Boarding Pass on your Cell Phone

Continental Airlines is launching a 3-month pilot program at Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport to allow customers to present a WAP-enabled boarding pass after checking in through the company's wireless site, which is here. According to Continental's Customer Service, users are then presented with the boarding pass image that is the airline's equivalent of a bar code. They present both their phones and photo id to TSA people at the security queue, and then again at the gate to get on the plane.

This is the one image that is being used with this story, but it's not clear who took it as it is at TSA.gov, USA Today, the Houston Chronicle and Endgadget without attribution.




The company providing the enabling technology is not listed in any of the stories or on the Continental website that we can find. As best we can tell, it MAY be a company called Mobiqa that has a product that is IATA approved and presents the image to security.



IATA has set a goal of 100% of airlines having the capability to do Bar Coded Boarding Passes by 2008 and 100% usage by 2010. Air Canada was actually the first to implement IATA's 2D barcode standard and usage grew quickly according to theStreet.com. According to Eric Leopold, Project Manager at IATA, the organization thinks it can facilitate more than $500 million in annual savings.


Mobile Ticket Purchase & Presentment

Mobiqa also caught our eye in a deal it did with PayPal and their mobile offering. The case study discusses that Scotland Rugby fans were left stranded without tickets due to strikes by the mail service. PayPal's WAP site enabled the payment processing and Mobiqa provided the ticket validation.

Mpayy will be the best solution for secure mobile payment processing and we hope to work our way into verticals like event ticketing with a partner like Mobiqa.