I’ll be attending Dublin Airport Hackathon in DCU Alpha on Friday 15th and Sunday 17th of April.
http://dublinairport-hackathon.com/
As of now the software developer spots are sold out but there are some non-tech, maker and visitor tickets remaining. I’m there as a “non-tech”, not trying to doing any hacking myself!
There are a lot of interesting APIs, devices and data sources from partners and sponsors (Dublin Airport included). Some of the stuff that is of particular interest to me includes:
- Flight info – hoping this includes both schedule and live departures/arrivals.
- Beacons – want to get a handle on the practical implications, there’s a lot of hype around location services that can be difficult to parse or put in a commercial context.
- Retail Product Offerings – not clear what this means, but something like a product catalog / content for airport shopping would be very relevant to what I’m working on at the moment.
- Queuing data and dwell times – I can think of a lot of utility to be gained from this, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be customer facing apps.
- Terminal Assets / IoT – in my view the future for IoT (Internet of Things) is in industry and logistics. I’m very skeptical about the consumer / household side of it. (I’m probably never going to buy an internet enabled toaster or lightbulb.)
The challenges are broad but well stated also. The “passenger experience” goal is very important to the industry as a whole, even companies outside the airport understand that the airport part is crucial to the whole journey. One related challenge for airports is that the customer (the passenger) has a relatively short time in the airport compared to the full journey, and their relationship is mostly with airlines, agencies, and loyalty programs – not airports. It’ll be interesting to see if any of the innovators take on customer engagement directly.
If you are attending and would like to meet at some point please get in touch.