone voice bemoaning the lack of loyalty to the previously un-touchable ITSO smartcard programme, with most people seeming to be quite happy to look into faster, lighter, more open, and above all cheaper alternative standards for e-ticketing and data sharing, such as the PKI based barcode standard, and the more open XML based journey planning and transport information systems.

Please leave the queuing system here?