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.

Foursquare outages, a hotelier emerges from bankruptcy, Facebook groups, executive changes and more:

1. Altimeter Group’s Ray Wang describes the 5 pillars of consumer tech that are influencing enterprise applications and their impact on innovation. Amongst the examples given was the Royal Caribbean CIO’s recent presentation at InformationWeek 500 CIO event highlighting how design thinking coupled with real-time analytics and on-board mobility could improve the cruise experience on the largest ship ever built.  So no doubt there are lessons to be learned for travel companies.
2. It’s been assumed that location-based services will be a critical strategy component for the travel industry…but only as long as services like Foursquare are actually working.  On Tuesday, Foursquare had an 11-hour outage. And while everyone thought they were out of the woods, they’re down again on Wednesday.  Now who was it that said architecture matters?  That’s right…me.
3. American Airlines says it will compensate travel agents for the value they create. The question is what constitutes value. And will all travel agencies have the resources to implement the direct connect? Yes, there are platforms like Farelogix’s SPRK out there, and yes it’s free, but is it reasonable to request that travel agents add another technology platform to accommodate AA?
4. Excellent article by Xotels’ Patrick Landman in Tnooz who wonders whether the hotel industry is ready for the adoption dynamic pricing.
5. Facebook made a big announcement on changes to Groups and addresses data portability and privacy.  Forrester’s Augie Ray, breaks it down.
6. Homeaway buys Instant Software, makers of vacation rental management software. Seems like a reasonable vertical integration strategy. No terms disclosed at this time.
7. ExtendedStay emerges from a messy bankruptcy with familiar owners.  Just 3 years after selling it to Lightstone Group, Blackstone reacquires ExtendedStay for about a BILLION less than it made in profits from the sale in 2007. And on top it that, it got to shed about $5B in debt which will give Blackstone “the flexibility to improve its customer experience and offerings”, according to a spokesperson.
8. Dick Costolo takes over as CEO at Twitter for co-founder Evan Williams who unexpectedly stepped down to focus on product strategy
9. That’s not the only executive change. Tony Bates leaves Cisco to become the CEO of Skype and Padmasree Warrior takes on the role of SVP/GM of Cisco’s Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business Development Group in addition to being CTO.
10. And one more…Wyndham appoints Gareth Gaston as its new SVP E-Commerce.

For the folks who may now be finding my blog for the first time on PhoCusWright Connect, I provide a weekly shot of curation every Monday, highlighting 10 articles that I felt were worth reading from the week that was. Travel is certainly covered, but so are other topics and technologies. Enjoy.

1. Great roundup by Robert Scoble, showing some of the diamonds in the rough being formed in the crucible that is Israel. Scoble sums it up best himself: “Why should Silicon Valley look to Israel for good ideas? Well, because, simply, this small country has more than its fair share of great ideas, especially when it comes to social networks.”
2. Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang looks at the evolution of the Social CRM market. Expect many of today’s species to be extinct.
3. In the battle to determine standards for airline ancillary revenue, APTCO scores a win with support  from GDSs, OTAs and corporate travel management companies. However, direct connect proponents hold firm.
4. Sameer Patel has a nice post about marketing investments v. expenses. I like the term transactive elasticity. It’s new to me, but meaningful. Very much reminds me of traditional marketing “manipulations” that Steven Sinek writes about in “Start with Why”.
5. How much web video is available in H.264? Perhaps as much as 90%.  Adobe, we’re way beyond the tipping point.  Thanks for playing.
6. Nice post on the intersection of PR objectives and metrics and how digital/social channels have changed what we need to look at.
7. HTNG releases new specs on Kiosks, Payment Systems and Distribution.
8. Dennis Schaal from Tnooz asks who will fill the travel meta-search void if Google completes the rumored acquisition of ITA and shuts down their contracts with other meta-search engines and airline websites.  Expedia and Amadeus are contenders for sure, although I very much doubt that Expedia would come to the rescue of Orbitz.
9. Another week, another multi-billion dollar acquisition. This time SAP buys Sybase for $5.8B.
10. Simply terrific post by Tech Crunch’s MG Siegler on the converging paths taken by Twitter and Facebook.  Which one do you think is “Jacob” and which is the “Man in Black”?

Here’s your weekly reading list:

1. T2Impact’s Timothy O’Neill-Dunne tries to judge who’s right in the airline merchandising row.  Spoiler Alert: it ain’t the BTC.
2. American Airlines is trying to make GDSs, distribution channels to embrace XML in order to access ancillary services, which otherwise can’t be done prior to arrival at the airport.  However, American insists there will be no incremental costs to book via the direct connect channel.  GDSs probably don’t want to have to work through Farelogix, but also don’t want to modernize their feeds from EDIFACT to XML on a supplier-by-supplier basis.
3. Redmonk’s James Governor explains how VMWare isn’t getting into the relational database business, but that doesn’t mean they’re not in the database business.
4. First broken by BusinessWeek, it looks like Google is going to buy ITA Software for more than $1B, fully ushering in Google to the travel meta-search game (which they’re kind of in already with their recent integration of hotel results into Google Maps.  If this is true, it’s not good news for Kayak.com nor for Microsoft’s Bing Travel, the current leader in meta-search who also leverages ITA’s technology.  Good analysis on the rumor from Tnooz.
5. Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang breaks down the announcements from Facebook’s f8 conference.  Also check out Robert Scoble’s take on Facebook’s Ambition.
6. Does HTML 5 Herald The End Of RIA Plug-Ins? It’s behind the Forrester paywall, but I wanted to share it anyway.  It’s a pretty good analysis that separates the hype behind HTML5 from the reality that a lot of people have invested in RIA platforms and that HTML5 is still an emerging standard and therefore it will take a while to kill of RIA platforms like Flash.  However, the analysis doesn’t really take the rise of the mobile Internet.  I think it’s a pretty big miss and could act as a tipping point in favor of HTML5, but we’ll see.
7. HTC passes on Palm Buy. Not many options left. Lenovo? Motorola? Dell? My decision to by a Pre last summer is looking worse and worse.
8. Blippy offers a lame explanation of how credit card information ended up on Google. The “it’s less bad than it looks” line is the sort of non-apology apology that I have grown to expect and loath from companies and celebrities. What I’d like to know is whether Blippy went through PCI-DSS certification or if they even know what that is.
9. Apple tries to take over the travel industry next.  Great writeup by PatentlyApple.  But I’m not sure NFC will play as central as a role in reality as it does in the patent application.
10. 2 great posts by Don Dodge on what makes successful startups here and here.  Really nice to see him getting back to good content rather than shilling for Google.

Nothing pithy to kick off the list today, so here it goes:

1. A lot of chatter about  Twitter’s first Chirp conference. Mashable review of 6 Twitter App models that stand a chance,  and a list of takeaways from GigaOM.  But best of all is a post by Dan Howlett on how Seesmic CEO Loic LeMuir either doesn’t see the effect Twitter’s recent announcements are going to have or is just being willfully blind to the reality.
2. Good overview of why you should care about HTML5 from a marketer’s point of view from Hubspot.
3. The ancillary revenue (otherwise known as how we can squeeze extra fees from our customers) debate continues. First a post from UpTake on the PhoCusWright Connect blog and then another from Tnooz.
4. 5 Ways to organize for social business by Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang.  Great way to think about how to introduce/evolve social into your company’s operations (not just marketing). It almost reads like a maturity model.
5. An interview with the Director of Merchandising from American Airlines on why we’re seeing the explosion of unbundling in the travel industry and how American is approaching it.
6. Great post by Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang on Twitter’s new “Promoted Tweets” scheme
7. New Dachis Group member, the eminent social enterprise king, Dion Hinchliffe has another great post on how social has created a transformative disruption in the enterprise.  As always, great infographs by Hinchcliffe.
8. Enterprise Irregular Bob Warfield looks at evolutionary biology and network effects in considering the future of Apple and Adobe Flash.
9. Shel Holtz thinks Ning screwed its user base.  I understand where Shel is coming from, but perhaps I never bought into the whole “free”/ad supported network stuff post the dot.com bust. If you’re offering a rich experience it costs money to create and maintain it. Often online advertising just can’t sustain those costs unless the company can reach a tipping point in scale.  But those companies (see Facebook) are few are far between.
10. OK, I’m listing this one about Google Enabling Printing from the Cloud, because I’m not sure why this is news at all. The Intenet Printing Protocol has been around since I was in the network printer business over 12 years ago. HP has bee talking about this for a long time too. Is it just because it’s got Google magic pixie dust on it or because it’s got the word “Cloud” in the headline? Please let me know why/if you think this was newsworthy.