Well you may notice the new headline. Trying to find 10 stories that were really interesting was sometimes a challenge. And sometimes it made it hard to then find one or two others to give a little more perspective on. So I’m shrinking the list.  Here we go:

1. I’m not sure why I’m so riveted by the patent fights between Oracle and Google over Java and Apple v. Samsung and HTC. Well maybe it’s because they may have industry-altering implications. Nobody covers it better than Florian Mueller. This latest post on Google’s flawed stance on patents is gold.
2. I love visualizations. I think that they can be very powerful. Here’s a new app that provides a visual interpretation of your Facebook friends social graph. It’s not 100% perfect, but it does a nice job of clustering real social circles. Automatically creating or suggesting to add friends to ‘circles’ in this way would be a cool, easy to use, feature for Facebook and operate much closer to real life than G+ Circles (IMO)
3. AirBnB, fresh off their big fundraising round has a PR disaster (aka #Ransackgate) as a “host” house is trashed. CEO Chesky quickly pens an article about safety for TechCrunch, but it’s easy to look concerned in retrospect. The apology that came on Monday doesn’t make me feel much better either. But this is what creeps me out about their model.
4. HP joins OpenStack along with Dell. Big, big win for the open source PaaS, which now seems destined to be the leading private/hybrid cloud stack.
5. Google launches Hotel Finder, a new “experiment” to help users find the perfect hotel. What I like about the tool is the more exact, visual way you can create a search area that’s not simply a radius around a particular location. I’m not so sure that the rate discount comparison feature is something that hotels will appreciate however.
6. Cloud Computing and SOA: 2 great tastes that taste great together. JP Morgenthal pens a nice article about what Cloud can learn from SOA and vice versa.
7. Lastly, I’m sorta sad to see Borders go (not that I ever bought books there; but the idea of fewer bookstores in general), but this is a great article written from a branding point of view.

Image courtesy of Kevin Dooley via Creative Commons.

In case you missed it:

1. Aloft Hotels, a Starwood brand, is rolling out a new “Smart Check-In” program which uses a RFID keycard & a push notification to a smart phone to let guests by-pass the check in lines and head straight for their rooms. I think this might be a better solution than trying to directly use NFC chips in smartphones.
2. Expedia & Groupon announced Groupon Getaways at the All Things Digital D9 Conference. Henry Harteveldt and Evan Konweiser provide perspectives. Both agree that consumers will like it but that travel suppliers may not.
3. Yahoo and Alibaba have made up (well sort of). But Alibaba’s Jack Ma thinks that Yahoo! would  be better off it were broken up, something that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has resisted thus far.
4. Just a day after American Airlines released an attack ad against Orbitz (the video has been made “private” by American shortly after the court decision) the courts ruled in favor of Orbitz and ordered American to reinstate their fares on the Chicago-based OTA. But fear not CourtTV fans, the legal shenanigans continue.
5. “Ooh, the cloud is scary…it’s unreliable to put complex, mission critical apps. You should keep it all on your own internal systems”. Yeah, right. Ignore the haters. NYSE Technology just built a custom cloud for financial markets. If a highly-regulated industry that relies on real-time data can implement the cloud, any industry can.
6. Oracle donates OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation. While @krishnan wonders about the ramifications wrt the LibreOffice fork of the project, I wonder whether the real purpose behind the move is to re-ingratiate Oracle to the Apache folks and bring them back into the JCP as part of a strategy in the ongoing litigation against Google for the forking of Java in the Android platform.
7. Nokia downgraded its earnings outlook and the markets responded with a vengeance knocking down the stock by about one-fourth to almost half the 52-week high price. Asymco’s Horace Dediu breaks down the value of the different components of Nokia’s business.
8. Groupon filed for an IPO and some of the information released made a few people wonder where the real value of the company lies and if the model is sustainable. What was most shocking to me is that in the last funding round – which was a BILLION dollars – 86% of the funds were paid back out to existing investors, board members and officers. I have never seen such an exit for investors between rounds. Crazy.
9. I was having a conversation with a client the other day about how to balance support of older platforms versus building their apps with an eye to the future. An hour later, Google announced they were dropping support for Firefox 3.5, IE7 and Safari 3. Good decision IMO. If only Microsoft built a version of IE9 (the only version of IE that supports HTML5) that worked on XP, life would be much easier for people designing web apps.
10. Ever hear of “Availability Zones”? In the wake of the Amazon outage a few weeks ago, you may want to learn. There’s not a lot of info out there on how they work, but F5’s Lori MacVittie does a nice job summarizing and putting it into context regarding application reliability and availability & DR in the cloud.

Of course all the news pales in comparison to the successful raid by a group of Navy Seals that ended in the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Unlike Rashard Mendhenhall, I have no ambivalent feelings about it.

So on with the other things that happened in the tech and travel sectors:

1. There was a lot of over-reaction to the Amazon EC2 that pulled down Foursquare, Quora and Reddit and other sites last week. But it’s awful easy to put the blame solely on the cloud provider or attribute it to the concept of cloud computing in general. But I agree with Adron Hall’s take: “If you’re site is down because of a single point of failure that is your bad architectural design, plain and simple.”
2. Gaming the system. Great phrase. Now SERKO’s introducing gaming into their booking tool to reward users for staying in compliance with company travel policies.
3. For all the negative reviews that the Blackberry PlayBook got (deservedly so for rushing an incomplete product to market), the sales of the first Android Honeycomb-based tablet, the Motorola XOOM, have been…let’s say “disappointing”. Or terrible. You pick the adjective you feel more comfortable with.
4. Price fixing is such a loaded term. Rate parity is a common goal for hoteliers and many other retail sectors. But is it illegal? It looks like we’ll find out soon as the UK’s Office of Fair Trading is looking into the matter. Tnooz obtained a series of emails that shed’s some light on what’s going on.
5. Developers determine whether a platform is successful or not. And right now things don’t look good for Windows Phone7 and Blackberry.
6. I always thought that airline retailing was a little strange (maybe a lot). It’s one of the few retail products that doesn’t use a discount/margin mechanism to compensate its channel for their effort and increase the profitability to the supplier for direct sales. At least I’m no longer alone. Forrester’s Henry Harteveldt made the suggestion that the airline industry look as a traditional retail model during his keynote at the Open Travel Advisory Forum. Here are some other highlights of Henry’s speech.
7. Everybody knew that Symbian was toast in the age of the smartphone. Nokia knew and so they put their efforts into MeeGo as the next generation OS.  That was until they realized it was going nowhere too. So they crafted a deal to license Microsoft to bet the future on Windows Phone7. But perhaps the people at Accenture didn’t get the memo. Because they just acquired (paid?) the Symbian technology from Nokia – and the 3,000 people who were working on it.  And now Accenture says it will play a key role in their mobility services. Maybe it’s just me, but it sounds like someone buying a quill factory to compete with digital publishers. More likely than not, it’s so that Accenture can extend the ‘life’ of their existing Symbian professional services business that they bought from Nokia in 2009. So if it cost them nothing great.  Or maybe they know something we don’t.
8. Tnooz reports that Expedia is making big bets on their new technology platform. What’s most curious about the announcement is that there are few clues to what that technology really is (except for the drag on earnings that the cost of development was). However, the results at Hotels.com, attributed to the new platform, inspire some confidence. But this quote from Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi almost makes me laugh: “We will be surprised if it doesn’t work.” Most people expect their plans to work and are surprised when they don’t. I’m sure the guys at Nokia felt the same way
9. To the delight of many users, Yahoo has sold Delicious, the popular social bookmarking technology to some of the founders of YouTube. Did you panic and transfer all your bookmarks to a different platform when Yahoo first announced they were shuttering Delicious?
10. Luxury vacation rental and trip management service Inspirato picks up $11M in funding.

1. Farelogix is on a roll as they add Delta to their client roster and giving it a clean sweep of all the major NorthAmerican carriers (Air Canada, American Airlines, United/Continental and US Airways).  However, while utilizing a “direct connect” technology, Delta is taking a kinder and gentler approach to airline distribution.
2. The travel distributions wars have hit a whole new level as US Airways files an Anti-Trust suit against Sabre. The heart of the filing is to remove the exclusivity provisions that binds airlines to a single GDS and provide extraordinary market power to the GDS over the airlines.
3. Intel blew past analyst estimates and delivered record earnings. The numbers seemed to show a very healthy PC market, but some have questioned whether there was some channel stuffing of a sort going on. But in any case, Intel does need to make some progress in the mobile space.
4. This is one of the most interesting pieces of analysis I’ve seen in a while. While most people are concerned with the relative share of Android v. iOS, for all of Android’s market success, it’s had almost no direct effect on Google’s stock price, whereas Apple’s fortunes correlate to the iPhone’s success.
5. If Michael Krigsman believes these numbers, it’s good enough for me. But what they say are shocking. It’s frightening that the expectations of 3-out-of-4 IT executives is that their projects will fail before they even start. The reasons all make sense, but that’s part of why we at Ness feel that it’s important to take a product-development approach to all software initiatives.
6. Apple usually exceeds earnings expectations, but this is getting ridiculous – Apple beat Wall Street consensus estimates by more than $1B in revenues and $1.00 EPS for the quarter.  And that was over estimates that were 5% – 10% higher than Apple guidance. TC’s Erick Schonfeld points out that MacBooks, iPhones and China are driving Apple’s performance. The first two are not surprising, but the numbers out of China indicate are pretty amazing.
7. American Airlines put forward disappointing earnings and apparently had an interesting earnings call.  Apparently Wall Street isn’t buying, feeling that no matter all the talk about distribution, there are some fundamental challenges such as high labor costs that can’t be overcome.
8. Concur keeps making moves. The latest is a strategic marketing agreement & $40M investment in Cleartrip, India’s largest online travel agency.
9. Is there a Moore’s Law for solar energy? I certainly hope so. It’s not travel, it’s not software, but it’s definitely worth reading.
10. eBay buys Where.com as they hope to drive more mobile transactions through PayPal.

As a Tennessee Titans fan I’m still trying to decide whether to be happy or concerned at the acquisition of Randy Moss. Thoughts?

Anyway, on to the best of the week that was:

1. The vacation rental market is heating up and while Google hopes to get a piece with their investment in Homeaway, Pegasus and the VMRA have other ideas.  Even better is this piece by OpenTravel Alliance’s Valyn Perini.
2. Facebook enhances their platform for mobile with single-click sign on using Facebook Connect for mobile apps and opening up their Places API. With over 200M mobile Facebook users already (40% penetration) they don’t need to develop their own phone. They’re already available on every smartphone and many modestly intelligent feature phones. From a travel perspective, the important news is that they’re expanding their support for businesses to provide local deals as a reward for check-ins.
3. It’s always more fun to watch a good game of chicken from the sidelines. This one’s a doozy. American Airlines has threatened to remove all AA flights from Orbitz as of December 1. If it in fact happens, who do you think gets hurt worse?  J.P. Morgan Airlines analyst, Jamie Baker adds some insight into the financial implications.
4. Dell buys SaaS integration house Boomi. Kudos and great exit to Bob Moul, Rick Nucci and the other folks at Boomi. At first I didn’t see this as a great fit for Dell, but CloudAve’s Krishnan a reasonable explanation when he puts it in context with Dell’s acquisition of Perot Systems and their attempt to remake themselves as a services company like IBM and HP before them.  However, I’m still not convinced and think that Phil Wainwright may have the right perspective.
5. Robert Cole goes inside the numbers of Amadeus’ recent Travel Gold Rush 2020 report.
6. Is this the beginning of the social graph cold war? Facebook, which has been chastised for their sometimes lackadaisical position regarding the security/sharing of their members’ personal information, has become very much like the Hotel California – allowing data from third-party sources to come in, but it…or any other personal information…can never leave. Well I guess Google finally said “enough” and has stopped Facebook from allowing users to invite more friends to join by importing their Gmail contacts.
7. Everbread, a relatively new entrant to the flight search engine game announced 3 new clients for their Haystack product (almost a perfect product name, eh?). No disrespect to fellow Tnooz nodes, Stephen Ekbergh and Timothy O’Neill-Dunne, but while nice wins, Everbread still has yet to break through with any premier clients. But I guess at this point positive trends, not raw revenues are the best measure.
8. Good article talking about the value of multi-tenancy from a business alignment perspective, not merely a cost of operations point of view.
9. I think that we can all agree that Farelogix’s Jim Davidson is “not a witch”, but he is nothing if not combative. Another volley in his was with the GDS’ as he responds to Sabre’s 20 Questions.
10. What’s another billion to Larry? Oracle buys eCommerce player ATG to enhance m-Commerce play. Analysis from Forrester’s Brian Walker.

Some may say that all that matters is that the software works…I ain’t one of them.  The technical decisions that a  software provider makes are critically important.  It’s as important in the travel industry as it is in traditional enterprise software, especially as a lot of companies in the travel industry are looking to modernize their applications and many of them are looking at adopting technologies like Cloud Computing and SaaS.   So whether your on the sell side or buy side it’s important to understand these new technologies.  This the theme of my recent 2-part series in Tnooz.

If you’re a buyer of travel technology, the technology choices of your supplier goes directly to the sustainability of your vendor, their ability to deliver their solution at the right cost and the performance and functionality you require – now and into the future.

If you’re a provider of travel technology, it’s a question of whether you’re positioning yourself appropriately to meet the future needs of your customers. Especially given the pervasive use of legacy technology in the industry.

Part 1 provides the context and acts as a bit of technology primer.

In Part 2 I lay out the top 10 reasons that you should care about how your travel technology provider builds and operates their products.

JD Power’s survey on hotel satisfaction is out, Facebook rolls out Questions, Google “borrows” content from Yelp!, Apple adds a few more details to a proposed iTravel app and a few other things that caught my eye:

1. Excellent, excellent post by RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady on whether Open Source in is maturity, growth or decline.
2. The Big 3 GDSs issue no-response response to Open AXIS. The closest thing to an answer was that they want one standard to rule them all. They just didn’t commit to whose.
3. Norm Rose’s take on the Google/ITA deal.
4. Facebook rolls out Questions to the masses. Tnooz’s Kevin May explores what this might mean for the travel industry.
5. ZDNet’s Phil Wainwright provides a framework of how to choose the right Cloud Computing platform.
6. Google introduces location-aware mobile display ads. Google claims that location-based mobile ads deliver an 8% increase in click through rates.  Should be some significant benefits for the travel industry.
7. New patent details indicate that Apple is planning to enable ancillary services booking from their rumored iTravel app.
8. As location-based content becomes more important for the travel and hospitality industry, Google ramps up its location content under Google Places using Yelp! content.  Understandably, Yelp’s  CEO is not exactly pleased.
9. Steve Cheney has some thoughts about why Apple should buy Infineon’s wireless chipset business to enhance its mobile device business on the (relative) cheap.
10. According to a recent JD Power survey, about 6 in 10 hotel guests made their reservations online in 2010, a 7.4% increase.  And the data suggests that they are more likely to book direct from the branded hotel website rather than an independent travel site.

The travel industry has been leveraging software for more than 60 years, starting with American Airlines’ installation of the first automated booking system in 1946 (hat tip to Stephen Joyce) and led the way for electronic commerce even as Gates, Jobs and Packard were playing with blocks.  So what that really means is that there’s a lot of old code out there on old platforms.

And to a large extent, while these systems are still running, they cause their fair share of problems:

• High cost of operations: can’t take advantage of lower cost hardware or Cloud-computing
• Fragility and Inflexibility: the systems don’t allow for rapid feature enhancement or make integration with other systems challenging.
• Mortalityware: literally there are fewer people alive who know the old development languages and how these systems work. And it’s not a problem that gets better.

Now it’s kinda scary that a trillion dollar industry is so dependent on what many would consider to be outdated tech. And the movement of the industry towards a la carte pricing, a.k.a. ancillary revenues is being blunted in part by the ability of the underlying software to merchandise and manage the distribution of these different offerings through multiple channels.

But modernization is a challenge that the industry has struggled with for years and while some systems have been moved to modern platforms, many more are still tied to the past. So what’s holding things back?

It’s not technology. Certainly a big part is an organization’s appetite to expend the resources to make the move. But I believe an underappreciated aspect is the psychology of taking on a modernization project. Many of the applicationsthat we’re talking about have millions of lines of code that have built on top of each other like an archeological dig with one civilization built on top of another. So the task can seem daunting and lead to paralysis. Few want to undertake a full re-write which can feel like a Cecil B. DeMille film, costing millions of dollars and thousands of lives (or at least man-years).

So it’s good to have a framework with which to view your choices. A good model is my “Six Degrees of Modernization” which covers the main paths to modernize your application.

When dealing with a huge project as we’re discussing, the big bang approach of re-writing the code is often a recipe for disaster and porting really doesn’t buy you a lot. So an evolutionary approach can be of great help. An example of such a strategy is where you’d start by separating and Wrapping the different bits of functionality into a SOA harness. Now that you have the code broken into more manageable pieces you can start the process of Translate/Refactor or Replace piece by piece — with the dual benefit of shrinking the size of the problem to a more manageable level that will help create early “wins” for your team and momentum for the project, as well as delivering a more flexible, higher code quality platform.

But this is not something that everyone should try at home. This is not a coding activity, although that’s a big part of it. More than anything this is an architectural challenge (even more so if you’re trying to transition from an on-premise to an On-Demand model). And it’s an area where Ness Software Product Labs Strategic Consulting team have helped many clients.

Hot industry stats, debates on legislation, an Open Source cloud stack and other news of note:

1. Since Congress has started to take up the question of whether airlines need to be transparent about ancillary fees across channels, in order to allow travelers adequately compare real costs of their choices, Timothy O’Neill-Dunne puts forward the definitive answer. Of course no one in Washington is listening, so this drama will surely last longer than the Microsoft Kin (what wouldn’t?).



2. On a related note, Sabre announces that it will update its “Air Total Pricing” system to enable travel agents and consumers see the total price of their trip, inclusive of ancillary fees before they book. The comparison shopping aspect will be addressed first, but the booking and fulfillment portion of the equation probably won’t be solved until later this year.
3. Forrester Cloud Computing analyst James Staten provides his view on Rackspace’s announcement to Open Source their cloud computing stack. NASA may not have found intelligent life out there, but must think the folks at Rackspace are pretty bright because they are amongst the first to deploy the platform.
4. Shortly after being identified as key competitors by Google, heretofore unheralded start ups Everbread and Vayant go mano-a-mano as Vayant alleges copyright infringement.
5. The continuation of a good week for Apple. First they declare there is no Antenna-gate and then they obliterate earnings estimates with their best quarter ever.  iPads almost outsold Macs and it was the most Macs ever sold in a quarter.
6. To patent or not to patent. That is the question. Great article by Pamela Samuelson from Cal-Berkley on why startups decide to patent…or not.
7. TopGuest, a new location-based travel rewards service has a bunch of notable investors, but more importantly nabs a partnership with the InterContinental Priority Club and IHG’s 4,400 properties.
8. Amadeus released preliminary results of their Guide to Ancillary Revenue in association with leading airline ancillary revenue consultancy IdeaWorks. Some good stats if you missed it.
9. While we have our survey out on what you think about the new Open AXIS Group, Professor Sabena gives us his take.
10. An entertaining and insightful view on the upside of newly passed legislation in NY outlawing the use of private dwellings short-term rentals. While decried by many as propping up the large hotel chains, there are real safety, health and security concerns that this bill protects unsuspecting travelers from.

Sorry for the late Monday post. So without further adieu:

1. Google introduced App Inventor, a simple GUI based app builder for Android OS. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid takes it for a spin. Mike Loukides from O’Reilly Radar discusses the different philosophies behind Apple and Google as evidenced by App Inventor. I for one don’t think that we’ll be better off having more bad apps at our disposal, but to each his own. And I guess that’s Google’s point.
2. Tnooz reports ITA had been working on hotel search. Add this to Google’s display of hotel listings and pricing on Google Maps and you’ve got some serious juju going.
3. Big cloud announcements at Microsoft WDC10. Perhaps Azure-in-a-box is the most intriguing. Ben Kepes has an interesting take.  And eBay is the first high-profile client to take the plunge.
4. Facebook v. Google: the upcoming travel wars. Interestingly the author ponders Microsoft’s potential role, but doesn’t consider Apple.  Curious.
5. Apple had its press conference on Friday, but the real-world experiences of Engadget’s own writers shows that perhaps the iPhone4 antenna issue isn’t as big of an issue that the media is making it out to be. And I would say that Microsoft COO Kevin Turner’s lame attempt at a joke equating the iPhone antenna issue with the outright suckiness of Vista was imprudent at best. First ship a mobile OS that doesn’t suck and then you’ve earned the right to say something.
6. In related news, it looks like Microsoft Phone7 OS isn’t going to be the game changer they hoped it would be.
7. Can Google make a good travel product? TravelPost’s Simon Breakwell has some definite opinions. A must read.
8. Google Click-to-Call. Is this the new face of mobile advertising?
9. Bing Travel introduces Flight Summary with savings if you’re flexible with your travel plans. Pretty cool. Would be even cooler if they could integrate dynamic packing of hotel and car to give the best overall travel value.
10. Homeaway hires their new COO from PayPal. This signifies a move to better integrate alternative payments (including mobile) into the booking process, but perhaps shows an appreciation of the benefits of having a more professional software engineering organization in order to keep up with the needs of the business.