In Competition’s Fifth year, Runner-Up Titles Awarded to Products from Interel and iRiS

CHICAGO — Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG), the membership association that unites the world’s hospitality companies and technology innovators to solve industry challenges, announced that its hotelier members awarded the 2013 “Most Innovative Hospitality Technology Award” to InnSpire for its Guest Media Streaming product. First Runner-Up title was awarded to Interel’s Augmented Reality Room Control App and Second Runner-Up was awarded to iRiS Software System’s Web Valet. HTNG senior officers presented the awards at the annual HTNG North American Conference in San Diego on March 6.

Hotel members selected the winners by voting for their choice from the 18 different technology entrants, whose products covered a range of hospitality technologies and systems. Many of the entries provided guest services through mobile devices and others provided entertainment services. In announcing the awards, HTNG Vice President Monika Nerger, who is CIO for Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, commented on the difficulty of choosing from the innovations, noting that a single point separated the top two entries.

InnSpire’s Guest Media Streaming product lets guests stream their movies, photos and music to the TV in their hotel room. Streaming is achieved wirelessly, natively and hassle-free through the InnSpire box. InnSpire supports iOS, Miracast and DLNA, which results in easy, setup-free streaming for guests. Guests simply click on the Stream icon on the TV in the room to activate the function. They can wirelessly connect their own iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Windows phone or similar device; then choose their content and stream. No downloads or setup are required.

In commenting about the appeal of the winning technology, Martin Chevalley, CEO & Co-Founder of InnSpire, said, “Gadgets are becoming an ever-more integrated part of our everyday life, but that doesn’t mean that everybody loves the gadgets. What people love is what their gadgets do for them. I think that Guest Media Streaming won this award because hoteliers realized that it hits the sweet spot for travelers, being able to easily use their gadget to wirelessly stream photos, videos or music of their choice directly to the TV in their room, without downloads or installations. This innovation meets that need for hotels.”

The First Runner-Up technology, Interel’s Augmented Reality Room Control App, offers guests an intuitive and truly international user interface, which depicts their actual room using an augmented reality concept. The room visualization dynamically changes with the status of the controlled room elements and makes the use of descriptive text obsolete. Virtualized replicas of the physical control devices appear on the application, guests can then interact with the devices in the same way they would in the actual room. The HTML5 application is hosted on 3rd party guest applications or on the hotel landing page. Push notifications inform the guests about the status of their service requests.

The Second Runner-Up, iRiS Web Valet, is a fully responsive guest facing web solution. The high-speed multilingual web app allows guests to interact with all the hotel’s services and facilities including in-room dining, shopping for products both internally and externally and booking spa treatments. Content and operations management is controlled through the iRiS Guest Experience Platform, allowing content changes to be made instantly and enabling two-way messaging in any language. Jason Jefferys, CEO, iRiS Software Systems Ltd., commented, “We are delighted that our brand new Web Valet product has been announced as a winner of Most Innovative Hospitality Technology of 2013. This cements iRiS’s position as industry leaders in the hospitality technology sector with this unique and fully-responsive, guest-facing web solution.”

HTNG CEO and Executive Vice President Douglas Rice said, “We are delighted at the continued interest in this competition and its ability to give visibility to hotels for some of the great innovations coming from the vendor community. Prior winners have told us that the award has provided a significant boost to their credibility and sales.”

Other contestants included:

• Alcatel-Lucent, Guest BYOD Telephony
• DirecTV, Advanced DirecTV Solution for All Hotel Wiring Schemes
• Dish Network, smartbox
• Eleven Wireless, Conference Services Manager
• Enseo, SITE
• FCS Computer Systems Sdn. Bhd., FCS e-Housekeeping & m-Housekeeping
• InnSpire, Dynamic WiFi Hotspot
• Infor, Infor Ming.le for Hospitality
• Intelity, Sapphire Bedside Dashboard
• iRiS Software Systems, iRiS Delegate
• Media Communications S.A., HOTstream CMS
• Motorola Solutions, T5 Wifi Over VDSL2 System
• Quadriga, CoCo from Quadriga
• ResortSuite, Tabletside POS
• SkyTouch Technology, SkyTouch Mobile

Source: http://www.hospitalitynet.org/