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.

Let me start out by saying that it seemed to be a good week for democracy in the Middle East (fingers crossed) and for Cheeseheads.

1. Jason Kincaid provides one of the better reviews of Google’s new Honeycomb Android OS that will be used on the upcoming Motorola Xoom tablet, amongst others.  It definitely looks like a big step forward and a capable competitor to the current iPad. But early reports indicate that the Xoom will retail for about $800, much more than the entry point of the iPad. And that doesn’t even consider what the iPad2 has in store for us. But a major step forward to be sure.
2. Almost as if acting out Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Microsoft (Darth Vader) finds the good inside itself to help Apple (Luke) stop Google (Emperor Palpatine…played by body double Eric Schmidt) from destroying video standards on the web (crush the Rebel Alliance).
3. Wanderfly raises $1M to continue to build out functionality in its social travel recommendation engine.
4. A nice analysis of the impact on flash sales on hotel marketing by Xotels’ Patrick Landman.
5. A post wonders what happens when TMCs become GDSs if the Direct Connect strategy takes hold. I often wondered who will fund the development that must follow at the TMC level. AirPlus International recently published some survey data that seems to drive to a logical conclusion.  I definitely understand the economic case on an airline level, but it’s still unclear to me how it pans out on a system level.
6. Phil Wainwright writes (say that 10 times fast) that Cloud Computing still needs a bill of rights. Spot on.
7. Verizon buys its way into cloud leadership through a $1.4B acquisition of Terremark. Forrester’s James Staten provides the analysis of the deal.
8. Travelport goes a long way to keep Orbitz from coming to an agreement with American Airlines. They are putting their money where their mouth is, but it feels like a desperate move.
9. Aria Systems, a leader in on-demand billing and a key technology for many SaaS companies, raised $20M. This follows on the heels of a very strong fourth quarter where booking tripled year-on-year.  But it was not all good news for Aria, as a key client, NetSuite announced its own billing and subscription product.  But on the whole, a great week for the company.
10. Last but not least, the travel industry’s cutest logo bags a $4.2M round from Expedia alums.

Well last week was my first PhoCusWright Conference and it was awesome. So many conversations, the opportunity to meet people “in person” for a change. Just terrific. And a lot happened during the conference that was newsworthy both at the conference and elsewhere.  If you didn’t attend PCW10, try to make it next year. But be sure to check out Tnooz to find out what you missed.

Now let me know what I think you shouldn’t have missed last week:

1. Bar brawls like the ones between AA and Travelport/Orbitz or Google v. FairSearch are fun to watch. New products, acquisitions and partnerships are good, but liquidity is king. So unquestionably the biggest news in the travel industry is Kayak filing for an IPO. This is the second big IPO (Amadeus) in the sector in the past 12 months.
2. While unrelated to the travel or technology industries, but far more important for the general economy, speaking of IPOs, GM raises $20B in their IPO culminating the complete turnaround of the brand since the bailout led by the Obama Administration.  Not bad for an “anti-business” president
3. Looks like 2011 may be the year of NFC (or at least first of many), but mobile telecom providers Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are trying to make sure they get to play more than a supporting role by joining forces to create a new mobile payment platform called ISIS. Will they succeed against established payment platforms from Visa, Mastercard and PayPal? If we can use past performance as a predictor of future success, my Magic 8-Ball says “Signs point to no”.
4. How do you choose the right sales model for your SaaS startup?  Start with realizing that a monthly subscription isn’t your best – or only – option.
5. I would like to say that it’s finally settled that Public Clouds beat Private Clouds, but that’s unlikely to be the case. But at least Phil Wainwright’s in agreement with me and he’s got a surprising ally in his argument…Microsoft. I agree with Phil, read the whole Economics of the Cloud whitepaper.
6. Google launches another foray into the travel space with Hotpot, the location-based recommendation engine.  Mashable praises the UI, but I think it’s must be based on the “Google-has-no-interest-in-UI” scale, not an “it’s-actually-a-good-UI” scale.  And I’m still waiting for Google to provide a serious social network platform, not a series of siloed, oft misguided efforts.
7. Travel meta-search startup Hipmunk has a great UI, a great logo and now better search results with their announcement at the PhoCusWright Conference that they will be using ITA’s QPX solution for flight search and pricing. They had been using ITA’s technology indirectly via Orbitz, but direct access to ITA’s APIs should enable them to provide better search results and give users more power.
8. If you haven’t seen these, read the advice that Elliott Ng gives PhoCusWright TIS presenters on the UpTake blog. Direct and to the point…and often very humorous (if you don’t work for the company in question).
9. Facebook introduces a new email platform although it’s not really email. Good analysis from GigaOm and Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li.
10. Expedia decides to accelerate its mobile strategy, announcing its purchase of Mobiata. Terms were not disclosed. Whether Mobiata was the best mobile platform to buy can be debated. But it will be interesting to see what Homeaway and Farecompare do from here as Mobiata built their mobile apps.

Sorry for the delay, but I was traveling to Phoenix for the PhoCusWright Conference on Monday and then time sort of got away from me. But enough with the “dog ate my homework” excuses and on with the items I hope you didn’t miss last week:

1. A major shift in the technology analyst world as Ray Wang leads a “constellation” of star analysts to form Constellation Research Group. Ray leaves analyst supergroup Altimeter Group and is the second major defection in the past 2 months (mobile guru Michael Gartenberg left to join Gartner). Ray is joined by industry luminaries Phil Fersht, Sameer Patel, Vinnie Mirchandani, Frank Scavo and Oliver Marks among others.
2. Airbnb raises $7.2M from Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners to accelerate product development and accelerate global expansion.
3. The standoff between Orbitz and American Airlines escalates. Travelport raises one lawsuit and the war of words continues.
4. HP continues to move away from being a travel services provider to being a direct technology provider with the licensing of RezView NG hotel distribution platform from Pegasus Solutions. Certainly a shot in the arm to Pegasus, but technology companies who have viewed HP/EDS as a reliable implementation partner should now be wary and begin to view them as a competitor. And perhaps clients should wonder whether they’re being offered the best in class solution or just the HP one. Anyone have a view?
5. On a related note, 2 days later, Amadues launches their new SaaS hotel platform. Let me use acronyms to shortcut the story: AHP = CRS + PMS + GDS. The question is whether it will equal new business and help Amadeus create a beachhead in the hotel sector in the US.
6. Oracle and Apple team up to bring Java to Mac OSX. While this will play well to many developers, I believe the real target of the announcement was Google, who is increasingly being cast as the only major tech company who is not abiding by Oracle’s rules regarding Java. Of course in the same week Google ratchets up the stakes with their latest response to Oracle’s lawsuit.
7. Norm Rose tries to cut through the rhetoric in the direct connect v. GDS ‘discussion’. Unfortunately, the truth is that both sides seem as likely to propose a compromise as the Democrats and Republicans.
8. The Silicon Valley talent shortage redux.  So far no free Porsche Boxters.
9. The money is starting to flow into tech startups again and competition for top tech talent is rising again and as a result so are salaries. Now for many these are signs of optimism and excitement. But star-VC Fred Wilson urges people not to get too excited.
10. There was a lot of buzz about Rockmelt, the new social-savvy browser, backed by Netscape wunderkind, and Silicon Valley VC savant, Marc Andreessen, but as I read what was written in the blogosphere, I didn’t see what the big deal was about. Neither did ZDNet’s Phil Wainwright.

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.

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.

It’s Tuesday, not Monday, but here’s your guide to the week that was. Hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend and took a moment to remember the men and women who lost their lives in defense of our country (at least those of you in the US).

1. Timothy O’Neil-Dunne divines Google’s travel strategy. Whether he’s channeling Google executives or not, it’s a reasonable and thoughtful articulation.
2. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber provides his reflections on the Apple-Google feud post the I/O conference. The upshot: Great week for Google, mediocre for Apple, not good at all for Microsoft.
3. IBM buys Sterling Commerce for $1.4B. Insight and analysis from Altimeter Group’s Ray Wang. All I know for sure is that the AT&T shareholders are happy to have a pile of cash where an ill-fitting piece used to be.
4. Hmmm. iPad competitors may face CPU shortages and miss the Holiday selling season. And worse (for them) it seems they will try to compete on hardware features rather than user experience. Add to that the announcement that Apple has sold 2 Million iPads in the first 60 days and I sense happiness in Cupertino.
5. Timothy O’Neil-Dunne strikes again, describing his conflicted feelings over the recent ATPCO announcement regarding standards to enable ancillary revenue sales across various distribution channels.
6. Attention Cloudwashers: Ray Wang is on to you. Personally I’m surprised that there’s still so much confusion on the syntax around SaaS and Cloud. But wait until the technical discussions of how to achieve it start. Hoo boy.
7. Lean v. Fat Startups. No surprise that VCs favor the former. The truth is that neither works unless you have strong management.
8. Excellent, interesting study of transaction processing performance based on different cloud architectures from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
9. Excellent post by Lori MacVittie to show that while the recent VMWare relationships with SFDC and Google allow you to move your code from one Cloud platform to another, it isn’t the same as enabling cross-Cloud deployments.
10. Google had their week, but Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference is only a week away. The first major rumor has begun with the possible revitalization of Apple TV. Perhaps it is a hobby no longer.

A lot of stuff happened while I was OpenTravel’s 2010 Advisory Forum in Seattle this past week:

1. I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with the successful IPO of Amadeus (AMA.MC), the largest GDS and leader in global travel technology solutions…and Ness Software Product Labs’ signature client in the travel technology space.
2. Apple buys Siri.  It’s not just mobile-web search, Siri also has the ability to learn preferences and not just provide better results back, but help complete activities or business processes like making dinner reservations or booking a flight.  It should be interesting to see how the iPhone experience evolves as Siri deepens the integration with iPhone OS.
3. Salesforce.com and VMWare announce VMForce.  Looks like Salesforce finally admitted that APEX was holding back the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service business and partnered with VMWare to enable direct Java-based development on the rest of the Force.com infrastructure. Good analysis by Enterprise Irregulars Phil Wainwright, Bob Warfield and Brian Sommer.
4. 5 reasons iPhone v. Android isn’t Mac v. Windows. Well said.
5. Another Top 5 list.  This time it’s the untapped or under-exploited opportunities in travel.  Mobile payments, re-booking top the list, but read on to see what other opportunities lie in wait.
6. Steve Jobs’ official position on Apple v. Adobe Flash.  Nothing terribly new (or not already said by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber), but if it’s written by Steve…and he gives it almost 1700 words, you should at least read it.
7. Excellent analysis of what Apple’s announcement of iAds will mean.
8. Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington announces that with the recent announcements at the f8 conference we’re officially in the ‘age of Facebook’.
9. Forrester’s JP Gownder offers an opinion on why consumers will pay more for products and uses the Mac as a shining example.  I only have two issues with the analysis.  First I think that Gownder mistakenly equates repeat purchase with brand loyalty.  But more importantly, the piece reads as if the three categories can have similar impact. As I’m in the middle of Steven Sinek’s “Start With Why”, I believe “self-selection” (as Gownder calls it) reason is by far the most influential. But if you read the book, self-selection has a lot to do with whether or not a company has a compelling “why”.
10. On top of the Amadeus IPO, two big mergers in the travel industry:  Hertz buys Dollar Thrifty and United and Continental Airlines are set to merge under the United moniker. And it increasingly looks like Google will buy ITA.  A lot of activity for sure.

Reported early this morning by TechCrunch, Salesforce.com

“announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud, for approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.”

Surprisingly, the deal’s not supposed to close for another year (Q2 2011).

I think this makes great sense for Salesforce.  What better match for a CRM company than to provide integrated access to a prospect database.  Additionally, the integration of Jigsaw’s  model for the automation of acquiring and keeping up-to-date business contact data plus Jigsaw’s own data cloud platform should shore up AppExchange’s standing within the ISVs and Enterprise community, which is increasingly important with the recent launch of Google’s App Marketplace.

OK, so it’s April already.  But you still should take note of these articles.  I promise next week’s post will be Monday.

1. Novell rejects $2B takeover bid.  It’s nice they feel the company is worth more, but it’s never a good sign that the board is “looking for alternatives”.  I hope the company makes it. I hear their new social enterprise platform Pulse is very strong.  I can’t wait for the beta.
2. Fantastic article about who might buy Palm that includes profiles of the 13 potential suitors with rationale.
3. Google Testing Hotel Prices in Google Maps.  I guess it’s no longer a question on whether or not Google’s entering travel meta-search…they’re in it.  They’re also excellent analysis on the move by travel industry blogger Robert Cole here.
4. TravelClick to add sales and marketing services to Central Reservations Systems software platform. http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_nshw.php?mwi=7107
5. WSJ reports that hotels are most vulnerable to data breaches.  This is on the heels of the news that Wyndham was hacked for the 3^rd time in the last several years.  For those who didn’t know, PCI-DSS compliance is important.
6. Everbread emerges from stealth mode and launches a new search platform that claims to be significantly faster than other travel search engines.  The fare and pricing engine named Haystack is being targeted to airlines and OTAs.
7. Yahoo releases 2 new iPhone apps for search.  The Sketch-a-Search capability is really cool.
8. The Open Source and PaaS Paradox http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/15160/open-source-and-the-paas-paradox/
9. Tnooz to launch Travel App portal in association with Capterra. http://www.tnooz.com/2010/03/22/news/tnooz-to-launch-tsoftware-a-unique-software-store-for-travel-technology/. Pretty interesting development to see a news organization become a marketplace. I guess they’re going the CNET route.  At the very least this will probably be the best way for me to build a travel technology prospect database J
10. Valyn Perini, Executive Director of Open Travel, asks “Why do car rental agencies make it so easy for me to stiff them?” She makes good points about how car rental agencies are basically the only part of the travel food chain that doesn’t ask for at least some payment up front or charge penalties for no shows.