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