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UK students develop portable IFE idea
A business idea for a portable IFE device developed by students from Lancaster University Management School in the UK has been awarded a £10,000 innovation prize at an international competition.
tripTAB, an onboard entertainment tablet for long-haul flights, is already attracting interest from easyJet, Ryanair and British Airways, according to the university. Holding hundreds of films, music and games, the tablet will be available for low cost rent during a long-haul flight.
The estimated turnover of the business in the first year is £1.2m, after splitting the profits with the airline.
tripTAB was created by undergraduates Varun Shah, Kevin Foster, Alex Roberts, Melissa McCue and Julius Rackys, who formed a team on the New Venture Planning module, led by Ian Gordon of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development.
Shah, who came up with the idea for tripTAB while bored on a 10-hour flight home to Mumbai said: “It gave you the space to think out of the box and to apply the skills you’d learnt in three years to real life. tripTAB is perfect for anyone with nothing to do because it is pre-loaded with rich media content which you can access with a special code so families get suitable content to share.”
Shah pitched tripTAB at the Startup Weekend contest in Newcastle in April, where he won £10,000 of mentor support from Newcastle Science City and access to a further £10,000 of venture-capital, with the potential to access up to £150,000.
The funding will enable Varun Shah and Kevin Foster to develop tripTAB into a real product which could be available to plane passengers within six months, they claim. There are plans to manufacture the bespoke tablet in India or China and update the licensed media content every few months.
Their business model provides the airlines with free tripTABs, with the profits from rental split. The airlines also benefit from lower fuel costs since heavyweight cabling to passenger seats can be ripped out and replaced with tripTABs.
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