Economy-class seats are 17 inches wide. Seat pitch (the distance between seat backs) is typically 30 to 32 inches. Add 10 inches of legroom and we essentially travel cross-country in a mini fridge. It sucks, but it’s what we expect.

Low expectations are an opportunity. It’s one thing for an airline to announce an additional 2 inches of legroom in coach; it’s another to invest real R&D money into blowing away customer expectations. That’s exactly what Air New Zealand did when it introduced the “Skycouch” coach seats that fold out into beds:
http://bit.ly/8Mvq1t

Not only did they innovate on seating, but they also came up with an inventive pricing model to ensure that those new skycouches would be full of passengers. What I like about the Air New Zealand approach is how radically they addressed the customer need. The three-year project not only looked at ergonomics for a single passenger but also for how families and couples utilize space together. Competitors may be able to shift seats forward and backward to create more room, but most will be at least two years behind on radical innovation.

Making big improvements in customer experience during an economic downturn takes guts. It will be interesting to follow Air New Zealand’s business curve over the next two years. Given my most recent travel experience, I’m thinking: Auckland is looking like a pretty sweet destination.

Relationship Status: Linked

Facebook pays $42 million and gets a user base of early adopters and a team of ex-Google developers who are leading the way in real-time search. Should Google be worried?

FriendFeed offers a set of active search filters that would be very useful for Facebook, but not in their current state. In my opinion, the FriendFeed tools become really valuable if they can be integrated as passive search on Facebook, allowing users to filter and find content from friends without initiating any search at all.

The Facebook news feed, where friends share status, links, and photos, is quickly overrun if users have no filtering set. It only takes two or three prolific friends to push content off the feed page in a hurry. The act of hiding a friend on Facebook is the simplest form of filtering. A friend who generates a lot of content, but very little value, can simply be turned off. Friends who provide valuable information stay on the feed page longer.

So why did Google release a public beta of their search engine (code name: Caffeine) on the same day Facebook announced the FriendFeed acquisition. Are they nervous? Currently, Facebook searches are limited to items posted in the last 30 days. Not very threatening. But Facebook poses a threat to Google because the way users find information is less important than the trust they put in the information they find.

Think about searching vacation destinations. I trust the choices of my friends more than the options offered by a thousand faceless search results. What Facebook has over Google is the potential to deliver destinations I might like — based on where my friends went — potentially, a much higher-quality recommendation than a paid search result.

Quality matters to us. According to Forrester, the #1 most powerful form of advertising is the personal recommendation of a friend — Facebook’s raison d’etre. Search engine optimization isn’t far behind — but in Google’s eyes, neither is Facebook.

What do you wake up to?

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? You have a few choices: Attend to your biology, get something to eat, shower, stretch. Many of us are reaching for our laptops or cell phones before we even get out of bed.

The New York Times article yesterday notes that network usage is spiking much earlier than even a few years ago: “Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyzes Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 a.m. on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. ‘It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 a.m.,’ said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.”

Last year, I would listen to NPR for a few minutes. Today, the clock radio is unplugged in favor of a cell phone charger. On more than one occasion, I have been awakened by the buzz of the first AP story alert of the day, or the first email from an early-rising colleague.

The first experiences of our day are critical to how productive we are during the day. Julie Morgenstern, the author of Never Check Your Email in the Morning, says no email for the first hour. In her opinion, email puts you into reactive mode to start the day, and you never catch up (video here).

Our morning routines will continue to evolve as technology integrates information into our lives. Is the fact that many of us reach for information before we reach for the cereal good news, bad news, or no news?