From optical scanning ID to boarding passes printed at home, airports and airlines are working on ways to minimize the bottlenecks for passengers before they board the airplane.
A panicky perusal of the boarding passes printed off so carefully the night before revealed that our flight actually left from London Luton, a good hour's drive away.
The technology being tested by Continental uses a two-dimensional encrypted bar code, which is much tougher to copy than the one-dimensional bar code used by many airlines for boarding passes printed online.
The seat was also chosen online, the check-in completed and even the boarding pass printed out at home before leaving for the airport, avoiding the usual queue at the airline counter.Not that it mattered, because there was another queue to be joined in a tent outside the terminal where it took an hour to reach the security checkpoint.
The web passed print a long time ago in terms of time spent by consumers, but 2011 will be the first year that mobile passes print, according to new estimates by market research firm eMarketer.
For single pass printing the area coverage varied from 5.8% to 11.9% with corresponding effective sheet resistances ranging from 8.9Ω to 1.5Ω.
We investigated the influence of the surface energy and the temperature of the substrate, the formulation of the suspensions, and the multi-pass printing aiming for layer stacks on the morphology of the deposits.
If the adhesion is low, the solvent of the second droplet impinging in a wet-on-dry multi-pass printing set might re-disperse the deposited particles and rearrange them, e.g., in a different morphology.
As he talks gloved assistants on either side pass him prints to be auctioned at an LA County Museum of Art (Lacma) gala in his honour, attended by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, Jared Leto and Kim Kardashian.
To make his pitch for the new service, co-founder Tim Westergren drew on his own experience as a musician — he recalled driving from San Francisco to Telluride to play a show that only drew 15 attendees, despite hours spent flyering and passing out printed invitations.
