Hotel Evolution: virtual front desk in your iPhone

The famous brainchild from Apple; the iPhone, is stepping on another spotlight last week when the news about Hotel Evolution broke out on the net.

Hotel Evolution is a web app for your iPhone, designated to work almost like what most hotels' front desk do. Such as calling house keeping, setting up wake up call, look what's on today's menu, etc. And if you're too lazy to walk across the hotel room or getting up from your comfy bed, you can now tap on your iPhone the "Do not disturb" sign. ;-p

Right now Hotel Evolution is already offered at Malibu Beach Inn in Malibu, CA. For a guest who already has iPhone, the hotel staff will load it into the iPhone. And for those who don't have an iPhone, the hotel will gladly lend a 16GB iPhone during the stay.

TechCrunch reported that the cost of getting such a system up and running varies on a hotel-by-hotel basis. According to Matt Allard, president of Runtriz (the software developer of Hotel Evolution), the cost of the first month is generally about double that of the standard monthly fee of $10 per room.

Runtriz brilliantly made Hotel Evolution as web app to avoid Apple's App Store long screening process, and to minimize the temptation of jailbreaking every guests' iPhone. Apart from that, it also facilitates portability; when they add support for other platforms (such as Android, or BlackBerry) in the future, it's a matter of simply tweaking the layout for each browser, rather than rewriting an entire application.

[blogged with my Treo 750v]