Let’s see what came up:

1. Forrester analyst John Rymer’s take on Oracle’s Cloud strategy. And for a bonus, a slightly different interpretation by fellow Forrester analyst Stefan Reid.
2. Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDnet: The Facebook imperative for enterprise software.  Hinchliffe is great. Longish articles at times, but good insight. Riffing off Benioff’s recent proclamation that enterprise software should look like Facebook (not sure I want my enterprise software UI changing every 3 months), he asks important questions like “Should Enterprises be Social” and has a Top 5 list of why IT should be social (I certainly won’t limit to IT).  But I think that social is critical for organizations, particularly global organizations, who want to innovate.  R&D has gone global and the best way to harness that is to make sure those teams are social with each other, collaborating and sharing.
3. David Linthicum: Cloud Provider Roulette.  Bottom line: If you are evaluating cloud computing technology today, you have to consider that your choice could be bought up this year or next. That means you need to make sure your legal agreements are rock-solid and spell out what happens if your provider is acquired
4. Wyndham Hacked for Third Time. Not good. Wyndham please talk to me about security testing.  Related article noting that recent research shows that the hospitality industry is hit hardest by hackers, with the natural focus on payment card information.
5. Tnooz: Will Priceline come back to the field?  The concentration of revenue in the OTA (online travel agency) business is pretty staggering.  It’s the Pareto Principle on steroids.
6. Tnooz: TripIt maps employee travel with TripIt groups.  Pretty cool way to keep tabs on the organization. Would be very helpful in case of a crisis and there was a need to know/get in contact with employees at a moments notice.
7. Daring Fireball: Thoughts on Windows Phone 7 by John Gruber (not related, but I’d be somewhat glad if people confused him with me. Would certainly help me get gigs on the speaking circuit)
8. Keeping in the iPad theme this TechCrunch article on Apple’s HTC patent Lawsuit indicates that the real focus of Apple’s ire is (spoiler alert) Google’s Android OS (ok, not really a spoiler).
9. Three theories why Google pushed Buzz out the door.  What’s more interesting to me is that it seems that the Buzz experience is vastly different on an Android device, with all it’s location-based goodness, than on a web client. Is this really targeted more at Foursquare than Twitter?
10. And last but not least: Ballmer’s really committing Microsoft to the Cloud. Yet somehow I still don’t quite believe it.

Homeaway, the online vacation rental giant snapped up it’s second vacation rental site in less than a week, purchasing AlugueTemporada.com.br.  The move expands Homeaway’s footprint into South America and gives them over 12,000 property listings on the continent and 475,000 worldwide.  The move is pretty savvy given the upcoming 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, both taking place in Rio de Janeiro.  Start searching now.

It looks like the sleeping giant has awoken and is aggressively moving to enhance it’s leadership position in the online vacation rental market.  It’s surprising only in that it’s the first significant moves to increase it’s depth and breadth of properties since it raised $250M 16 months ago.  It also follows behind Homeway’s first major television ad campaign where they launched an ad based on National Lampoon’s Vacation during this year’s Super Bowl.

What comes next for the Austin, TX based Homeaway is unclear, but they are certainly on the move.  It should be interesting to watch.

This was the only commercial that my wife and I actually watched as we sped thru the Oscars on DVR.  But I was very disappointed.  Apple advertising usually hits it out of the park, but in my opinion this had no impact. It didn’t spend time really communicating any of the capabilities of the device. It all went too fast.  Apple hopefully will create a number of different spots promoting specific capabilities that they believe will drive consumer adoption. Personally, I still plan on buying one, but if I was on the fence, I don’t think that this ad would have pushed me over.

The only thing Apple has going for it is that their advertising is still miles better than Microsoft’s advertising and Google hasn’t bothered at this point. I must say that I’m appalled at the Microsoft Windows 7 ads. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, so as it kind of fits here, let’s go. The Windows 7 ads fails along several dimensions:

• It tries to be a little hip and isn’t.  It’s actually that uncomfortable in-between, just a shade better than Bill Gates wiggling his butt, which may be the all time worst moment in advertising history — or at least Bill Gates’ career.  The whole “I’m a PC”-thing doesn’t have the warm and fuzzies of a Mac campaign if for no other reason (beyond the abject awkwardness of the spots themselves) that “PC” is not a cuddly term the way that “Mac” is.  The “PC” as a brand of sorts represents nearly every over-structured, unfeeling, bland attribute that one ascribes to the factory-like businesses (to borrow a concept from Seth Godin’s Linchpin) that most people work for, and the very same attributes which most people dislike about their jobs.  They may have well featured the uber-boring “Knit Knots” from Disney’s kid-show the Imagination Movers (see pic) in the ads.
• It portrays mighty Microsoft as clueless about how software should behave, giving consumers credit for every good idea that made it to the gold code.  I understand that they’re trying to create a connection to consumers, show that they were listening to what didn’t work in Vista and other prior iterations of the Windows OS.  I just wonder whether a ‘mea culpa‘ ad that said “We listened, and here is your new operating system that we think you’re gonna love” would have worked better and felt more authentic.  But perhaps Microsoft’s general inability to admit mistakes is what truly makes this campaign authentic.
• Lastly, so many of the features that are highlighted are so basic (paraphrasing: ‘I wish it would start up fast and just work’) and seem to echo the benefits of Mac OSX that it could have had a slightly different, yet crushing ending with each of the people featured saying “It’s a Mac”, rather than “I’m a PC”.  Anytime an ad sets up that way, it portrays a fatal flaw, at least in my opinion.

Here are 10 items worth reading in case you missed them:

• Tnooz: Can travel be smart about Smart Computing? Issues with search in the travel industry.
• Roughly drafted magazine: An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash.  Real reasons why Flash not suited to touch-oriented devices rather than the usual “Jobs-hates-Adobe” crap.
• ReadWriteWeb: Mobile Cloud Computing: $9.5 Billion by 2014.  I sort of have a problem in the way that people are confusing mobile web v. apps v. Cloud based services, but you get the point.  The numbers will be big.
• MobileCrunch: Maybe AT&T Has Best 3G Network After All.  Note reliability #s. Maybe I can’t hear you now.
• Google extends Comparison Ads drive, hints that travel is in its sights.  Anytime Google sets its sights on a market, those in it should start to step up their game. How can you create new innovations to stay a step ahead? Direct, undifferentiated competition with Google doesn’t sound like a game most companies would want to play.
• PhoCusWright: Kayak takes on the big guys.  It will be very interesting to see what other twists and turns Kayak takes in its ever-evolving business model.  Certainly interesting with respect to recent comments that changes in OTA fees have really started to level out the playing field across direct and indirect booking channels.  So is the NEED for meta-search reducing? Is that the reasoning behind the changes in strategy that Kayak is taking?  Find my take here.
• UpTake Blog: Opening and Running a Hotel – The IHG Way.  Good demonstration of how companies build solution accelerators to help their partners and franchisers be successful.
• Tnooz: Concur corporate-booking tool and mobile app land Southwest Airlines
• 4Hoteliers Blog: The great GDS unbundling – not pretty
• Christopher Penn’s Awaken Your Superhero: The reason why your personal brand sucks Just  a great read on finding your essential quality and what that means  to establishing your personal brand, your value to your organization and others that you touch.

Until next week!

Travel industry analyst firm, PhoCusWright, recently posted that “Kayak Takes on the Big Guys“, noting the apparent changes in their business model, and poses the question whether Kayak can still be considered a meta-search player.  Kayak’s introduction of ‘booking facilitation’ and ‘Private Sales’ are pushing them closer to becoming an OTA in some aspects.  However, Kayak CEO, Steve Hafner, maintains that is not the goal, explaining that they intend to evolve into a full service travel planning site, but will retain it’s advertising based revenue stream and ‘media company’ status.

Lorraine Sileo, PhoCusWright vice president, research has said “Kayak has become another intermediary or layer that never replaced any of the other steps in the search, shop, buy process. This move is important to their long-term success.”

Sileo’s comments about Kayak never replacing the other steps in the booking process  are even more important given a few items in the news this week that I saw:

• Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference 2010 in San Francisco this week, Priceline President and CEO Jeffery Boyd noted that OTAs’ (Online Travel Agencies) decision to remove booking fees on airlines has really started to level out the playing field across direct and indirect booking channels.  So the primary consumer benefit behind meta-search, to find the best prices across channels and sites, seems to have been mitigated.  So is the NEED for meta-search reducing? Is that the reasoning behind the changes in strategy that Kayak is taking?
• The second item in the news was a report from Kevin May, editor for tnooz, that Google may have travel in it’s sights by extending it’s Comparison Ads pilot.  May even says that “Comparison Ads is effectively a metasearch…of products already in the AdWords system.  It looks and feels like a scaled-down Kayak in terms of functionality.”  I always believe that anytime Google sets its sights on a market, those in it should start to step up or change their game.  And if you’re a search company — that also relies on advertising as a primary source of revenue — is Google the one that you want to compete with? Direct, undifferentiated competition with Google doesn’t sound like a game most companies would want to play.

To me what’s most interesting about all of this is that it’s happening in advance of a much-rumored IPO for the company. Some thought that the IPO was a driving force behind the $60M TV ad campaign that Kayak recently undertook.   Of course it’s always better to make these changes prior to the IPO so that there’s some consistency in the earnings and therefore stock price…especially while restrictions are in place.  But how these changes may impact the company’s valuation are beyond my comprehension.  I’ll leave that to other folks smarter than me AND the investment bankers — just over a year ago, I might have clubbed the two together

So what do you think is in Kayak’s future?

Each week I’ll be providing a list of 10 items that caught my eye during the past week, in no particular order. So if you missed it, here’s your chance to find what I thought was interesting. Please provide feedback good or bad so I can improve the relevancy…well at least understand what you’re interested in.

• Switched On: Making it different versus making a difference Impressions of Windows Phone 7. Story is just like it sounds, but this new mobile OS from Microsoft will either seriously impact the mobile landscape or will be the final chapter in Microsoft’s attempt at participating in the mobile market.
• Scobleizer: Marc Benioff’s enterprise ambitions (first look at Salesforce Chatter) Tech blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble’s take on Salesforce.com’s social enterprise app.
• Tnooz: Yapta to integrate Kayak Meta Search Engine.  Another interesting move my travel meta-search leader Kayak.com as they evolve their business.
• Tnooz: Orbitz launches travel agent website, commission program for hotels, packages Interesting move by leading OTA Orbitz to try to get traditional travel agents to book on their platform. You always hear that  Sales people are coin-operated, I guess we’ll find out as Orbitz increases commissions by 20%.
• Singularity Hub: Minority Report Interface Is Real, Hitting Mainstream Soon (Video).  Usability is so interesting to me.  The guy who designed the interface concepts for the movie “Minority Report” is trying to build a real business out of it.  I think that this tracks very nicely with the move away from mouse and keyboard interaction.  Perhaps life will imitate art after all.
• Tnooz: How the travel industry can thrive rather than just survive in 2010 Coming out of a brutal 2009, there is muted optimism for a recovery. Technology to support dynamic packaging can enable both travel suppliers and intermediaries to create demand.
• Tnooz: A genuine “awesome” – Microsoft new visual eye candy on Bing Maps. Story covering Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ TED talk on Bing Maps and Augmented Reality.  tNooz’s ever-intelligent editor Kevin May links to amazing insights by…wait for it…ME! on how such technologies may impact the travel market.
• TechCrunch: My Bloody Valentine: Expedia.com Semi-hilarious and well chronicled story of TechCrunch’s MG Siegler’s misadventures with a booking on Expedia.com.  Expedia finally made good (at least economically), but the lag in response time is stark contrast to Southwest Airlines’ response to “Silent Blob” being tossed off a flight for being to fat to fit in a single seat.
• Travel Trends – Travel 2.0 Blog: The Future of Visitor Guides, 2009 Internet Usage Stats. Another look at how the iPad may revolutionize travel and some good stats on Internet usage, et al.
• Sameer Patel’s Pretzel Logic: The Enterprise 2.0 Parallel Universe Start to Merge.  Sameer’s blog is a must read.  This post provides some insight on how the Social Web and Unified Communications markets may start to merge.

Today I saw a video from TED 2010 of Blaise Aguera y Arcas (an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, the architect of Seadragon and the co-creator of Photosynth) presenting how Bing Maps has begun to integrate augmented reality into the experience.  Really very cool stuff. Watch the video (below) and then meet me for the rest of the post.

So it’s cool, but what can we do with this in the travel industry? I see a TON of uses, but let me start with just one.

Think of how this could impact the packaged travel sector. Last week at Travel Technology Europe 2010, Viator’s Patrik Oqvist, Managing Director, Europe spoke about how the travel booking process is actually upside down – the booking process is centered around getting there while people’s desire to travel is based on what they’ll do once they arrived. So if you’re trying to convert lookers to bookers, isn’t the best thing to increase the excitement they have for taking the trip in the first place?

This is where I think augmented reality comes in. Instead of just showing some canned pictures of a venue or activity, let prospective travelers literally see those activities through the eyes of people who have already been there or view live video. It could not only help travelers build excitement during the planning process, but also help them build/select daily itineraries, see what other activities are nearby, etc.

Of course these kinds of uses don’t need to be limited to tour operators or DMO’s but could also be used by hoteliers to promote their property and proximity to other activities and perhaps help put them at the center of the travelers’ plans.

Well that’s my initial reaction. What ideas do you have for integrating augmented reality into your travel marketing plan or travel technology platform?

One of the amazing oddities of the travel sector is the lack of adoption by traditional travel agents of modern user interfaces in travel reservation systems. It’s kind of funny that much of the software industry is debating HMTL5 versus Flash while the travel industry is holding onto a user experience that makes me reminiscent of working on a DEC VAX. Even at this week’s Travel Technology Europe 2010 show, I was flabbergasted to see new releases of software purposefully replicating the mainframe-style, hot-key oriented user interface that Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and Central Reservation Systems (CRS) introduced 30 or more years ago.

I struggle to understand the psychology of travel agents who cling to the old-style interfaces. Time and again I’ve read and heard of stories where they claimed that it makes them more efficient and that even new travel agents, many of which grew up using computers and the Internet, abandon the modern enterprise software GUI interfaces (a relative term since the GUI hasn’t changed dramatically in the past 20 years) to adopt a user experience which is one step removed from punch cards and stone tablets. At Travel Technology Europe I spoke to someone from one of the leading TMCs who used to be in operations and spoke enthusiastically and nostalgically about using the old-style interface indicating that she felt it gave her a sense of irreplaceability since it takes a while to understand the idiosyncrasies and nuances of the system to develop the speed that she was so proud of.

So I had a thought while participating in a discussion around the iPad: could touch be the technology that takes travel agent desktops out of the stone age?

Some of what I’ve heard is that as great as the different RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies may be, it takes a long time to execute different searches and drill down into details. Touch should be faster than manipulating a mouse and if a layered “Minority Report” style UI brought up different search results using a cover-flow approach and you could tap on a property or flight and “flip the card” to see more details and to view photos it could match and potentially exceed current productivity levels and prepare the industry for further innovations.

Just a thought. What’s your take?

OK, maybe I’m overreacting…I mean it’s been a whole 10 minutes since I’ve been using Google Buzz…but the early results do not portend well in my opinion.  But even though I’m only following a handful of people the information is coming in torrents.  It’s funny, with the Google Wave beta, I never saw that much activity as I wasn’t using it for any collaborative projects, but Buzz, which seems to incorporate some Wave-style features, has created a tsunami of information in short order.

At least with Twitter, I can segment the inflow with searches, hashtags and lists.   I don’t see those kinds of controls/filters straight off the bat with Buzz.  And with Twitter, you can let the tweets wash over you, jump out for a while and no big deal.  But now all this stuff is piling up in my Inbox and I can’t find the off switch. Oy.

Perhaps I will get used to it or perhaps I just need less prolific friends.  But I’m afraid to add more folks to mix for now.

Has Buzz been activated for you? What are your reactions?

Now I may be relatively new to the travel industry, but I’m not new to controversy, so let me get this off my chest.

I like many others were glued to their computers listening to live audio streams of yesterday’s Apple iPad announcement, tweeting away.  Now I won’t get into the whole debate as to whether or not the iPad met expectations or not. That’s been discussed ad nauseum, here, here, here and here.  But I was reading through my RSS feeds and came across PhoCusWright’s (a leading travel industry analyst firm) take on The iPad Affect on the Travel Industry.  Mobile is growing in importance in the travel space, and it figures prominently in the solutions that my firm, Ness Technologies will provide,  so I certainly wanted to get their take.  But unfortunately, it didn’t take them very long to miss the entire point of the implications of the iPad.  Here’s the part that got me:

Yesterday’s iPad announcement…does not mean you need to build another app.

Ugh, you don’t.  Let the dust settle on this announcement before drawing up plans for your iPad app.  Let’s see how the consumer uses the device and then develop based upon their needs and opportunities.

HELL YES it means you need to redesign your app!  I mean why continue to constrain yourself to the capabilities of a tiny screen if you don’t have to?  The truth is that the iPad, especially as a super-media-consumption-device will let you do things that can’t be accomplished on a much smaller display.  While the iPad looks like a gigantic iTouch, the trick to unlocking the value of the iPad will not be to treat it that way.  Imagine the user  experience differently.   I thought that the MLB.com demo showed how you can significantly improve the user experience and the levels of interaction with the game.

Image credit: gdgt.com

Now imagine how a hotel could completely remake the education and trip planning phases of the traveler lifecycle if they used all 9.7″ of real estate and the touchscreen interface to immerse a potential customer into the experience that the hotel provides, using overlays to show details of rooms, launched video of featured activities, a tour of the spa, whatever.  But the point is that instead of a bland website or an app that is transactionally-focused, you can create an experience that should increase the likelihood of them booking.

Bottom line: Don’t judge yesterday’s launch or create your mobile app plans based on what you saw yesterday. Think about what the apps will look like 6 months from now after developers have had a chance to play with the SDK.  Now you can wait until the usage model is determined to make your decisions, but by then you will be behind your competition. 2010 is shaping up to be another tough year for the travel industry, don’t make it worse for yourself because you’re waiting to see what the future becomes.