Boston has a pretty well-known cluster of tech companies—young and old—that are focused on aspects of travel like booking flights and hotels. Kayak, TripAdvisor, and ITA Software (now part of Google), just to name a few, fit that mold. But there’s another area player that’s helping customers to experience a city once they get there, via an interesting marketing proposition.

That would be Boston-based Smart Destinations, which is looking to provide a Disney World-esque experience to hitting tourist and historical sites in 12 cities such as Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. It’s not a new idea, as you’ll see, but it has a modern twist.

For Boston, adult travelers can buy a three-day “Go Card” from Smart Destinations for $109, and gain admission to more than 70 attractions, like the New England Aquarium, Salem Witch Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, and even Cape Cod activities like whale watching. That price can be adjusted in wintertime (when people don’t want to be out on a boat), and, naturally, a kids’ Go Card costs less. The card also enables users to skip lines at tourist attractions, says CEO and founder Kevin McLaughlin. That, and the one-stop-shopping aspect give it the amusement park pass feel.

“It makes it really easy for families to go to big cities,” he says.

McLaughlin recognizes that not every customer may be looking for a 72-hour-straight, nonstop tourist-attraction-hopping vacation, though. Smart Destinations also offers a Go Select pass, with which consumers can pick certain spots they’d like to see. For each attraction they add to the pass, the amount of the discount at each individual spot grows.

McLaughlin started the company with travel industry veteran Cecilia Dahl in 2003. The inspiration came from a Paris tourist service, which sells a card giving visitors access to all of the city’s museums. This is McLaughlin’s sixth tech startup. His past ventures include Delphi Internet (acquired by News Corporation), Netspoke (acquired by Premiere Conferencing), and exchange.com (acquired by Amazon). Smart Destinations is now up to around 32 employees, and has raised three rounds of funding from investors such as North Hill Ventures.

Smart Destinations is now making a bigger push into the mobile sphere, says McLaughlin.The company started by selling physical cards with a smart chip through its website. Consumers can get still get that card via snail mail or participating kiosks in their destination cities, or they can access it via their mobile phones. Starting first quarter of this year, consumers can also create, purchase, and customize the Go Select pass right from their phones, adding tourist destinations and racking up discounts as they make their way through a city. A small … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

While we are remembering Ken, I couldn’t help sending this picture of a poster that appeared in my office one Monday morning about 30 years ago that illustrated Ken’s sense of humor that most people never saw (see photo at bottom of this post).

This is something we shared, along with the concern about wanting to have beautiful computers and cabling. Unfortunately, I don’t have the text on the back of the poster that listed 20 reasons for the messy cables—e.g., “engineering said ‘marketing made me do it,’” and “we don’t ever want a customer to say that our cables are too short.”

Ken loved to work on the cabling and power supply problems for the DEC computers, a problem he and most every other company has never solved. He delivered a lot of the crisply burned out power supplies that customers sent him to my office.

Cabling has only gotten worse.

However, as a Ford board member, he claimed that he was able to get them to have a beautiful engine compartment and cabling (after he became a board member).

There are other things to recall as well. There’s the story of him wanting to redesign the famous, large, Yellow Ethernet cable just as we were to announce it!

I tend to remember all the humor and moments of irony that we shared while building computers at DEC.

Personally, I believe one of his longest living legacies will be the founding of The Computer (History) Museum(s) that started in Maynard, moved to Marlboro, then Boston for 15 years, and has lived in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years.

.

[Editor's note: The author spent 23 years at Digital Equipment Corporation as Vice President of Research and Development, where he was responsible for Digital's products.]

Comments (10) | Reprints | Share:          

“I’m the only person in location who’s happy today.”

That was Seth Priebatsch last Thursday. It was the morning after Facebook announced its new feature, Facebook Places, that lets people “check in” using their iPhone or iPad (or location-aware laptop) and share their location with their social network. The general consensus among tech observers is that location-based mobile startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Booyah, and SCVNGR all have some adjustments to make, now that the 500-pound gorilla (with 500 million users) has put its foot down in their territory.

Priebatsch, 21, is the founder and head of Cambridge, MA-based SCVNGR, one of the darlings of the Boston mobile scene. So why is he happy? Because, he says, his company is based around “challenges” and “being the game layer on top of the world,” not around check-ins per se—meaning just a social network plus location. “Come on, Facebook was going to own that,” he says. “And now they do.”

A little background is in order here. SCVNGR started in 2008 out of DreamIT Ventures, the Philadelphia-based incubator and fund, as a text-message-based platform that corporations, associations, and nonprofits could use to set up interactive scavenger hunts and other on-site activities. The startup has since raised a couple rounds of venture funding from the likes of Highland Capital Partners, Google Ventures, and Bantam Group. It has also gone from five employees to about 60 in the past 15 months.

Paralleling the rise of Foursquare and other mobile check-in and rewards services, SCVNGR has evolved into a multi-pronged business that includes a relatively recent consumer-facing game, in which people can do challenges (some goofy, some not) at different locales. Consumers earn points for commenting, posting photos, or checking in with friends. They can also create their own challenges for others to do.

The company is also about to roll out a new online platform for small businesses to build rewards programs—players will be able to earn points and redeem them for things like a free coffee or burrito from local shops. The program will start with about 60 businesses in Boston, and then will look to expand to places like Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. “It’s insanely powerful for local businesses, but super easy to implement,” Priebatsch says.

But SCVNGR’s main revenues come from conventions, events, and tours that sign up … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

I came across a nice Isaac Asimov quote this week: “No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”

The copyright dispute that went public this week between the UK’s National Portrait Gallery and the Wikimedia Commons is lodged firmly in the world as it is. Under UK law, it seems pretty clear that the 3,000-plus high-resolution images that a Wikimedia administrator copied from the museum’s website and uploaded to the Commons are copyrighted by the museum and are not, as the Wikimedia Foundation argues, in the public domain.

But the case is making waves in the blogosphere because it’s also about the world as it will be. Digital technology is making it possible to share near-perfect copies of priceless paintings and other cultural artifacts with anyone, anywhere, instantly. And because the cost of this sharing is now practically zero, many people now believe the information itself should also be free.

And perhaps it should. But unless we figure out a reasonable way to support the institutions that spend lots of money to make these images—namely, museums—very little of this material may actually be available for sharing in the future.

Free-culture activists are applauding Wikimedia for refusing to delete the disputed images, but this isn’t a simple Robin Hood story. If the Wikimedia Foundation prevails and gets to keep the images, it could lead to an overall reduction in sharing. Don’t get me wrong—I’m a public domain maniac. I’d love to see as much of the world’s heritage digitized and freely shared as institutions can manage. But what I fear is that the episode will prompt the National Portrait Gallery and other museums to either slow digitization efforts or place greater restrictions on access to their digital collections in the future—or both.

Let me back up and explain the Wikimedia case. The Wikimedia Commons is a public file repository maintained by Wikimedia Foundation, the same non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. (Most of the images you see alongside Wikipedia articles are stored in the Wikimedia Commons.) In March, a volunteer Wikimedia administrator named Derrick Coetzee copied 3,300 high-resolution images from the National Portrait Gallery’s online database, some of them as as large as 2400 x 3200 pixels, or about 8 megapixels. He then uploaded all of the images to the Wikimedia Commons, where, for the moment, you can view them at your leisure—just be ready for lots of lace and powdered wigs.

Coetzee, a U.S. citizen, hasn’t spoken out about the case, so it isn’t clear whether he was merely trying to make it easier for others to see the portraits, or whether he was also hoping to goad the National Portrait Gallery into a confrontation. But that was certainly the effect. In April, the gallery’s solicitors asked the Wikimedia Foundation to remove the images. It refused, for reasons I’ll get into momentarily. On July 10, the solicitors, Farrer & Co. of London, turned to Coetzee himself, sending him a letter (which he promptly posted on the Wikimedia Commons) threatening to seek injunctions and damages unless Coatzee agrees to remove the images, delete all of his copies, and generally keep off the Gallery’s digital lawn.

The letter gave Coetzee until July 20 to comply. As of this writing, the images are still online, so it’s safe to assume Coetzee and the Wikimedia Foundation are digging in their heels. He posted an update saying he’s being represented in the case by Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The main question in the dispute is not about the portraits themselves, most of which were painted more than 100 years ago and are indisputably in the public domain. Rather, it’s about who owns the digital images. Are they copyrighted by the National Portrait Gallery, which went to the expense of hiring professional photographers to document the original paintings, and should therefore (the solicitors argue) have the right to control their distribution and collect licensing fees from anyone who reproduces them? Or are they in the public domain and therefore … Next Page »

Comments (16) | Reprints | Share:          

Paul Allen just got a new addition to his Flying Heritage Collection of vintage aircraft. Yesterday, the Paine Field facility in Everett, WA, held a media event in which the museum hoisted a full-scale replica of SpaceShipOne to the ceiling. Just thought Xconomy readers would be interested to see these photos (courtesy of Jennifer Bragg and Adrian Hunt).

SpaceShipOne was funded by Allen and received the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 as the first low-cost, civilian, manned spacecraft launched into suborbital flight (to an altitude of around 100 kilometers). The craft, and its replica, were built by Mojave Aerospace Ventures and Scaled Composites. The original ship is on display at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

Back in August, Luke took a tour of the Everett hangar facility, which opened to the public last June. It looks like the SpaceShipOne replica will feel right at home, as it is placed near the collection’s ME-163, the world’s first operational rocket-propelled aircraft—an inspiration to the design team of SpaceShipOne.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

You don’t have to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to appreciate its amazing array of paintings, prints, sculptures, and artifacts: thanks to an aggressive digital-capture effort, the MFA has the largest image database of any art museum in the world, all freely browsable on the Web. And now, you can even carry a mini-masterpiece with you on your cell phone. This week MFA became the first U.S. art museum to allow users to download iconic paintings from its collection, such as Monet’s “Water Lilies,” for use as wallpaper on their mobile-phone screens.

Single-image downloads, available at the new mobile website http://mobile.mfa.org, cost $1.99, the museum announced Wednesday. For $4.99, dedicated art aficionados can subscribe to a rotating selection of six new wallpapers each month. But the MFA isn’t really in it for the money. The wallpapers are part of a strategy to broaden the public’s access to museum’s collection and help people develop a more personal relationship to the art there, says Kim French, the MFA’s deputy director of communications.

“Our interest is in making art a part of people’s everyday lives, not just something they experience once a year when they walk into a museum,” French says. “And not just with their phones, but with the website. Once we built our database and put it on the Web, we began to look for ways to help personalize the experience.”

The “MFA Mobile” campaign is a collaboration with Boston advertising agency Hill Holliday, whose interactive marketing division also helped the museum launch “microsites” focusing on its recent smash-hit Edward Hopper exhibit and its upcoming Napoleon exhibit.

“MFA has been very forward thinking in seeing the mobile channel as a viable channel for promoting art,” says Thi Linh Wernau, a managing supervisor for Hill Holliday’s digital division. In addition to the wallpapers, the company helped MFA set up a mobile “short code,” MYMFA (69632), where cell-phone users can request art, sign up for alerts about events at the museum and, in the future, obtain tickets to special events. Text “fog” to 69632, for example, and the museum will send back a copy of “The Fog Warning,” the museum’s most famous Winslow Homer painting.

If the cell-phone screen is a bit small for your taste, there are plenty of other ways to experience the MFA’s digital reproductions. For example, the museum has licensed some of its paintings to GalleryPlayer, a Seattle company that publishes fine-art content for high-definition displays; one offering is a DVD collection of 20 Claude Monet paintings owned by MFA, including “Water Lilies.” GalleryPlayer also produced a DVD based on the Hopper exhibit (I can recommend it personally; it’s available through the MFA’s online gift shop).

“We are continuing to explore all the things we can do with the digital assets we have available,” says French, who also points to the museum’s podcasts and e-cards and the customized tour suggestions available at the MyMFA section of the museum website.

At the same time, the museum is improving facilities for actual visitors. Excavation is underway for the new Norman Foster-designed American Wing, and the museum has started work on revamped entrances on both the Huntington Avenue and Fenway sides of the complex. The projects, scheduled for completion in 2010, will increase the museum’s exhibition space by 28 percent.

Comments | Reprints | Share: