Some time ago, I decided to give away some of the crazy ideas I was producing on a daily basis but I never acted.

So today, 12th of December 2009, I will start releasing what, IMHO, are a solid ground to start new ventures.

In June 2001 I was flying back to Paris CDG from San Jose, California on American Airlines.
This was the end of a two weeks trip accoss Florida and California where I was looking for a job in the land of opportunities, in addition to some amazing sight-seeing and cross-culture experience.

On board, as I was heading toward my seat, I discovered the true meaning of Geeks On a Plane: almost everybody was pulling his laptop, his PDA (back in the days it was the must-have mobile device), some even had noise-cancelling headsets.

I was clearly surrounded by tech savvy people involved in the IT industry.

And I was still looking for a job. I was gonna spend the next 10 hours next to potential employers and networking opportunities without being able to interract with them (except bugging everybody which, even at this pre 9/11 period wasn’t a smart move).

What I needed was in a sense simple: an in-flight intranet providing basic services like forums, chats and news. Even an IRC channel would have cut it.

The trick was that all of us were stuck in the same place while sharing some common interests or patterns: marketers would call it a captive market.

Then, out of this situation, the idea came out: an in-flight intranet would be an advertisers dream.

On this flight, I know where people were coming from (San Jose), where they were heading (France), what was their spending power, which language they were probably speaking: some valuable information for ad targeting.

You could display ads/offers for:

• car rental, hotel, events related (think exhibitions, conferences, sports)
• banking services (remittance, offshore investments, …)
• telecoms (visitor packages, roaming offers)
• business inquiry (partnerships, jobs)

I’ve designed (in my mind) the in-flight intranet as nothing more that a stack of open-source software delivering chat rooms, forums and promotional offers all packaged on a dedicated appliance plugged into the in-flight entertainment system (IFE).

Before boarding, the system would be backed up for reporting and reloaded with new content specific to the origin-destination.

What would have been the business model?

• Leasing the hardware/service to the airline, per plane.
• Selling ad slots/campaign to advertisers in the in-Fligh Ad Network
• Revenue sharing with the airlines (makes everybody happy, especially if they gonna spend hundred of thousands on your services; I’m sure the ROI will be so high it will be a no-brainer for them to invest)

The main issues to tackle would have been:

• Integration: airplane modification are subject to rigorous testing and certification processes. This is both time and resources consuming that’s why a strong partnership with the first airline is necessary (with a solid IP and market protection strategy)
• Security: integrity, insulation, auditing
• User Interface/Interaction: in 2001, IFE were pretty basic, no touchscreen on American Airlines, no advanced keyboard/remote

I’ve just read that Emirates Airline is scrapping their in-flight magazine (Open Skies) and will start a pilot program to sell in-flight online advertising …