On Rich Karlgaard’s blog – digital rules – yesterday the Forbes publisher named his 10 predictions for 2010. Number one on that list is that private aviation will make a comeback.

Here’s the prediction:

Hurt by the Great Recession and Congressional cheap shots, new corporate jet sales fell about 40% in 2009. But the economy is healing, stocks are up and shareholders have lost their lynch-mob mood.  The bad news is that commercial air travel convenience is sure to worsen–just when you thought it couldn’t get worse–in light of new security threats. (Are you ready to be seated and belted during the entire last hour of flight? Looking forward to those full-body scans with possible radiation risks?) Businesses will quietly return to private aviation.

We agree with the analysis. So long as we live with the constant threat of terrorism, airline travel never be convenient and will most probably get even worse than it is now after the Christmas day terrorist attempt.

Unfortunately, the lynch-mob mentality will take longer to diffuse. Business is already slowly but surely returning to private aviation – it will be interesting to see how attitudes towards private aviation change in 2010. This lynch-mob mentality is our industry’s greatest enemy. 

Gad Barnea – CEO – FlyMiwok, Inc.

For most folks, 2009 was a tough and stressful year. Ours was no different – with some of the highest highs and lowest lows a startup business could imagine.

As we take stock of the past year – one thing is certain: We are just as grateful for the tough times as we are for the good times. It was during the toughest times were where we learned the most about our business an about our character as a company.

Our first blog post details the trials and tribulations of the 1st half of the year: An operator that we worked with for 2 years went out of business, we had to fire an incompetent software development team and essentially start from scratch, major challenges to the business plan, etc…

All of these have made us better, stronger and well positioned for growth in 2010 and beyond. We found a phenomenal partner in New Vectors Aviation and learned a lot in the process. We developed many additional features in our software suite that go far beyond booking and reservations to very sophisticated CRM and Flight Resource Management. And we finally launched the online system we have been working on for the past 4 years on November 6th 2009!

Moving forward, we have adapted our business model and technology (version 1.1 to be released in Q2 2009) to support almost any type of aircraft available for charter, most trip profiles, over 19,000 airports and heliports in the US and even more sophisticated CRM, resource management and optimization features.

It has been an amazing journey since we started out 4 years ago and we are very excited to move into 2010 for the next chapter of our story.

We hope you enjoyed your holidays and wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year!

Your friends at FlyMiwok

It’s that time of year again.. The world’s largest consumer electronics show (CES) is about to rock the technology world from Jan 7th to Jan 10th 2010.

To help Southern California High Tech innovators, we have launched a special CES promotion, that will make your CES experience truly unforgettable.

For $1600 each way (all inclusive), our operator will fly you in a luxurious Cirrus SR 22 aircraft from any Southern California airport to Las Vegas’ McCarran airport and, included in the pricing, we’ll even have a limo service ready to drive you to your hotel or the convention center.

Use our service round-trip or just one-way – it’s up to you.

Call us now to book your flight! (949)200-7412

* All flights operated by New Vectors Aviation

Folks, here’s a pretty good catalog of what can happen if you do not understand Facebook’s privacy settings. You have been warned…

And, of course, there are much more extreme examples…

I was reminded of this when I logged into Facebook and saw a popup altering me to the new privacy settings they have implemented and I immediately set all to “Only Friends” – the most restrictive generic option.

[for the anti-social social networkers among you, you can also customize to even limit access to certain information just to yourself…]

If the examples above convinced you to manage your information on Facebook closely, please log in and review it. One of these days you’ll be happy you did.

The unsettling thing was that with the new privacy settings, the default option was “everybody”.. This is an option that will undoubtedly create many more fails on Facebook. 

It is also very irresponsible. Facebook should know better.

Jason Calacanis – CEO of Mahalo and a blogger I like to follow – dissects the problem correctly and points to the fact that this is a very sneaky way to monetize your information.

At FlyMiwok, your privacy settings are set automatically to “no-one”. I.e. no other member can see your personal information. Period. It is up to you to decide what information you want to share with others. Just log in and go to “My Profile/Settings” and check it out!

Gad Barnea – CEO – FlyMiwok, Inc.

A New York Times article from yesterday looks into the substantial benefits of face-to-face meetings. At FlyMiwok, we are obviously interested in promoting the advantages of business travel – because we help our operators sell business travel. But even more importantly, because we firmly believe that there is great danger to businesses who rely too much on technology to replace in-person meetings. When you make cuts to your business travel budget, you cut your relationship capital as well.

If fact, as a small startup with a very limited budget, we get out of the office and travel for business meetings almost exclusively and our use of web-meeting technologies has practically stopped.

As a startup, every relationship we have is critical to our long-term success, and relationships simply cannot be forged over IP.

Apparently, more and more businesses feel the same. The article tells the story of Brian Jacobsen, co-president of Madison Park Greetings – a company that sells stationary and gifts from Seattle. When the economy started going south, Mr. Jacobsen decided to invest more in travel – realizing that this will give him a competitive advantage while his competitors were cutting their relationship capital.

The same goes for Brian Parish from IData who claims to have won 2 projects thanks to “being there” to work with the customer.

Mitch Mounger from Sunrise Identity echoed the same sentiment:

“We believe in business travel,” Mr. Mounger said. “You just have to be smart about it.”

He added, “I don’t have data, but every time we do it, good things happen.”

Indeed.

Gad Barnea – CEO – FlyMiwok, Inc.

Gobble up a private flight!

Airline delays and highway congestion are as much a part of Thanksgiving as Turkey and pumpkin pie.

This year, save yourself the hassle and fly privately!

Meet your relatives refreshed and ready for massive intakes of tryptophan and cranberry sauce.

Fly in a luxurious Cirrus SR-22 aircraft with state-of-the-art safety and technology features.

Call us now at (949) 200-7412 for your special Thanksgiving award and special pricing!

This special in not available online, call now!

* All flights operated by New Vectors Aviation

Call us now!

Sincerely,

Your Friends at FlyMiwok, Inc.

With our move to production last week came a number of “interesting” challenges. One particularly fascinating artifact was that switching context between SSL and non-SSL would cause the connection to be dropped and therefore clicking on links under SSL would produce.. nothing.

It turns out that many “free” and open-source products or APIs will get you on SSL and charge you big bucks when you are most vulnerable – i.e. when you need SSL support (a.k.a moving into production). This is true of Google and also of IceFaces and several others.   

Here’s the background for the situation we found ourselves in: we use Google’s “free” map API extensively throughout the website to provide information to our customers about distances to and from airports, airport information, directions, etc. and of course actually mapping the airports graphically on a map.

The free version of Google maps – as it turns out – does not work under SSL. That is, unless you have an extra $10,000 laying around that you are just eager to pass on to Google just for the privilege of being able to do Google maps through SSL. By the way, Google buries the price information about this deep within its site and even then it only offers prices in GBP – not in dollars.

This made IE completely unusable but worked reasonably well under other browsers, although not without problems. This had to be fixed.

Of course, we’re a startup and we have much better things to do with $10,000. But even if we weren’t – it is ludicrous that Google would charge that kind of dough just for SSL support. There is and cannot be any justification for that. The paid Google maps “Premier” is supposedly for sites that charge customers for access to maps (or where only paying customers can access maps). In our case it is completely free – both registered customer and non-registered customers can access maps and even registered customers are not charged for their membership. We have no need to be a “Premier” customer.

It also turns out that IceFaces’ ‘push-server’ does not support SSL out of the box – only the paid “enterprise” version does. The only way to find that out is on the forums as it is never mentioned in the actual product literature. I’ve complained about IceFaces here before, but unfortunately we still have to use them in various parts of our product-suite.

However, if we are not happy with “free” version, why on earth would we pay for the enterprise version?

The 1st part of our solution was to isolate the checkout page to use SSL (https) and have the pages that use Google maps run under regular http. We can do that since we use the Google API on pages that do not contain any sensitive information.

This would solve our Google maps problem.

It also means that we need to switch context between SSL for some “pages” and non-SSL for others.

This “context-switching” cause IceFaces to drop connections:

[..] com.icesoft.faces.webapp.http.core.RequestVerifier service
INFO: ‘POST’ request expected. Dropping connection…

My first reaction was to blame IceFaces for yet another bug.. – but it turns out to not be a bug. It’s just that IceFaces is such an intrusive API that you have to do a lot of extra administrative work to make it work through Apache SSL. Especially in our case since we use mod_rewrite extensively.

So here’s the setup:

In httpd.conf we have 2 virtual hosts one SSL (port 443) and the other not (port 80). We intercept calls to secure pages that go to the non-SSL virtual-host and mod_rewrite them to the secure host – and vice-versa for the context switching back.

You need to make all IceFaces resources switch contexts together with all the uris they are linked to. Otherwise, IceFaces will not be able to find it’s /block/ content.

The best way to see what content IceFaces is trying to get is through a javascript debugger like FireBug.

In it you will see that resources such as

/push-server/block/receive-updated-views

cannot be found (error 404) or – if you do mod_rewrite redirects like we do – it will say something like:

“301 resource moved permanently”

This is your hint that during context switching you are redirecting away IceFaces resources. So in httpd.conf you need to add the following RewriteCond’s for the SSL virtual-host:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/<uri-path/to/secure/resource1>$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/<uri-path/to/secure/resource2>$
[…etc. secure resources..]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/push-server/block/receive-updated-views$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/<uri-path>/block/send-receive-updates$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/<uri-path>/block/ping$

Then add the same configuration with reverse logic in the non-SSL host. i.e the above example checks that the resource “IS NOT” (!) and has an “AND” relationship between RewriteCond’s; whereas the non-SSL host checks that the resource “IS” and has an “OR” relationship between RewriteCond’s.

We hope this helps others who are stuck in the same situation, but especially it will help others fight back against deceptive practices by some supposedly “free” and “open-source” companies that try to milk you when you’re most vulnerable.

Gad Barnea – CEO- FlyMiwok, Inc.

There’s no time like the present to reward yourself!

FlyMiwok and New Vectors Aviation want to help you maximize your fun time and get you to Las Vegas privately, quickly and hassle-free!

For a limited time, we will be offering flights to and/or from Las Vegas for only $1,500.

That’s $750 per person for you and another lucky individual to fly to Vegas in a luxurious Cirrus SR-22 aircraft with state-of-the-art technology and safety features.

Reward yourself now! Call us at (949) 200-7412

This special deal is only available by phone and will not be posted online.

• All flights operated by New Vectors Aviation

We are always here to serve your on-demand travel needs.

Don’t forget to check out our website at http://flymiwok.com

Your team at FlyMiwok, Inc.

We are extremely grateful that the LA Times covered our launch and took the time to talk to Tom (of New Vectors Aviation – our operator) and me.

However, since this is a new type of service, a number of misconceptions crept into the article that we have an obligation to correct immediately to avoid misrepresenting anything to the general public.

We owe anyone using our service and flying with our operators to know exactly what is going on and what each entity is responsible for.

We will ask the LA Times to correct this information.

A) The article starts with

The company will fly passengers between more than 28 municipal and commercial airports from Santa Barbara south to San Diego and as far east as Las Vegas.

We do not fly. New Vectors – our operator – is the company that does the flying. It is very important that anyone who uses the service, understand that they fly with an FAA-certified carrier. FlyMiwok simply helps operators with bookings and provides them with a portal. We have nothing whatsoever to do with flight operations.

B) The caption for my picture says

Gad Barnea, founder of FlyMiwok, looks over a plane that will be used by the private air service at Santa Monica Airport.

This is not really an error – if you read it right. But it could be read incorrectly. So, just to put things straight: There’s no private air-service based at Santa Monica airport. Our operator(s) will pick customers up from Santa Monica, but none of the operators were working with or currently talking to is based there.

C) The article continues:

FlyMiwok is not an airline. It’s more like an air-taxi company that can fly passengers […]

True – we’re not an airline. But we’re not an air-taxi company either. We do not fly. New Vectors and the operators we represent are.

D) On pricing:

On FlyMiwok, the prices vary by distance, but on average a flight from Santa Monica Airport to Palm Springs International Airport will cost about $1,950. You can cut the cost by splitting the ride with other passengers.

That’s for a round-trip assuming a weekend-long stay. Same-day returns will cost less and by splitting the costs the round-trip can cost you $650.

Again, this is no fault of the LA Times. We understand that this is a new service and many people will have to translate it to something more familiar. We just need to keep the record straight.

Gad Barnea – CEO – FlyMiwok, Inc.

Dear friends,
It has been about 3 months since our "soft launch" and the first flight by our operator – New Vectors Aviation – and almost 4 years since we started conceiving of FlyMiwok (then Miwok Airways) as a way to re-think and re-do the on-demand air-travel market.

Now, today, Saturday 11/7/2009, I am very [very] excited to report to you all that we are officially open for business. Go to http://flymiwok.com where you will experience the first ever revenue-management and flight booking system for on-demand operators and air-taxis.

Now anyone can go online to check out pricing, book flights and manage their account right from their computer.

The Los Angeles Times covered the launch of our business today. As I mentioned in my previous emails, with the economic downturn also came a number of changes to our business model to allow us to bootstrap the business while expecting lower demand, higher dead-head ratios, more volatile fuel prices, tight credit and greater marketing challenges. Thus also, initial prices are higher than what they will be when demand builds up.

As exciting as this major milestone is, it is just the 1st step. Now, we need to build a loyal customer base and get the demand to where we want it to be.

Expect a lot of marketing activity in the next few weeks.

We thank you all for your support over the years.

Have a great day!

Gad Barnea – CEO – FlyMiwok, Inc.