The FCC on Thursday proposed to auction off more airwaves for commercial ground-to-plane broadband communications. We’re not just talking about a handful of frequencies here: The FCC is eyeballing a 500 MHz block of spectrum, which could boost the connection speeds available to aircraft by a factor of 100,000.

As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham explained in a recent post, current in-flight broadband is so pricey and low-bandwidth because airlines rely on expensive satellite or ground-to-air transmissions systems to link aircraft to the internet. The dominant airline provider GoGo uses what is in essence a 3G CDMA network pointed at the sky. That means a single 3Mbps EV-DO connection must be spread among all of the internet users in an aircraft. Your fancy new laptop may support gigabit Wi-Fi, but the bottleneck in the ground-based backhaul link can slow you down to dial-up speeds.

The FCC’s plans, however, key in on a proposal Qualcomm made last year to clear a massive swathe of spectrum in the 14 GHz frequencies over which a kind of super-LTE network could be built. That network would only sport about 150 towers but each of those nodes would blast a high-powered signal into the northern horizon. Airplanes would fly between these huge crescent-shaped cells just as our cellphones move from tower to tower on the ground. But each of these aerial cells would have a whopping 300 Gbps of capacity, which would be shared among all of the planes occupying the surrounding airspace.

That’s a lot of bandwidth, but it’s conceivable that the airlines and their passengers could find a use for it. Today’s in-flight Wi-Fi is priced for the business traveler with an expense account and the inability to go four hours without email access. But these days everyone in the cabin from first-class to steerage is carrying multiple Wi-Fi-enabled devices. And they don’t just want to check email — they they want to stream video and play networked games. Airlines could also use that bandwidth to offer on-demand entertainment and live programming from the cloud, not just from their on-board hard-drives.

As for costs, a more efficient network could allow airlines to drop rates — or maybe even eliminate in-flight broadband fees entirely — to make high-bandwidth connections available to all customers. GoGo’s current network uses 160 towers, making it the same the size as Qualcomm’s proposed system. The infrastructure investment would be about the same, but by using the latest 4G network technologies and hell of a lot more spectrum, we could shove a lot more bandwidth into that infrastructure.

The 14 GHz band is currently used by fixed satellite providers as an uplink path to their birds in orbit. The FCC proposal would require that the any new in-flight network share those frequencies with its current tenants. In its notice of proposed rulemaking, the Commission said it is seeking industry comment to ensure there will be no interference between those two uses.

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Apigee manages, monitors and optimizes mobile application programming interfaces (APIs), which act as the glue connecting technologies, services and data sources across networks. So far Apigee has focused on the mobile industry, attempting to whip into shape the different network APIs used by hundreds of different carriers and present them to developers as a simple common interface.

Now Apigee plans to go after other industries such as healthcare and the airlines. Those industries have a lot of useful information, from frequent flier miles to health records, that developers would love to access if only it weren’t so fragmented. On Thursday Apigee announced what it’s calling the API Exchange, which essentially takes the model it’s devised for telecom and applies it to any other industry.

Healthcare companies and airlines actually have a lot in common in mobile carriers, said David Andrzejek, who heads up the Exchange for Apigee. Their industries are highly regulated and dominated by multiple, very large, vertically integrated companies using proprietary technology that is unfathomable to all but the most committed developer. “The barriers are normally just too high for any developer to build anything against,” Andrzejek said.

For the mobile carriers, the problem has always been that developers couldn’t just tap into a single API to use their location, presence or payment services – developers have to tap into the separate APIs of hundreds of carriers around the world. Consequently no developer wanted to deal with carriers, further marginalizing them. The mobile industry spent years trying to develop a common set of APIs that would present a unified front to the developer world. They failed spectacularly.

When Apigee took over the GSM Association’s OneAPI program, it pretty much gave up on the dream of standardizing under a single set of carrier APIs (which makes the program’s name a bit outdated). Instead, Apigee took to connecting all of the carriers’ different APIs to a single platform and then translating them into a single meta-interface that any developer could hook into. At Mobile World Congress this year, Apigee and the GSMA presented the initial fruits of that labor: an identity-management API any app developer could use to authenticate users via their phone numbers.

It’s still early days for the OneAPI project, but Apigee feels it’s learned enough dealing with the fickle mobile carriers to take on other big complex industries. Just like the carriers, airlines and insurance companies haven’t standardized under any common APIs, and for competitive reasons they’re unlikely to do so.

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Tello started out by developing customer feedback apps for retail businesses, but with the emergence of iOS 6 it changed its focus to Apple’s new digital wallet. It has developed a platform called PassTools, which allows for the easy creation of passes, loyalty cards, tickets and coupons that slide digitally into the iPhone or iPad.

While American Airlines and Walgreens may have the resources to churn out digital boarding passes and loyalty cards, your typical gym or local pizza chain doesn’t, explained Joe Beninato, Tello’s co-founder and until recently its CEO. “We came to the realization that it was very difficult for people who weren’t engineers to build these passes,” Beninato said.

PassTools is capable of generating the tens of thousands of individual boarding passes a day required by an airline or a monthly coupon for a pizzeria, which is why Airship found the technology so appealing, said Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke. Airship can sell passes to the current roster of big brands using its app-based push messaging services, and it can target smaller companies who otherwise have no presence in an app store or even on the mobile web. For a small local business, a loyalty card or coupon may be the only digital presence it needs, Hieggelke said.

The companies, which were brought together by their common investor True Ventures, wouldn’t reveal and financial details of the deal. Urban Airship will keep Tello’s staff of five full-time employees on board in Palo Alto (Airship is based in Portand, Ore.). Before the acquisition, Tello had raised $2.7 million in a Series A round led by Bullpen Capital and True.

Disclosure: Urban Airship and Tello are both backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Kayak, which just completed its IPO in July 2012, initially filed to go public in November of 2010 but delayed the deal while looking for an improved market. Kayak’s stock closed at $31.04 on Thursday.

The company allows customers to compare travel prices across services, and is best known for its airline flight search, although it also does hotels and rental cars. Kayak processes more than 100 million user queries each month, it noted in the press release. The company was founded eight years ago by Paul English and CEO Steve Hafner. Priceline is one of the largest online travel sites in the world.

“A bomb just dropped in the online travel world,” wrote Rafat Ali of Skift. He noted that “Priceline will gain a great online and mobile team to build its portfolio and will put muscle behind the Kayak brand.”

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Though no gaming platform has a shortage of “simulator” tycoon style games, few have enough engaging gameplay to really stand out among the crowd. Now Boarding, a tycoon style game revolving around routing passengers at an airport, is one of these little treasures and a great game to help you relax and escape from the real world.

The basic gist is that you are the owner of an airline and its home terminal, in charge of the amount and placement of seats, stores, and snacks (among other unlockable treasures). Your mission is simple. Ferry passengers from your airport to others. As your business grows, you can take on other destinations, more passengers and larger aircraft to handle the traffic.

The game is laid out as five “episodes” spanning various regions across the northern hemisphere. Individual cities within each episode have their own unique characteristics, such as Orlando being busier during the summer (due to its amusement parks). Strategy is essential as you grow your fleet of aircraft and choose which destinations to expand your airline service to next.

With unique graphics and an engaging soundtrack, gameplay is very upbeat and fun. Don’t be surprised to waste huge amounts of time as you play to unlock awards and achievements.

Inside your terminal, you are responsible for staffing appropriate positions (ticketing, gate attendant, customer service, docking) in addition to expanding your airline fleet, all while keeping within your budget. As traffic to your airline grows, you will be able to expand to offer more unique methods of transportation, including a helicopter, a 36 seat plane and a private jet.

As your airline business grows, so does the difficulty of keeping happy the hundreds of passengers that move throughout your terminal. As the pressure mounts and more passengers pile into your terminal than you can handle, they will start to get angry. When they have a melt down, the game is over.

Now Boarding started as a Flash-based game and, due to its nature, does require a pretty beefy system for decent gameplay. Users will need to have at least a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo or 1GHz PowerPC G4 processor or faster to play. On older Macs, performance may degrade as you progress higher into the game as your airline plays host to an increasing number of passengers. The game is built around the Adobe Air platform, so in addition to being compatible with Windows and Linux, it also runs just like any other standalone application, complete with its own icon.

Now Boarding is a great game that starts off simple and easy, but quickly scales in terms of difficulty and challenges. A demo version of Now Boarding is available at its website here. The full version costs $14.99. If you’ve had a chance to play, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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