In case you were at the beach, shaken up by an earthquake or lost power during a hurricane this summer (I did all three in the past month) and somehow missed our webinar on mobile strategy, fear not. We captured the whole thing for you watch on YouTube.

In the webinar, Jean-Noel Lau Keng of Amadeus and I cover

• The state of the mobile industry (for those of you looking for stats)
• Common challenges in approaching mobile development initiatives
• Why mobile has become a critical channel in the travel sector, and how Amadeus are integrating mobile into their products and services
• How Transaction v. Engagement objectives may impact the approach you take to mobile
• The approach Amadeus has taken to address the mobile imperative, unexpected challenges, and the results of the company’s mobile initiative
• What are the 5 key steps your organization should take to implement a successful mobile strategy

If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments.

Join me for a webcast on August 11 at Noon ET/9am PT/6pm CET with our client Amadeus to talk about the latest trends in mobile development!

Mobile technology is the center of customer interaction for competitive businesses today; spurred by the always-connected customer, mobile has become the primary channel for business and consumer communication. While pushing applications to mobile devices is (or should be) on every company’s agenda, it can be difficult to know where or how to begin designing new capabilities and user interfaces for smaller, mobile devices.

Join this webcast featuring Jean-Noel Lau Keng Lun, Senior Manager, Mobility from Amadeus, the leading transaction processor and provider of advanced technology solutions for the global travel and tourism industry; and Glenn Gruber, AVP Mobile Solutions from Ness Technologies.

Jean-Noel and Glenn will discuss current trends in the mobile market and the most effective approaches for companies to develop and implement a sound mobile strategy. The discussion will include:

• Why mobile has become a critical channel to Amadeus’ business, and how they are integrating mobile into their products and services
• How Transaction v. Engagement objectives may impact the approach you take to mobile
• The approach Amadeus has taken to address the mobile imperative, unexpected challenges, and the results of the company’s mobile initiative
• What are the 5 key steps your organization should take to implement a successful mobile strategy

We will be monitoring Twitter using #nessmobile during the event. Please tweet questions, topics you would like covered and other comments. We will try to incorporate as many as possible into our session.

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.

This seemed to be one of the more interesting weeks I’ve seen in quite a while. Yahoo makes a big move in Big Data, Google+ launches, Homeaway IPO’s and much more. Good stuff, take a read through.

1. They’re dancing in the streets of Austin…well that isn’t so out of the ordinary on Sixth Street. But after a successful HomeAway IPO, with a $2.2B valuation, they’re dancing down on First Street too. Amazingly, while some thought HomeAway’s offering was overvalued, shared soared almost 50%, raising the valuation to over $3B. Perhaps lost in the news is the announcement that the VRMA/Pegasus switch concept is dead which should only brighten HomeAway’s outlook.
2. Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li says that Google+ could offer great utility if you’re a Gmail/Android user, but that it increases the amount of trust that you have to have in Google. But in an AllThingsD interview with Google’s Vic Gundrota and Bradley Horowitz, it seems as if Google+ is still in the “science project” phase as the purpose of the limited launch is to get customer feedback before a big launch.
3. Mobile payment startup Square raises a $100M Series C round and now has a valuation of $1 Billion.
4. Microsoft officially launches Office365, the subscription-based cloud version of the vaunted Office suite. It should be an interesting transition for the folks in Redmond, particularly from a revenue perspective. I do wonder how enterprise adoption will unfold, but unfortunately it looks like Office365 is basically unusable on mobile devices, so that will slow adoption dramatically.
5. HP is looking for a hardware partner for WebOS in the Microsoft/Nokia vein.
6. Yahoo! launched Hortonworks, a spinoff with the sole focus on developing and commercializing the Hadoop technology originally developed in the company. Hortonworks is a joint venture between Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. This made big news at the Hadoop summit…and may be the first thing Yahoo! has done right in a while…but folks like CloudEra and MapR are making plenty of headway as well.
7. Another software leader born in the cloud commits to HTML5. First it was Facebook, not it’s Salesfore.com who has a big footprint within the enterprise. Just another example of how companies who are not bogged down by the baggage of the past 30 years can move faster to adopt new tech…which helps attract more customers. However, WindowsXP and IE 7 & 8 still hold back the pace of adoption of HTML5 in the enterprise.
8. It’s one thing when a company is no longer the darling of the media. It’s another when customers start to flee for alternatives. But can anything be salvaged when the employees plainly state they’ve lost confidence in the direction of the company? That seems the situation at Research in Motion. Worse yet, the tepid response from RIM seems to indicate they don’t yet believe there is a problem in the first place.
9. Everyone always wants to get the most of their employees, but the focus is often on “productivity”. How about tapping your employees “cognitive surplus”. Not familiar with the term? Check out this really interesting article and learn. Well worth the read.
10. A consortium of tech companies including Apple, Microsoft and RIM won the bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio.  That group looks like the epitome of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

Last week I had the opportunity to interview John Engates, CTO of Rackspace after his appearance on the Cloud Supersession at HITEC in Austin, TX. In the interview we cover a topics such as:

• Compare and contrast Cloud v. Virtualization strategies
• Advice for customers struggling with how to justify ROI for the cloud when they have existing infrastructure investments
• Security in the cloud
• OpenStack for private and hybrid clouds

The cloud computing “supersession” was moderated by Horseshoe Bay Resort CIO, Lyle Worthington and featured Infor’s Senior Vice President of R&D Javier Buzzalino, PAR Springer-Miller President and CEO Larry Hall and Charles Henderson, Trustwave’s Director of Application Security Services in addition to Engates.  You can find a link to my article recapping the session on Tnooz.

That’s the title of a post I wrote for Tnooz last week as the HITEC show was set to kickoff. As some of the commenters wrote, the advice I give isn’t just useful for hoteliers, but for any company considering leveraging the cloud.

Here are a couple of highlights from the article:

• According the recent IBM Global CIO study, cloud computing notched the highest gains in interest in CIO roadmaps than any other technology
• Cloud computing is not just hot in the enterprise, but was central to many PMS and hotel technology announcements at HITEC
• in evaluating whether to choose a cloud/SaaS solution over on premise you also need to do an honest evaluation of your own IT organization’s ability to manage your infrastructure. Google’s cloud-based Gmail service offers 99.984% availability, which is 46 times better than the averageMicrosoft Exchange implementation.
• Despite the articles about cloud failures and warnings about security, the cloud is probably more secure than your own infrastrucutre and is in use by financial institutions and governments that have more regulatory compliance requirements than travel. Further, major cloud platforms offer better physical and network security than virtually all hotel chains can provide.  These examples show that the cloud is not inherently less secure or less available than on premise solutions.

Finally were the Top Six Questions to ask companies offering cloud-based systems:

1. Is it really cloud or just cloud-washing?
2. Do you have Service Level Agreements on RTO/RPO?
3. What are the application availability SLAs?
4. Is there an offline mode?
5. What about integration with other systems?
6. How can I get my data back out (aka data portability)?

Click here to read the original article.

Apple’s announcements at WWDC are easy to get excited about, but be sure to check out the pieces by James Kobielus on big data and Florian Mueller on the latest in the Oracle-Google battle over Java.

1. The event of the week was Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference and Steve Jobs’ keynote.   The major announcements were iCloud, iOS5 and Mac OSX Lion. I would say that only those that felt a new iPhone announcement was required (i.e. Henry Blodget) were disappointed.
2. eBay keeps up their eCommerce acquisition spree, this time buying Magneto, an open source eCommerce platform and rolling it into a newly formed X.Commerce unit along with GSI Commerce (the deal just closed) and other pieces. eBay originally bought PayPal to reduce purchase friction, but now has built a broad eCommerce and Payments platform that is driving most of the growth and about 40% of the revenues for the company.
3. Choice Hotels rolled out a new cloud-based PMS system which could help induce hoteliers to switch flags. The cloud based offering eliminates OpEx costs and dramatically lowers implementation costs. The system is being used by 4,000 hotels worldwide.
4. I don’t know anyone who seems to know more about databases than Forrester’s James Kobielus. So listen to him when he says that Hadoop is the future of enterprise data warehouses. But fear not: “All of your investments in pre-Hadoop EDWs, data marts, data hubs, operational data stores, and the like are reasonably safe from obsolescence”. That’s comforting J.
5. Brilliant analysis by Florian Mueller on Oracle’s case against Google with respect to Java and Android. I’ve written about this before and it looked more like posturing then. Google’s own admission that they rejected a license offer from Sun and willfully went forward is pretty damning. This looks like real trouble.
6. Some feel the GDSs are “evil” and are limiting innovation in the travel sector, while others see that the GDS still plays a vital role in travel distribution and deliver a higher average yield while offering a completely variable distribution cost. Who doesn’t like healthy debate…or a cookie.
7. TIMN’s Nilay Patel writes that phone numbers are “…a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers”, yet provides some hope for the future.
8. JavaScript has made an amazing evolution from niche technology to a foundational element of the modern web.
9. Room77 closed an oversubscribed Series B round of $10.5M led by General Catalyst Partners. The financing will go toward expanding the company’s core search technology and its global index of hotel rooms.
10. Fusion-io builds more momentum for technology IPOs and investments with a successful IPO and a $2B valuation. Fusion-io, the Utah-based startup that uses flash memory to make ordinary servers run faster, technology plays an integral role in the recent mega-datacenters built by Facebook and Apple. Incidentally, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is Fusion-io’s Chief Scientist.

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.

That was the title of my latest post in Tnooz.  

For all the buzz around NFC and Google Wallet, I don’t think that it’s a real game changer in the near-term.  Why you may ask?

1. Google Wallet isn’t the only game in town. PayPal, Apple, Square (backed by Visa) and others are in the game and are well ahead at this juncture.
2. The wrong use case? The NFC-based technology fits better for Point-of-Sale retail situations than it does for how  much of travel is purchased. There may be other uses for NFC in travel, but I’m not sure how well payment fits.
3. It’s the Infrastructure, stupid. Getting NFC chips in phones is the easy part. Getting NFC-capable readers at the point of sale is another story entirely.
4. Devices need to reach critical mass. Google launched a Wallet system that today works on only 1 phone on 1 network in 1 country.  And it’s the smallest network of the Big 3-1/2.  Ironically Google might only succeed only if Apple, Microsoft and others are successful too.
5. The Court System. It seems as if it can’t be a travel related story if the courts aren’t involved in some way anymore. Rest assured they are as PayPal sued Google only hours after the Wallet announcement dropped.

But maybe my perspective is skewed as I’m not a huge believer in NFC (a 10 year old technology) as a game changer. Please read the full article and please add your thoughts in the comments?

1. Airline cutovers are challenging and fragile projects. So it’s not surprising that there are often hiccups, but the problems during the cutover at AeroMexico had some fairly significant impacts to travelers.
2. Building airline systems is hard work too as HP is reportedly working through some challenges with their Agiliare Passenger Service System which is the basis of American Airlines’ Jetstream product. HP reportedly let go upwards of 200 contract developers. But conflicting sources make it hard to know whether this is just growing pains or something more significant. The only thing for certain is that many people are watching.
3. There’s a lot that I like about the OpenStack cloud platform – it’s been built by real rocket scientists and can be deployed on any infrastructure. Citrix has taken the platform another step ahead by launching Project Olympus – the first commercialized distribution of OpenStack which will include a Citrix-certified version of Open Stack along with a cloud optimized version of Citrix XenServer as hypervisor. A shrewd move by Citrix to counter the momentum that VMWare is creating.
4. Software AG buys Java performance specialist Terracotta with the stated goal to build a cloud application platform that would compete with the big boys – IBM, Oracle and VMWare. Perhaps it’s a little ambitious of a goal given its current enterprise application lineup.
5. After a period of rumors, Twitter officially buys TweetDeck. One hopes that Twitter leaves TweetDeck alone, or at least doesn’t make many significant changes. Here’s a story from the inside on how it all went down.
6. Getaround…the Airbnb of car rental wins TechCrunch Disrupt. Getaround is an alterative to ZipCar and traditional car rental agencies allowing customers to rent personal cars by the week, day or hour.  Besides winning the $50K, the must be real happy about this next story.
7. Can Airbnb really be worth $1B or are we just partying like it’s 1999? At least the folks at Andreesen Horowitz thinks so as they lead a $100M investment into the alternative lodging startup.
8. Choosing between developing native apps or going down the mobile web route is a decision that companies struggle with all the time. This article points out two key considerations for commerce companies – native apps have significantly higher conversion rates and can deliver better performance than mobile sites, also impacting conversion. Just something to keep in mind.
9. PayPal files suit against Google and some former employees, specifically recent hire Osama Bedier who joined Google to help create Google Wallet, a direct competitor to PayPal’s mobile payment platform.
10. Kayak reports stellar results in advance of its planned IPO.