Some of us at the Wel­ling­tonista are rather fond of the old Snap­per card. We worked through its teeth­ing troubles and are now hap­pily tag­ging on and off as we bus about the city.

So when Miki Szikszai, CEO of Snap­per, asked us if we’d like to vis­it Snap­per HQ and learn a bit about what’s new in the world of the magic­al talk­ing fish box, we (well, Alan and I) jumped at the chance.

After the jump – what we found at Snap­per.

First obser­va­tion

Enter­ing Snap­per HQ does not involve tag­ging on. Their door is opened using an ordin­ary prox­im­ity key. This is slightly dis­ap­point­ing.

Over yon­der in the val­ley

Snap­per has just launched on all 130 Val­ley Fly­er buses. Pas­sen­gers had pre­vi­ously been using an older type of smart card, and (as of Fri­day) 11,300 of those old cards had already been swapped for Snap­per cards. And now 43% of trips are paid for with a Snap­per. We wel­come res­id­ents of the Hutt to the 21st cen­tury.

Fares and fees

With Val­ley Fly­er now join­ing Go Wel­ling­ton, there are small dif­fer­ences between the two bus com­pan­ies’ pri­cing. For example, on a VF bus, you can trans­fer free to anoth­er bus with­in 30 minutes of your first trip. But GW don’t offer that. Is this fair? Snap­per don’t con­trol the pri­cing deals like this – it’s decided by the indi­vidu­al bus com­pan­ies, with influ­ence from the Great­er Wel­ling­ton Region­al Coun­cil.

New stuff

Com­ing soon will be a card that can only be used for trans­port. I like to think of this as the anti-pie device. Par­ents want to make sure their kids don’t buy pies with their school bus money, and employ­ers want their employ­ees to be able to travel on pub­lic trans­port for work and not buy pies.

Monthly passes are on their way. Repla­cing the old Gold Pass, you’ll be able to pay for 30 days in advance. And it won’t be stuck to a cal­en­dar month. The Snap­per read­ers, once upgraded, will tell you how many days you have left on the monthly pass. Clev­er!

Cool geeky stuff

Snap­per like the idea of open­ing up the Snap­per data. They have a retail SDK (Soft­ware Developer­’s kit), which would allow people to build oth­er applic­a­tions that, once author­ised – pre­sum­ably – by Snap­per, could be allowed to deb­it value from the card. It would ulti­mately help give Snap­per the kind of ubi­quity they need.

The lib­n­fc pro­ject is build­ing RFID card drivers, and now works with Snap­per. This is an import­ant build­ing block for developers to get to work on Mac and Linux drivers. The Snap­per tech­no­logy ori­gin­ally comes from Korea, which is a very Win­dows-cent­ric coun­try. So it’s up to Snap­per to get stuff work­ing with Macs and Linux PCs. 30 Snap­per read­ers have been sent to some keen geeks in Canada to come up with ideas.

Please don’t for­get to tag off! Card value low!

You know how the vocal warn­ing mes­sages are kind of annoy­ing, espe­cially in the morn­ing before you’ve had a cof­fee, and how when the voice says “Card value low”, it sounds kind of dis­ap­poin­ted in you? Yeah.

Well, plans are afoot to speed up the tag­ging-on and ‑off pro­cess. Snap­per are look­ing at ways of redesign­ing the card read­ers so they give you more use­ful, rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion on the dis­play, and they’re also hav­ing a bit of a think about what sort of vocal mes­sages are needed and when. For example, would­n’t be more use­ful to be reminded to tag off when you’re about to get off the bus?

Anoth­er idea: instead of your card being deb­ited twice – once when you get on, and the bal­ance when you get off, what about get­ting deb­ited just once when you alight?

The web­site

The Snap­per web­site sucks. “It’s hor­rible – and you can quote me on that,” said Miki. But you won’t have to suf­fer its Flash-addled hor­rors much longer. The site is being redesigned, with lots of user input to make sure that it will be a site that Snap­per cus­tom­ers will find really use­ful.

Actu­ally, it’s not too ter­rible once you get through to the con­tent. There’s an inform­at­ive blog and com­ments are wel­comed and will get responses from Snap­per people.

Snap­per are right into Twit­ter too, and it’s worth fol­low­ing @Team­Snap­per if you’re inter­ested in Snap­per.

Chur. Thanks, Snap­per!

Photo cred­it: yann.co.nz at Flickr