Tech Talks | Greg Ross-Munro, Sourcetoad

Ian Richardson: 00:00:03

Hi, I'm Ian Richardson. Welcome to the Tech Talks podcast from theICEway and Seatrade Cruise. Each episode looks at technology and innovation in the cruise industry, as I host q&a sessions with tech leaders and innovators who are all working diligently to create solutions that will benefit crews in a variety of different ways. As co founder and CEO of theICEway ecosystem of

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:01:49

Richie! I appreciate those very kind introduction. Thank you.

Ian Richardson: 00:01:54

You're probably one of the smartest people, certainly one of the smartest people I know anyway...

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:01:58

what do you want? Richie? It's yours. You got it.

Ian Richardson: 00:02:01

I just want to talk about Cruise mobile apps. But I mean, maybe we should start with yourself and Sourcetoad and how it kind of all started for you?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:02:09

Yeah, strangely enough, I was working in an investment bank, I'd run a mapping software company beforehand that I sold when I was young and didn't know what I was doing with running a company. And I desperately wanted to get out of the investment banking world. And the principal of the bank said he would find me to do whatever I wanted to do. And so I started building software for

Ian Richardson: 00:03:07

Right? Yes. Because I was going to ask how you got into the cruise sector, because people always telling me, it's a niche channel, or niche market. So it was Silversea, your first client?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:03:16

Yeah, it was they had a very ambitious kind of technological ideas in 2000 10s, including wanting, they wanted to build a mobile app. And I know this sounds crazy. But like, if you think about the iPhone came out 2008. And by early 2010, you still could not actually write software for the for iOS, there was no app store. And so the idea was, we'll have guests be able to contact

Ian Richardson: 00:04:10

Well, yeah, it's a high price point. So they can afford that luxury.

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:04:14

To be fair, it was also my first experience of building like real software on board of a cruise ship. I don't want to say it was an unmitigated disaster, but it was not good. Like, the Wi Fi in the corridors for the stewards did not work and people didn't know how to use tablets. Yeah, it was it was it was not great.

Ian Richardson: 00:04:31

Yeah, we all need to go through one or two of those implementations. So I mean, in terms of I mean, that that that was how you got in how has it evolved since then? What sort of challenges so very cruise specific challenges can you talk about?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:04:45

Yeah, so now we're, Sourcetoad is like a real products and services company. We're kind of split 50-50 and product licenses and support. So that's the kind of the stuff that we already have off the shelf. That our customers will either just purchase a license from us, and then we'll modify it. And that's, you know, interactive TV systems, digital signage, captive portals and

Ian Richardson: 00:06:02

Yeah, and I think the last time we caught up it was at Seatrade in March, Global in Miami. And I think you had your software in the Tech Zone, The Interactive Tech Zone. So I mean, first of all, how was Seatrade for you?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:06:16

It was great. Actually, you know, we've been doing this long enough now where we we've never had a booth or anything we've attended every year for seven years, something like that. Sometimes with partners, we've shared spaces with others. But for the last couple of years, we've been an interactive textbook, which has been a lot of fun, and a lot more kind of hands on with

Ian Richardson: 00:07:14

There's been some success out of those as well, or they grew some legs, didn't they?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:07:18

Yeah, two of the companies. I know for sure one took the prototype and use that as the basis to they kind of pivoted a little bit, but they use it as the basis for their, their business. They have a photo momento kind of business around around that idea that's actually worked out really well for them. And this year, we demoed our mobile app in a box product, which is

Ian Richardson: 00:07:43

Yes. So this is cruise director?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:07:45

Yeah, so we have a piece of middleware, which is the most boring thing in the world to talk about. But it basically sits in front of multiple PMS. So if you've got Elio or Talia or MSP or whatever it is, you've got middleware kind of sits in front of it, and speaks that language. And then we built that so that we could, we didn't have to build 20 different interactive TV systems

Ian Richardson: 00:08:26

Daunting from the customer side or daunting think from the vendor side, I guess both right?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:08:31

Yeah both I mean, yeah. Just telling protestations. Yeah. And then there's so many stakeholders, and so many every everybody wants something different. So we're the product we've come up with is, will not be perfect for everybody. But it does, it checks all the boxes, it's got pre cruise check in, it's got boarding passes, it's got you know, once you get on board, it has dining

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:10:26

notifications are game changing?

Ian Richardson: 00:10:29

Absolutely. And it's not just sort of operational push notifications. It's commercial as well, presumably.

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:10:35

Yeah, I mean, we, we always have to be careful health and safety probably comes first in every cruise lines mind, especially these days. And if people feel like they're being sold too hard, they'll turn it off. And so you kind of want to walk a fine line. So we found that the best way to do that is lots of opt ins. So hey, I want to receive special notifications about the spa like

Ian Richardson: 00:11:19

Yeah that makes sense. Now, I want to talk about your white paper that you publish, because I think since you've been doing it since 2018. Yeah, I got a copy of it. I read it. It's very good. But so you publish this annual crews, mobile app, white paper. So why did you start doing that? And what did you hope to get out of it? And has it been a success for you?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:11:42

Every year, what we do is we download all the apps that we can find that are publicly available in English cruise apps, and we download them and we investigate them from a security perspective, that's a euphemism, we use some in house tools, and some third party tools, the same kind of things you would use for, you know, checking to see if there's a virus inside of your Android

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:13:33

discovered, inside of applications, what features are trending, what features have become kind of commonplace. And if we see anything interesting in terms of, you know, what technologies are being used, or what people are doing to secure their, their mobile app, some hacks or you know, obvious getting the code, things like that. So and it's been very successful. The first year or two, we

Ian Richardson: 00:14:29

Yeah, well, I certainly find it an interesting read. So staying on that theme, what sort of is interesting and new that people are doing in cruise mobile apps?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:14:38

Yeah. So this year was different from previous years, which is that we published a version on river cruise apps, which is definitely not as interesting as the well it's not as interesting from a technical perspective as the ocean apps which you know, they have much bigger budgets behind them. The one standout was Viking Cruises because they have a large ocean fleet now and

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:16:32

you would expect, there's a core set of features that everyone's cited are important, or at least a table stakes when that was not the case just a few years ago. So the apps have actually become more similar now. And what's interesting is, because they're all more similar and cruise lines, they are interested largely in innovation and technology. They continue to push the innovation boundary

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:18:22

about just from a process perspective about what people are being told. So I think you're gonna see a lot of new push notification related features coming out. And I think you're also going to start to see like, relatively unexpected features, probably in two main categories, which I think which I kind of put a surprise and delight. So the fun stuff to entice guests to download the app, it's very

Ian Richardson: 00:19:40

What are you excited about working on at the moment?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:19:43

The things that are really interesting to me at the moment are some of the cool crazy stuff that we're doing with expedition cruising. It's been going on for a while with some brands, but this is some growth in that sector. And there are even more challenging communities issue and technology issues around when you're going to like the Antarctic or your shore excursion team now

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:21:42

know, if you go to expedition cruising, and you're taking like a small plane, you might want to notify the passengers that the sea plane is going to be delayed, or it might be early. And now that's, that's an off the ship experience. But it's being dictated by something's happening on board. So that's really cool. And then the other kind of the holy grail of all of this is, you know, I'm sitting

Ian Richardson: 00:22:32

That does sound exciting. And what about, I'm gonna sort of look to the future a little bit now, or what do you predict is going to happen in the next five years? In terms of passenger apps let's say...

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:22:44

I can tell you what I what I think is gonna happen, what I hope is going to happen, those are two separate things, maybe. So my hope is because we do, one of the things we do for quite a few kind of hospitality companies and a couple of cruise lines, but not not as many as probably we should, is we do security audits and penetration tests. Every time we've done a pen test on a

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:24:40

thing later to talk about something less scary. Digital check in is not ubiquitous in the industry, because it's tricky. You know, you're dealing with that bridge between shoreside and shipboard systems. So that's always tricky, and I think that that's probably going to be solved on the new PMS and basically got this handle Coming out of the box. And then there are like this kind of bridges

Ian Richardson: 00:25:26

Right? What about the employee crew experience? Anything you see in the future there?

Greg Ross-Munro: 00:25:33

Absolutely. We talked with a lot of cruise lines. And that is a question they all have. And so we have 10 different versions of a crew app basically being bandied around crew from operational perspective, if you can make their lives better. And you can you can reduce turnover, you can prove health and safety. You can even reduce friction on board by having information available

Ian Richardson: 00:26:59

Great. Well, as always, Greg, it's been an absolute education, talking with you. And it's great to see that you've still got so much passion for improving the guest and crew experience. So thanks for joining us. I really appreciate it. I really hope our audience have enjoyed it as much as I have. So tune in for more Seatrade Cruise Talks coming very soon. Thanks for