Sorry for the delay, but busy traveling to Berlin for ITB. Le’ts start of with a little bit of irony.

1. In a very interesting turn of events, Kayak is going to power flight meta-search for Bing Travel…to help counter Google’s push into the travel sector with their acquisition of ITA Software…which powers Kayak’s meta-search engine. #irony.
2. More strong growth at Salesforce.com, yet profits are puny. So to change the story, at the DEMO conference SFDC VP, Platform and Marketing George Hu talks up the potential of Chatter, their social collaboration platform. But I love this comment: “what is keeping him up at nights is the education of this massive sales force. As the company has grown from a single application (Salesforce Automation) to a CRM platform, collaboration through social enterprise, and Data-as-a-Service, it has become increasingly difficult to train each new employee to manage their products.” Have they thought of using their own product? #evenmoreirony
3. Well little furry critters need a place to sleep too!  So Hipmunk gets into hotel search. I cover this of course because of the cute logo, but also because I know that it irks some ‘prominent’ travel bloggers that a SV startup gets so much press for what they feel is so little.  While I love the ‘agony’ filter on air search and the associated UI, I don’t think that Hipmunk’s ‘ecstasy’ filter for hotels works as well.
4. For those of you who think that Apple may one day actually adopt Flash…not a chance. Dead on.
5. Super-rich, but want to make sure you can get the best deal on your private jet? FlyRuby aims to be the Kayak of private air travel. Now this is a product I wish I had enough cash to use…just once. Flying on a private jet is right up there with going on a seaplane (with or without pickup by Herve Villachez).
6. This looks like an interesting company, but I’m not sure if it’s a necessary company. What do you think? Is this a problem for you or anyone you know?
7. For those developing for the cloud, here’s a new Cloud IDE, called Cloud9 that you might want to check out. The Cloud9 development platform for JavaScript incorporates HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP.
8. Apple introduced the iPad 2 to some fanfare, tracking pretty much with predictions leading up to the announcement. Some felt that the newest iPad wasn’t groundbreaking enough, but to my eye, it surpassed the recently announced Motorola XOOM and still-not-shipping RIM PlayBook and HP TouchPad in the spec wars (which Apple does not really play; and really we’re not putting that much emphasis on an SD card slot are we?) — all while hitting a lower entry price point.  And to those that groused that it was evolutionary, not revolutionary…chill out? As DF’s John Gruber noted, Apple has released 3 products that changed the mobile device landscape (iPod, iPhone and iPad) in the past decade while the combined forces of all other players have delivered none. ‘Nuff said.
9. How the specialist tour and activities market works is a mystery to most and terribly complex to orchestrate…and that’s just the way Alex Bainbridge of TourCMS likes it. But out of the goodness of his heart he tries to create a map of sorts of how the sector lays out. This comes on the heels of a report on the sector released by PhoCusWright.
10. Hotel meta-search is heating up with both Google and Pegasus Solutions announcing new products. Pegasus’ solution enables participating hotels to participate more fully in meta-search sites like Kayak.com. Pegasus, along with Trust International and others is providing the data supporting Google’s Hotel Price Ads solution,  which seems a little less meta-searchy and a little more advertisy (typical Google), but does display availability and pricing by dates input by the customer.

A very interesting week indeed. In particular a lot of news out of Salesforce.com and TripAdvisor.

1. Salesforce.com had their Dreamforce event last week and there was no shortage of news. IDC #staranalyst Michael Fauscette summarizes the show, but I wanted to highlight 3 announcements of note:
   • Salesforce Chatter goes Freemium. Perhaps one of the most important announcements from DreamForce. For those of you who don’t know about Chatter, it’s Salesforce.com’s social collaboration platform that can play a key role both in social CRM and service and support initiatives. The freemium offering should result in more companies testing the social enterprise waters with a number of them turning into paying customers for SFDC.
   • Salesforce introduces a new XaaS – Database as a Service, named database.com.  There are other emerging players in this space, but the interesting part of database.com is that it can be leveraged by a multitude of Cloud and mobile platforms (AWS, Azure, AppEngine, iOS or Android). If you want to learn more, Anshu Sharma, the guy behind Salesforce.com Force.com strategy explains the “Why, How and What”.
   • One of the biggest challenges that the Force.com platform faced was not technical, but one of winning the hearts and minds of developers. Initially companies could only develop apps on the Force.com platform using their proprietary, Java-esque APEX language. Then earlier this year they launched support for Java with VMWare’s SpringSource team. Now they are trying to hit the developer G-spot with their acquisition of Heroku for $212M which brings over 100,000 Ruby developers into the Force.com fold.
2. They say the NFL is a copy-cat league — that when one team is successful against another by using a certain strategy, you can be sure to see those elements in future opponents’ game plan.  Well it looks like the approach applies in tech too. After seeing how Facebook fared by protecting its content from Google’s search engines, TripAdvisor has blocked its reviews from Google Places. Tnooz broke the story first.  In a companion piece, Expedia believes Trip Advisor Media can be a Billion Dollar business. Well maybe that explains the Google Places deal a little better.
3. First let me say that if you’re concerned about security in the Cloud, or in general, and you’re not reading Christopher Hoff’s blog, start now. In his most recent post he makes an important point that security is a shared responsibility between the Cloud (IaaS/PaaS) provider and the company who’s developing the app. There are no magic beans for security and you can’t abdicate responsibility to your provider.
4. Google unveils the Nexus S, full of Gingerbread-y goodness that goes well with the holiday season. Sure would have been a lot more interesting if it weren’t tied to T-Mobile. Nice way to one-up the iPhone…take your marquis product to a worse carrier L
5. I always like to highlight good news when I can. And this is certainly good news, not just for the $1.8B raised by tech start ups in Q3, but because it’s the continuation of trend. And that’s good news for everyone.
6. Travel Tripper makes a case for an Open Source Hotel Industry Switch. An interesting post, but I had a couple of questions: 1) What’s in it for Pegasus to want to donate the code? And 2) Is there a large enough ecosystem of developers who would actively contribute to maintaining and enhancing the switch?
7. What’s wrong with RIM’s Blackberry business? Many answers, but excellent analysis in this piece. It’s worth reading, not just for the insight about RIM, but because the concepts behind the analysis – how to spot trends that your platform is dying – is extremely valuable to every business person, regardless of the sector you’re in. Must read.
8. Another blow to frictionless commerce. BA is now charging a fee for booking flights via travel agents while using a credit card. This now mirrors the practice when booking on BA.com. I wonder if Karl Rove is behind the move as the fee only applies to the two lowest classes of service (World Traveller and World Traveller Plus), so rich people get a pass. Beyond being a regressive tax, it’s hypocritical as the intent was to recoup fees imposed by credit card companies. But given that these fees are typically a percentage of the charge, the policy makes little sense. I guess they’d prefer it if I walked up to a counter with a sack of money.
9. Google finally announces the long-awaited ChromeOS. While the reviews of the CR-48 prototype device have been less than stellar, the OS itself seems to have arrived to great acclaim. GigaOM breaks down the announcement.
10. Very interesting back story on what happens when a flight gets cancelled.

The only issue more overblown than Cloud Security may be this one. I was reading yet another post on the topic today and felt compelled to write this.

The premise the Lock-In Boogeymen are selling is that because of the proprietary APIs and mechanisms that are used in many of the large cloud computing (e.g. IaaS and PaaS) providers to optimize performance and scalability, you’re locking yourself in to that vendor.  While there is an element of truth to that concept, the implication is that if you don’t adopt the cloud you won’t have that issue.  Nothing can be further from the truth.

If you decide to eschew the cloud for a traditional on-premise/internal solution you are still making the following commitments:

• What technology stack to do I want to align myself with? Java or .NET? Oracle or IBM?
• What development environment do I want to standardize on? Eclipse? VSTS? SpringSource?
• Putting down big dollars up front and committing to medium- to long-term high-cost maintenance agreements for the foundational software that you’re going to develop upon.
• Even more big dollars on computing infrastructure…which is about the only thing that depreciates faster than the value of the car you just drove off the lot.
• And let’s not forget the money you have to spend on the network monitoring and management tools for that hardware.

All of these decisions – and the related upfront costs – dictate that you’re going to stay on your chosen platform for a fairly long time. 5 years? 8? 10? Is that any shorter of a horizon than you have when deciding to adopt the cloud?

<don’t see many hands raised>

And it’s not like there isn’t ANY portability in the cloud either. Rackspace’s OpenStack platform leaves you completely free to take your app to any other environment – including bringing it back in house – simply by deploying their open-sourced framework on another provider or datacenter.  Both Google and Salesforce have adopted VM/SpringSource as their IDE so it’s (relatively) easy to move back and forth. I mean there will be work to do, but it’s not like you have to re-architect and re-write your entire app.

And further there are a host of integration platforms (Dell/Boomi, IBM/Cast Iron Systems, Pervasive, Informatica) that you can utilize to mitigate the portability issue further. And I believe that you’ll see even more movement towards portability and interoperability of clouds in the future.

So what’s your POV? Comments always welcome.

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.

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.

Last week I presented on a webinar alongside PhoCusWright analyst Bob Offut, entitled “Travel Innovation and Technology Trends: 2010 and Beyond”, sponsored by my company Ness Software Product Labs.  I’m providing links to both the PDF of the slides and the replay of the webinar via WebEx below.

In the webinar, Bob talks about the Top 10 travel technology trends, based on PCW’s report that came out in March (subscription required).  Then I pick up at the 45:00 mark (slide 81 in the PDF) to discuss the impact of Cloud Computing and Mobile on the travel industry. Some highlights from the presentation:

• Cloud Computing and Travel
  • Watch out for Cloudwashers. There are a lot of people who are either trying to prey on those still confused about Cloud, some of which are purposefully obfuscating their solutions to cash in on the trend.
  • Cloud can be an important part of a modernization strategy, but isn’t an end in and of itself. Evaluate the “Six degrees of Modernization” and think about how Cloud can fit within the direction you chose.
  • The Public v. Private Cloud debate is interesting, but it’s not necessarily and either/or proposition. Private Clouds do lack certain attributes and benefit of Public Cl0uds, but think of the difference as an evolutionary process, not alternatives.
  • Moving to the Cloud requires a change in perspective from mere software development to a systems engineering mindset.
• Mobile and Travel
  • Mobile Devices are Becoming the Center of Traveler Interactions
  • 5-step Framework to a successful mobile strategy. Understanding the use cases of your customer and the role that you want mobile to play in their overall experience with your brand is critical.
  • Determining whether you want to take an mobile web-oriented approach or an app-oriented approach, and what platforms/devices your target customer is likely using make a big impact on the technology choices you make.

Anyway, enjoy the presentations. I had a good time and I hope you find the information interesting and useful.  Please let me know what you think. Contact me directly  or add to the conversation in the comments.

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.

Well perhaps this week’s installment should be 10 things that happened at Google I/O. It surely dominated the conversation last week. But a few travel items make it as well including a post from FareCompare CEO Rick Seaney. news on Amadeus and Travelport and Google’s Friday acquisition of Ruba.  And in honor of the last episode of Lost, a bonus #11. 

1. Farecompare’s CEO breaks down the airfare pricing rules that seem to make no sense to the average traveler. And it’s just getting harder to make any sense out of it with all the airline fees (or as they call it ancillary revenue).
2. Bob Warfield talks about the huge lead that Amazon has in the Cloud derby and the barriers of entry that they’re creating. However, the recent moves to integrate the VMWare SpringSource technology into Google and Salesforce’s Cloud offerings should make those considering Cloud/PaaS provider take a second look.
3. Travelport becomes the first GDS to buy a meta-search player. I wonder whether this will be the first of several transactions and how much the rumored acquisition of ITA Software by Google is creating a sense of urgency among the GDSs.
4. Big announcements from Google I/O: the Chrome Web Store, Google Wave ready for launch, the open sourcing of the WebM video CODEC (see next item), Google partners with VMWare for AppEngine.  And that was only day one.
5. Google open sources WebM video CODEC, which may throw a monkey wrench into the H.264 bandwagon.  However, perhaps WebM won’t be royalty-free for long, says AllThingsDigital’s John Paczkowski.
6. Netflix jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon with both feet.  And the Wall Street Journal notes that Apple is winning ground in the fight against Flash. Although much of that gain may be given back in light of Froyo and other announcements from I/O.
7. On its face, Google TV looks to be a very big deal. It’s everything that many hoped AppleTV would be.  Although Mashable thought that there’s little here that’s not already in TiVo. But since only about 8 people on the planet own a TiVo, this will be pretty cool to most everybody else. Some think this isn’t so much a shot across Apple or other set-top box maker’s bow, than it is to TV providers.  Here’s some more info, but I’m not sure how much adoption it will see if you still require a cable/satellite set top box.
8. Amadeus making gains with US Travel Agents. Very interesting stats around financial incentives given to travel agents by the GDSs.
9. A good point about the importance efficient software development made on the Ness Software Product Labs blog that I hadn’t really thought about before: Cloud Computing puts a premium on efficient code.  Less efficient code requires more CPU cycles and therefore incurs higher costs in the pay-by-the-drink world of Cloud Computing.
10. Google takes another step on its journey into the travel industry with its purchase of Ruba, the online travel guide and travel community. Ruba’s visual search approach is apparently what caught Google’s eye.  Looks like it will be integrated into iGoogle, at least for now.

And in tribute to the Lost series finale which aired last night…

• A fabulous review of the Apple-Google rivalry by TechCrunch’s MG Siegler…even more so if you’re a “Lost” fan like me.

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.