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.

Sorry for the delay in posting, but I’m been flat out here in India as I am getting further up to speed with my new role at Ness Technologies Software Product Labs. Now that the excuses are out of the way, let’s get to the Top 10.

1. I’d be remiss if the first one out of the gate wasn’t the public announcement of Ness SPL’s relationship with travel IT giant Amadeus.  For the past year Ness has built an engineering team in Bangalore, supporting Amadeus’ continued investment in building industry leading software products for the travel industry.  It also signals Ness’ focus on providing software product engineering services to the travel industry.  If we can deliver for Amadeus, we can deliver for anyone.  Call me!
2. GM’s Augmented Reality Windshield: This is potentially very cool. Nice that it can highlight road signs, but better if it could superimpose hi-fi versions of signs I can’t see clearly.  Also the ability to check out where the drivers eyes are looking could be potential liability issues for drivers who crash while texting, dialing or otherwise distracted.
3. Google May Leave China on April 10. I can’t imagine they want to really do this, but their public stand has kind of boxed them in a corner.
4. Priceline Introduces Pay-at-Checkout for hotels.  I guess I didn’t realize that with online travel agencies (OTAs) that you had to pay the hotel fees at the time of booking.  I guess I never booked a hotel through an OTA because this seemed like standard operating procedure.
5. Musings from the Mobile Upfront: Recap from Mobile Upfront and insights from mobile guru @tgruber
6. Security Risks of Multi-tenancy.  Just goes to show that architecture in the wrong hands is dangerous and usually that’s at the core of bad software.
7. Cloud killing the enterprise software market? Hold that thought. I agree that there will probably be a lot of private/hybrid-cloud implementations, although don’t believe that’s a very good strategy, other than trying to recoup existing infrastructure investments.  It’s one thing to get leverage from what you already have, but let’s hope that few are actually thinking about buying a bunch of hardware to build-out new private cloud infrastructure.  This makes me think back to a post from last summer: Who will be the first to offer cash for infrastructure? I still think it’s a good idea.
8. Why RedMonk’s @sogrady is against patents – the system is broken.  But what if the system could be fixed. Then again this is an awful lot like tort reform. Too many special interests to make it happen and too many frivolous lawsuits/patents.
9. Webciety and Enterprise 2.0: A snapshot of today’s social computing conversations.  Notes and perspective from CeBIT on the opportunities and concerns about E20 by the one and only Dion Hinchcliffe
10. Enterprise 2.0: efficiency, effectiveness, blame and responsibility.  More good hard truth from Dennis Howlett.

Well I finally attended my first unConference. Last week I went to CloudCamp Boston at Microsoft’s deftly named NERD Center (New England Research & Development) in Cambridge, MA. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the format or the quality of the content. On balance, I’d say it was worthwhile attending. The unConference actually directly followed a real conference (Xconomy Boston’s Cloud3 Forum), so I’m not sure if that had any impact on the content or quality of what was presented at CloudCamp.

I will say that I was pretty disappointed in the first half of the session which began with (thankfully) short sales pitches by the sponsors. That was followed by an “unPanel” where self-proclaimed experts picked from attendees in the room answered about a dozen questions from the audience. Unfortunately, not everyone who went up there qualified as an expert while actual experts like Cisco’s Christopher Hoff (@beaker) and Canonical’s John Willis (@botchgalupe) sat back. Additionally, many of the questions were quite pedestrian. This leads me to a pet peeve with a lot of conferences today is that the content is geared towards the great unwashed and doesn’t dig deep enough to people who have the basic understanding of the subject at hand. I’m no architect by any stretch — hell, I haven’t programmed a damn thing since a Fortran class I had in college 20+ years ago — but still found the content too basic. I felt the same way about the Inbound Marketing Summit this fall, although I do think it went a little deeper.

The second half of CloudCamp where the attendees broke into improptu breakout sessions was a lot better. The highlight for me was Hoff’s “Cloudifornication” presentation which can be found here (actually this is from the Microsoft BlueHat conference this summer). Anyone interested in the security implications of moving to the Cloud should watch. Any anyone who has line-of-business responsibility for building or consuming Cloud apps should pass. It’s never fun to know how the sausage is made. Ignorance is bliss.

Finally, let me leave you with an interview that I did with Cory von Wallenstein who is VP, Product Marketing at Dynamic Network Systems.  The interview came about from a question on Twitter by @wisesumo who wanted to know what the company thought about Google’s newly introduced DNS services.  This was my first attempt at consumer journalism.  The video came out great, but unfortunately my tripod sucked and directly afterward my camera crashed to the ground and is now on my way to the factory to see if it can be repaired.  Lesson learned.

Last week Red Hat’s CTO Brian Stevens introduced a new initiative called Deltacloud that has a very lofty goal of simplifying the process of invoking cloud services via a new unified standard.  It address interoperability which can be an important challenge in cloud computing for ISVs.  Out of the box they have some pretty good market coverage, supporting Red Hat’s own Enterprise Virtualization, VMWare ESX and Amazon EC2 with support for Rackspace to follow.

This is a good start, but I think that this is about as far as Red Hat’s going to be able to take this.  Nowhere is there any mention of, nor do I expect support for, some of the other leading Cloud platforms from Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce.com.  And this highlights the both the problems with the mega-vendors and the open source movement.  Open Source levels the playing field, but that is diametrically opposed to what the mega-vendors like Microsoft and Oracle want, particularly Microsoft who loves their proprietary standards.  And between Microsoft and Oracle, they control so much of the ISV ecosystem, that I don’t see how Red Hat’s Deltacloud gets any traction.  Even Stevens’ own statement talks about “creating a buzz”.  Well maybe for one day.

There was a lot written in the past few days about the service interruptions with Gmail, so let me add my two cents.  In my mind there was a significant over-reaction to the Gmail Fail, mostly by people who for some reason or another are anti-SaaS or anti-Cloud.  I wish someone would do some sort of psychological analysis of that crowd (are they contrarians, do they fear the impact to their own jobs, uniformed), but that’s not going to be the topic of this post.  While many people made like Chicken Little, I think that most drew the wrong conclusions. I look at it like this:

• Gmail isn’t just personal mail: It highlighted how many people are using Gmail for what they consider business-level communication, not just personal email.  With some what I’ve seen regarding Google Wave, this could be a very interesting development and something I’m sure the folks in Redmond are concerned about.
• There is Value in ‘Commercial-Grade’ Release Processes: There is a flawed theory used in much of the online application world which believes that being in perpetual beta is OK.  It’s not.  I understand the desire to get new products and features out to market right away, but letting your users be your testing team — unless it’s a structured beta — is not the right thing to do.  Software companies need to test their products appropriately before releasing it to clients. There is value to a ‘commercial-grade’ release process.  And it’s not like a structured release process means slow time to market. Agile development methods support rapid releases and are pretty mainstream these days. Speed does not excuse sloppiness.
• SaaS and the Cloud Require a Systems Engineering Perspective. Architecture and application design – not just testing – for performance, scalability, reliability and availability is critical. And note that people always talk about PSR testing, not the “A” for availability, which in and of itself is a big miss in thinking about designing and developing systems that are meant to be used by large user communities in unpredictable ways.  But it runs deeper than that.  SaaS requires a systems engineering perspective. It’s not just the software that gets developed it’s how we think about how that software interacts with the underlying infrastructure and how together they deal with internal and external threats — security vulnerabilities, natural disasters, disaster recovery, etc.

Lastly, some of the people I discussed this with have argued that SaaS or Cloud is a good backup to traditional software systems.  It’s not.  SaaS is a choice…and an alternative to other on-premise software. But you don’t choose an Email or CRM or ERP system as a backup to a separate primary system. Of all the issues around SaaS, integration is perhaps the biggest.  So who’s going to take on all those headaches for a something they plan to never use?  Nobody.