Interactive Mobile @dvertising Surprisingly Wins Travel Innovation Summit

(MoneyWatch)  The votes are in, and Interactive Mobile @dvertising was voted the winner of the Travel Innovation Summit. Clearly, I was far off on this one. This is the company that has its iM@ (I'm at) application that offers destination-specific content to people on their mobile phones. I can see the potential for this to work, but I'm not yet convinced.

The business model is definitely there. When someone lands at an airport, they can flip on their phones and, if they have the application, find destination specific content. This will be funded by targeted advertising offers that will likely have a relatively high conversion rate. It sounds like a winner, but my only concern is in their ability to attract enough users.

Sure, if you fly to Vegas, the airport could plaster ads all over the walls telling people where to go to download the application, but for something like this, I would think it would be tough to get people to actually download the app in the first place. Maybe frequent fliers would download it, but they will probably be wary to download something that is going to thrive on an advertising model when there are other ways to get destination content.

So, we'll see if this ends up working for the company, but I remain skeptical. I was finally able to find the website for iM@, but there's nothing there right now.