Unexpected Airline Innovations

Two airlines are taking a broader view of their mission.  Virgin Atlantic and Emirates have recently helped bring two innovations to the market, and neither has anything to do with moving people from one airport to another.

Virgin Atlantic has sponsored Taxi2 (www.taxi.to), which helps travelers find ride-share partners at their destination airport.  What a great idea – helps travelers save some money, and reduces carbon emissions by using fewer taxis.

Emirates funded the development of iLingual, an iPhone app that

Verbal Translation via iPhone

Here’s a cool – bordering on bizzare – new app that your international travelers will want to check out, assuming they have an iPhone:

It is designed to translate spoken English into spoken French, German and Arabic.  It was developed by Lean Mean Fighting Machine for Emirates Airlines, in order to reinforce Emirates as an innovator in the travel space.  Well done on all accounts!

You can find six versions of this app, all free, on the Apple iTunes store.  Here’s the link from the developer’s site, or you can search the app store for the product name iLingual (clever name, that.)

(Thanks to Tnooz for posting on this topic yesterday)