Airlines won't mandate online check-in

Most airlines have extended their services online to provide passengers added ease and accessibility. However, these carriers have no plans to remove traditional service channels, preferring to offer Web-based services as an additional channel for customers.

ZDNet Asia spoke with three airlines--AirAsia, British Airways and Singapore Airlines--all of which run portals that offer their passengers a range of online services, including flight reservation and Internet check-in. Passengers can also choose their seats and pre-order meals for their flights via the portal.

However, these carriers said they have no plans to make online check-in a compulsory procedure for travel, a move that was recently announced by a European budget airline.

RyanAir last month said it will remove all of its check-in counters from 146 airports and make Internet check-in compulsory for its passengers. RyanAir customers will also need to print their own boarding pass online, or face a US$64.50 fee if they fail to do so. In addition, passengers will have to fork out about US$8 for the online check-in service.

The three airlines said they will continue to operate physical check-in desks at airports, where online check-in will remain as an additional option for passengers. This, the carriers said, offers their passengers added "flexibility" and convenience.

According to a British Airways spokesperson, online services give passengers complete control of their flight details and provide "speedy" progress through airport procedures.

Nicholas Ionides, vice president of public affairs at Singapore Airlines, said online services facilitate shorter queues and faster counter check-ins at the airport.

Ionides explained in an e-mail interview that passengers with self-printed boarding passes will have to get these documents verified, and drop off their luggage, at designated counters in the airport. This reduces the processing time, compared to physical check-in counters, he added.

A spokesperson from AirAsia's communications department, said in an e-mail: "We have always used technology to grow our business across all fronts. It has enabled us to offer cutting-edge products, and to continue to offer quality service to our constantly expanding passenger base."

The spokesperson added that over 80 percent of their flights are booked via the Internet. The mobile platform has also allowed AirAsia to disseminate information to its customers, allowing passengers to receive these updates via their handheld devices, he said.

RyanAir did not respond to ZDNet Asia's queries at press time.

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Software liability law could divide open source

The world of open source development could be divided if the European Commission (EC) succeeds in passing a law extending consumer protection rules to software, according to experts.
The EC proposes software companies be held liable in the European Union (EU) for the security and efficacy of their products.
David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT Research at Ovum, thinks this may lead to a situation boosting current open source vendors' business models, but making it more difficult for independent developers to thrive.
The EC proposal is likely to make vendors force customers into support and maintenance agreements upon each purchase, in order to help the former fulfill warranty obligations, said Mitchell.
This is already in line with the business models of current open source vendors such as Red Hat and Canonical, which sell support services. On the other hand, the "garage open source model" of independent developers who do not have the scale to guarantee their products at that level, will likely suffer, Mitchell said in an interview with ZDNet Asia.
Bryan Tan, director at Keystone Law Corporation, had predicted in an earlier blog post the "caving in" of open source software due to similar worries over liability on the parts of independent developers.
"Gone are the days where software could be written in a garage by two guys," Tan wrote.
Tan also told ZDNet Asia the proposed law would likely inflate prices for consumers outside the EU, as well--including the Asia-Pacific region, as a result of the vendors' need to provide insurance. Furthermore, the "death" of some smaller vendors would lead to increased prices as well from lack of competition, he added.
While the EC has said the proposal is in the interest of consumers, Ovum's Mitchell thinks there will be a "huge amount of market uncertainty" created, on the other hand.
"Customers will find that their existing support and maintenance agreements are now ambiguous, or in contradiction with any new legislation," he said. Businesses would also have to undertake longer testing cycles, resulting in project delays, Mitchell added.
Realistically, liability will be hard to pinpoint, because of the inter-dependency between hardware and software, Mitchell noted. The failure of a piece of software could be blamed on another installed software or hardware portion.
"[The legislation] promises to be a lawyer's dream [come true] but not to deliver any tangible benefit for the customers," he said.
However, Stanley Lai, partner at Allen & Gledhill, thinks consumers will benefit. While he agrees that software prices will likely go up, "it remains to be seen whether consumers will consider that the price to be paid in return for quality assurance is an adverse effect".
Lai also said it is "premature and over-simplistic" to predict the demise of open source software. He said with code open and more easily-corrected--the oft-quoted "many eyeballs" effect--users and consumers of open source software may be more likely to get errors fixed through the community and less likely to pursue direct recourse to liability under the proposed legislation.

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Cisco enters rack-mount server market

Cisco is to move into the rack-mount server business as part of its drive towards what it calls 'unified computing'.
Unified computing, says the company, involves combining network, compute and virtualization resources into a single system. Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) C-series rack-mount servers, announced on Wednesday, add a new element to a portfolio that already includes UCS blade servers.
Like the UCS blade servers, which were announced in March, the C-series rack-mount servers are based on Intel's Xeon 5500 Nehalem chips.
Cisco's UCS range is the company's first foray into the server hardware business. The company is better known for its networking products.
Also last week, Cisco announced two new IT individual certifications for customers and channel partners: Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Design Specialist and the Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Support Specialist.
The certifications cover skills such as storage networking, data center networking infrastructure, data center application services and virtualization.
Cisco's UCS C-series rack-mount servers will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.

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Bing off to solid start, but not that good

Microsoft's new Bing search engine has received positive reviews in its first week on the planet, but did that early buzz translate into traffic?
A report from Statcounter picked up by TechCrunch suggested that Bing's debut was successful enough to eclipse Yahoo Search during its first week, but subsequent analysis from Search Engine Land as well as data from CNET's network of sites suggests otherwise.
Statcounter, a Web traffic tracking company, reported that as of Thursday, Jun. 4, Bing accounted for 16.28 percent of the U.S. search market, surpassing Yahoo's 10.22 percent just days after going live on Monday. Worldwide, Bing's advantage was said to be slimmer (5.62 percent to Yahoo's 5.13 percent), but that was enough for Statcounter to proclaim "Bing overtakes Yahoo!"
However, it's not quite that simple. Statcounter's data is "based on aggregate data collected by Statcounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion page views per month collected from across the Statcounter network of more than 3 million Web sites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication", according to the company.
Therefore, it will be interesting to see if those numbers change next week. Search Engine Land checked in with Comscore, Nielsen, and Hitwise, and found that over the past week in the United States, Yahoo Search did about three times more traffic than Bing, roughly the same level where it was the week before when Microsoft-branded search consisted of Live Search and MSN Search.
Nielsen figures show that there was indeed a surge in interest among U.S. Web surfers related to Bing on Jun. 1, the first day it went live. But that's not all that surprising given natural curiosity surrounding something new and shiny, and Bing's surge appeared to neatly replace the corresponding drop-off in traffic to Live Search and MSN Search.
CNET data suggests a similar story. For the first four days that Bing was live, the new search engine accounted for 2.2 percent of all session starts across the various CNET sites, including News, Reviews, Download, CNET TV, and CNET Shopper. Yahoo searches accounted for a little more than twice as many session starts, or 4.5 percent. Google, of course, was responsible for the rest. Bing did better than Yahoo on some sites, but worse on others.
Measuring Internet market share is notoriously tricky, and five different companies could very well reach five different conclusions. But even Microsoft has said that its basic goal for Bing over the next year is to pick up 2 percentage points of share, which unless Yahoo goes completely dark will still leave it solidly in third place behind Google and Yahoo.

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