We wrote about Waymate and its rival GoEuro last month – both companies are trying to navigate the world of travel comparison services, but Waymate is taking the extra step of letting people book journeys directly from the service, rather than sending them off to the train or plane operators’ websites.

As we noted at the time, this is difficult from a data point of view, due to the complexity of the various services on offer. There’s an even greater barrier, though, in the unwillingness of many operators to let a third-party service handle their bookings.

Despite these hurdles, Waymate’s iOS app is now out and its website is fully up and running. In this initial version, users cannot book journeys directly from the app – instead, they can select a journey then email themselves a link, allowing them to complete the booking on Waymate’s website. The service is also yet to be internationalized, meaning long-distance journeys need to originate in the Eurozone and local journeys can only be searched within major German cities.

The chief benefit of Waymate is the ability to compare all sorts of travel modes: planes, trains and automobiles (car-sharing schemes and taxis are included), as well as metro services and buses. Price and journey duration are clearly displayed on a visual timeline. Sensibly, Waymate has scrapped earlier plans to have two separate apps for local and long-distance travel: this one folds in both ideas.

“Now the task is to expand the app and the website with thrilling new features — especially in social networking — and to internationalize,” Waymate CEO Maxim Nohroudi said in a statement. “In short, we want travel planning to be completely simple and joyful.”

It’s an ambitious aim and one that (as far as I am aware) no-one has been able to achieve so far. It would be no surprise to see the app that finally pulls it off come out of Europe, as the fragmented nature of the market creates a substantial need for a service like this. Now let’s see how far Waymate’s rivals dive into this space.

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The hobbyists have established a startup called The Flexiscale Company, which launched a Kickstarter project on Monday that aims to fund the production of model kits for several old and very obscure locomotives, the Ffestiniog Englands. If recently-announced plans to 3D-print a moon base are all about creating futuristic designs, The Flexiscale Company is trying to recreate designs of the past.

Copying trains with lasers

What’s fascinating is the accuracy with which they can achieve this. Last year Chris Thorpe, the man behind the project, approached a firm called Digital Surveys that was more used to modelling for the energy sector. He got someone from the company to come over with his equipment and laser-scan Winifred, an 1885 steam engine that had recently returned to the UK for restoration after a 40-year stint lying in storage under the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

This was the result:

With that data in hand, Thorpe was able to do two things. First, he sent it off to the French 3D-printing firm Sculpteo to make a 1:25-scale model of Winifred. As he put it in a blog post:

“Even printed in the cheapest white plastic and with all of the inherent faults of the medium and process it is an exquisite model and so much more. It is an artifact of digital reproduction and the industrial revolution; both the old one powered by humans and the new one which has more computers and robots.”

However, the other thing Thorpe wanted was to recreate part of Winifred in 1:1 scale, namely her smokebox door. To test whether this would work, he sent the data for the door latch to Shapeways, which returned a copy in stainless steel: effectively a spare part for vehicle that’s more than 120 years old, complete with the patina gained by the original part over the years, with 1mm accuracy.

To make that finish even more authentic, though, The Flexiscale Company needs more accuracy in its scanning, so the four Ffestiniog Englands are being scanned with a system called Surphaser, which offers 0.2mm accuracy. That means around 10GB of data per train, since you ask.

Those who donate to the Kickstarter campaign can get the resulting model at varying sizes – in the old days scaling a model meant hard, manual work, but with this sort of data it’s becoming easy to automate. Those who donate £1,000 ($1,572) or more will also get to have themselves scanned, so a mini-me version can be the train’s driver.

The Flexiscale Company itself is unlikely to become large-scale though, Thorpe said:

“I’m doing this because I’ve always wanted these kits. I’m interested in a space where you can have the things you really want. A lot of the time you tend to buy things that aren’t optimal and you don’t tend to have a long-lasting relationship with them. I’m interested in the sustainability aspect of it as well.”

What can we learn from this?

The model train scene is about as niche as you can get, but the work being done by The Flexiscale Company will allow those with even more specialized interests to be catered for. The big model manufacturers such as Hornby are themselves testing out 3D scanning, but even there they will stick to relatively well-known engines. The Ffestiniog Englands will only be of interest to a small subset of people but, once they’ve been scanned, the trains can be made to order on demand and in a variety of sizes — economy of scale is not an issue.

Chris Thorpe presenting at the Monki Gras scaling conference in London

As for the cost of the scanning, well, that depends on what you’re scanning. The equipment being used to record locomotives costs in excess of £15,000, but it can be rented with an experienced technician for a lot less — the Surphaser scans only cost £900 per train.

The resulting product cost is pretty eye-opening. According to Thorpe, a model of a certain mass and detail may cost £160 from Hornby and around £200 from The Flexiscale Company – more, but not nearly as much more as you might suspect. For something so niche, this is remarkable.

And what about smaller objects? After all, that’s where the scanning itself can become something for the home hobbyist.

“You can use Kinect and a cheap USB-powered turntable,” Thorpe said. “There are different bits of software – the one that works the best is Artec Studio. The Artec guys make really good laser scanners, so you’re using all their knowledge.”

This stuff is being done now, and it can be achieved incredibly cheaply, so it’s probably worth starting to chew over the implications. Here are just a few of questions I have running through my mind:

• Are we going to see more heritage preservation operations go technical, with objects being scanned in the same way Google is trying to scan and record the world’s book catalog?
• Will there be any way to enforce design rights when anyone can not only disseminate schematics online, but create those schematics themselves through 3D scanning?
• How might these advances affect the servicing and repair industries, particularly in terms of after-sales support?

I don’t expect to see answers anytime soon. But in the meanwhile, if you’re interested in supporting an innovative model train startup, here’s the Kickstarter pitch:

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At Microsoft’s MIX10 developer’s conference, the company gave a preview of some third-party mobile applications that will run on the new OS, which is set to ship on devices by the end of 2010. That includes a Netflix app prototype that was demoed by Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo, the mobile development company that created the app.

If all the features from the prototype make it into a final version of the app, subscribers with Windows Phone 7 devices will be able to view new releases and recommended movies, manage their video queues, and watch full-length videos even when they are not in front of a computer or other connected device that stream Netflix movies. Because the Windows Phone 7 OS supports Microsoft Silverlight streaming, Netflix will be able to stream to mobile devices using the same video assets that it streams to laptops connecting to its online Watch Instantly service.

Despite comments from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings that streaming video to mobile devices isn’t a priority, the company sent out a survey to some subscribers to gauge their interest in the development of an Apple iPhone app. Now it appears that an app could be available on the Windows mobile platform before an iPhone app appears. While Stanfield didn’t designate a date for launch, the app could possibly be released as soon as mobile devices for the platform appear later this year.

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According to the release from state-owned DSB, customers will be able to book train tickets and reserve seats and vehicles via the web, and eventually via handheld devices. How the project will be financed, whether commuters will buy into it and whether the two companies can make the economics work at large scale remain to be seen (we’ve asked Better Place for details).

But the project could serve as a laboratory for integrating Car 2.0 technologies (in which vehicles are connected to the power grid as well as communication networks) into a much greener transportation system for the digital age — because it’s about mobility, with mass transit, shared cars (and hopefully biking or walking), rather than personal vehicles.

DSB and Better Place plan to set up a pilot project next year with electric car sharing and charge spots (available for private vehicles as well as shared cars) at the Høje-Taastrup and Skanderborg train stations, and will evaluate the possibility of expanding the network to “several of the largest commuter stations” in 2012.

Other companies and governments have dipped their toes into electric car sharing: ExxonMobil invested about $500,000 earlier this year in a car-sharing program in Baltimore, Maryland that includes a small fleet of electric four-seaters from Electrovaya. And last year Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced plans to roll out a subscription-based service called Autolib with 4,000 vehicles available for pickup and deliver at 700 spots around the city by the end of 2009.

The DSB-Better Place project fits into a larger push by the Danish government to upgrade the country’s electric transmission grid, build out infrastructure for electric vehicles and spur widespread adoption of the technology. Better Place came into the Danish EV picture nearly two years ago, announcing plans in early 2008 to work with state-controlled DONG Energy to provide charging and swap stations for cars from the Renault-Nissan Alliance. This year DONG and Better Place closed a €103 million ($135.8 million) financing deal for the project and said they will have a demonstration center set up in time to show off the technology at the UN climate talks coming up in December.

Will the U.S. keep pace with Denmark on this kind of public infrastructure? Likely not, said Nancy Gioia, Director of Ford Global Electrification, and Mark Duvall, Director of the Electric Power Research Institute’s Electric Transportation team yesterday at an event in San Francisco.

According to Duvall, countries with “monolithic utility industries,” as opposed to the U.S. system of some 3,000 utilities and 50 utility commissions, can make decisions and roll out public charging stations more quickly. “The U.S. has the most complex utility structure in the world,” said Gioia, and as a result, “Other parts of the world are very much driving this change.”

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Sure, but it’s the approval of a controversial £8 billion expansion of Heathrow Airport that could have a substantial, and negative, impact on the environment. The Transport folks plan to add a third runway and a sixth terminal, which could eventually lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. There have already been numerous protests against the expansion, which will add about 400 flights per day at the airport, already one of the busiest in the world, and eventually boost the total number of annual flights to 702,000, up from 480,000.

Opponents, including the country’s environment secretary and energy secretary, complained that building a new runway would go against the UK’s target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

The transport agency did make some concessions, saying that the third runway will only operate at half its capacity when it first opens, and that aircraft using the new runway will have to meet strict greenhouse gas emissions standards, meaning older aircraft will have to stick to the old runways.

The agency also said that total CO2 emissions from UK aviation must drop below 2005 levels by 2050, but the third runway is set to open in 2020, so any potential environmental damage will have already been done.

As for the low-carbon vehicle funding, the transport agency gave few details, saying only that the cash would be used for consumer incentives and infrastructure development. It’s not clear if infrastructure means charging stations for electric cars, or pumping stations for ethanol, or even a network of hydrogen filling stations. Information on the program won’t be released until later this year.

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