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.

1. Concur continues its investment binge with $5M for Yapta and integrates the air and hotel price tracking tool into TripIt.
2. Isis, the carrier-led near field communication (NFC) mobile payment platform has signed up Visa, MasterCard and American Express along with original partner Discover, who will join the carrier initiative when it launches next year. Interesting development, but a long way to go still for Isis and any NFC payment scheme. PayPal still seems to be in the lead IMO, but perhaps this puts Isis ahead of Google Wallet.
3. Cisco laid off 6,500 employees which was greeted much more warmly by the investment community than the actual workers. And who knows if any of this will actually help restore Cisco’s former glory.
4. Evan Konwiser always has an opinion – this time it’s on Google, ITA and disruption of the travel industry.  Nice post, but the best stuff is in the comments. Lots of great dialogue.
5. Zillow, the real estate site founded by ex-Expedia chief Richard Barton, had a rollercoaster of an IPO. First the share opened at $60, twice the value it was initially priced at, only to see its shares tumble down to the $30’s.
6. American Airlines orders 460 jets from Airbus and Boeing. Flightcaster’s Evan Konwiser asks the question that many others are thinking.
7. There was a lot written about American Express’ new Link, Like, Love daily deal program launched with Facebook (the deals you see are influenced by what you and your friends “like” on the Web). It doesn’t provide the same deep discounts as you might find with Groupon or LivingSocial, but seems a heck of a lot healthier for merchants (MUCH better financially, real stats/analytics about redemption, no impact for employees at point-of-sale).
8. TripAdvisor finally got what it wanted as Google drops [scraped] web reviews of hotels on Google Places.
9. Cloud security is kind of an evergreen topic. Take a look at how Google secures it’s cloud services. I’m guessing this doesn’t resemble your infrastructure operations.
10. Microsoft can’t seem to figure out the online space and the problem is only getting worse as evidenced by the latest earnings report. Microsoft’s online division LOST $2.5 BILLION last year. I can’t imagine what their cost structure looks like.

Major news in the travel industry with Google-ITA going through and a pair of big announcements by Expedia, Facebook takes infrastructure open source and more:

1. Google’s plan to buy ITA Software cleared the DOJ on Friday.  While this wasn’t unexpected, it certainly was not the way that many in the industry wanted to kick off their weekend.
2. Expedia and American Airlines kiss and make up, bringing AA fares back to Expedia and Hotwire sites.  For now Expedia will continue to use the existing GDS connection to get fare data and availability, but the statement does indicate that in the future Expedia will use some fashion of American’s direct connect technology through a GDS, although the exact implementation is left unsaid.  Tnooz’ Dennis Schall wonders whether the OTAs that are not owned by GDS will enjoy a competitive advantage
3. In perhaps bigger news, Expedia announced that it’s going to spin out TripAdvisor as a separate public company.  It will be interesting to see how this affects the stock price for Expedia and how the street evaluates the relative value of the businesses going forward.  All this comes on the heels of Expedia’s JV in APAC and softening of their stance on direct connect with their recent rapprochement with American Airlines. Many changes in a short period of time signals either genius strategy or panic. I guess we’ll see which in time.
4. PE firm Apax Partners spent well over a $1B to buy two mid-cap ERP firms Epicor and Activant. The combined entity – which is effectively a roll up of roll ups –  will have revenues of about $876M.
5. Google has been outspoken in their belief the current patent system needs reform and is fighting a number of patent infringement lawsuits in which they’re the defendant, most notably with Oracle over the potential improper use of Java in the Android OS. So naturally they bid $900M to buy the vast patent portfolio of Nortel. It has been suggested that perhaps this is being done as a deterrent to current and future plaintiffs – “if you sue me, I’ll sue you”. Even with “Emperor Palpatine” stepping down, the whole “don’t be evil” thing still doesn’t seem to be in vogue anymore.
6. Cisco cloud security guru Christopher Hoff is never one to pull punches (must be the jui jitsu) and holds to form, calling BS on cloud-bursting as a de jure hybrid cloud strategy.
7. Facebook announces the Open Compute Project, releasing their data center hardware stack as open source to any and all comers which should help many companies enhance the efficiency of their infrastructure operations. This is a big move as many would consider datacenter strategy a distinct competitive advantage. Combine this with Rackspace’s OpenStack cloud platform (Rackspace is also a member of the Open Compute initiative) and I think we may see some interesting developments in the future.
8. This is getting idiotic. Living Social raises another $400M on top of the $200M they already raised – for a business that has zero barriers to entry and may be ultimately harmful to the companies who offer the deals through the service. Maybe Mike Fauscette is right and we are in a new bubble.
9. In what may look like the marriage of two industry dinosaurs hoping to survive the Ice Age, Texas Instruments announced it will acquire National Semiconductor for $6.5 billion which is a 77% premium National’s market cap. It seems that the rationale for the deal is bolstering manufacturing efficiency, but not much was said about innovation, which may be telling on its own.
10. Has Facebook peaked as an e-Commerce platform? Forrester’s Sucharita Mulpuru thinks so. Well at least maybe this will put an end to made up terms like f-Commerce.

Can’t really think of anything pithy today, but I hope you’re all finding the links plus commentary more valuable than the simple aggregation of tweets from Paper.li “dailies”.

1. Apple’s Steve Jobs may be out sick, but the company is healthier than ever with a record $26B quarter. And since Steve wasn’t around to take a dig at the competition, Apple COO stepped in and called the current slate of Android tablets “bizarre”.
2. This is absolutely brilliant. Delta has taken a page out of Priceline’s book and let passengers ‘name their price’ for getting bumped on overbooked flights. That’s power for their customers that actually counts. With more and more flights packed to the gills, there seems to be a greater likelihood that flights are overbooked. And who doesn’t love <sarcasm> the mating dance of requests for passengers to take travel vouchers to go on later flights, while those same passengers wait for the voucher price to increase before ‘volunteering’.
3. After 10 years at the helm of Google, Emperor Palpatine, er Eric Schmidt, steps down as CEO and Larry Page is in charge. For Google’s sake, hopefully Page and Brin can re-ignite innovation and provide a vision for the company going forward.  Since the original PageRank algorithm, little real innovation has come from Google. Wave and Buzz have failed miserably and Facebook is kicking their butt.  AppEngine isn’t at the top of most people’s list when looking at IaaS/PaaS. The three biggest successes (AdSense, Android and AdMob) are all results of acquisitions. Perhaps all the more reason that Google needs the acquisition of ITA Software to go through.
4. In what hopefully is the first domino to fall that ratchets down the rhetoric in the Airline v. Intermediary ‘war’, US Airways signs an agreement with Expedia to offer its full array of products and services via the GDS channel. The accommodation being that both firms agree to work together (what a novel idea) to ensure that US Airways’ Choice Seats product and other ancillaries will become available through Expedia in the future.
5. Ignoring the link-baiting headline that seems to overstate their actual position, two Deutche Bank analysts properly broke down what’s happening in the airline distribution wars (although 3-days later the US Airways-Expedia deal occurred).  Overall a reasoned analysis, although I question the way they characterize the savings that AA and other airlines are shooting for. The way they describe it, to ‘save’ the extra $5 in GDS fees, they are suggesting there are zero costs in maintaining the integrity of the direct connects for the distribution channel, and that seems false on its face. I wish people would at least acknowledge that in the arguments.
6. The possibility of a “world” iPhone on the Verizon network via the new Qualcomm chipset will probably cause me to wait to upgrade my phone. But while there’s lots of good rumor mill fodder in here, many are enabled via software upgrades.
7. One of my favorite social sharing sites, Scribd closed a $13M round of funding, some of which will be used to enhance the platform and focus on mobile solutions.
8. Starbucks introduces mobile payments…because there weren’t enough iPhone-toting-double-mocha-non-fat-latte-drinking people at Starbucks already…or maybe because there were.
9. Goldman Sachs Excludes U.S. Clients From Investing in Facebook. Damned those pesky reporters for pointing out that their plan didn’t conform with the law (apparently Messrs. Shaggy, Scooby, Fred, Velma and Daphne work for the NYT and WSJ). Nice that Goldman Sachs, the same company the US Government had to bail out a little more than a year ago for creating non-standard investment vehicles that disguised the actual riskiness of the investment to shareholders, decided to skirt US securities law by not offering the $500M Facebook investment vehicle to US consumers…even though Goldman and Facebook are US companies. Apparently lesson NOT learned.
10. Privacy continues to be a big concern with all the social sites and location-based services. But in this post, Constellation Research Group’s Ray Wang highlights not just the reasons why he’s opting out for now, but gives some good advice on how to proceed in relative safety to those who continue to brave on.

While there is a lot of travel and technology news to get to, the most important and awful news of the week was the terrible tragedy this weekend in Tuscon as an armed man opened fire at a meeting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, shooting the Congresswoman in the head and killing 6 people including a Federal Judge and a 9-year old girl and wounding many others. My thoughts and prayers are with them.

The business-related story of the week was the escalation of the war between American Airlines and many of its distribution partners (well maybe partners isn’t such a good term right now). While there was a lot of good articles written with different points of view, I will highlight four articles and leave some room for other news of the week.

1. First and foremost, you should read PhoCusWright analyst Douglas Quimby’s post. He covers short and long term implications of the pitched battle and 9 key issues to watch for.
2. Our favorite Professor provides a humorous, but pointed, commentary on a recent Business Travel Coalition press release (in-line with the press release text) on the latest developments.
3. The New York Times’s Travel section covers the topic from a consumer perspective as it’s getting harder to shop for airfare in this environment.
4. Flightcaster’s Evan Konweiser wrote an interesting defense of AA.  There are aspects which ring true, but he also makes a few leaps of logic which don’t fit the facts (e.g. Kodak didn’t decide not to bring a digital camera to market in 1975 only because it was a challenge to its film-processing based business model, but because the technology to deliver image quality that approached kindergarten sketches, let alone traditional film standards was decades away. Nor were there PC’s for consumers to upload them to, sites to share them with friends on or printers to print them on…unless you like the dot-matrix photos that were common at B’nai-Mitzvahs when I was growing up). Ah, the problems of taking an analogy too far. But there are some valid points here.  The airline and travel industry have the most “unique” (yeah, that’s a nice way to say it) sales and distribution processes in the world.

Now what else happened last week?

5. Verizon showed a lot of new devices at CES, the most interesting being the Motorola Xoom tablet prototype running Android Honeycomb. But of course the most anticipated announcement from Verizon is scheduled for Tuesday.
6. More news from CES: Skype acquires Qik for $100M. Good tuck in acquisition from a technology perspective. As Skype CEO Tony Bates said: “…the acquisition of Qik will help to accelerate our leadership in video by adding recording, sharing and storing capabilities to our product portfolio.”
7. Facebook raises $500M at a $50M valuation. Next stop NYSE, circa 2012.
8. Qualcomm buys WiFi silicon maker Atheros for $3.1B. A very strategic buy that enables Qualcomm to achieve its vision of being an end-to-end supplier in a networked world centered on a phone, with the phone able to communicate seamlessly with a multitude of networks, with CDMA, LTE and WiFi all under one roof.
9. Apple launches the Mac App Store. In many ways this is a massive shift in software distribution for Apple and funnily enough gobs more cash in their pocket as a result. But as MG Siegler explains, there are also changes in app design that are a part of some of these new apps.
10. Salesforce acquires DimDim. While many are dismayed at the loss of a free web conferencing service, this does fit nicely into the Chatter platform.

Just when you thought it might be a quiet week leading up to the holidays…SURPRISE! The story of the week was American Airlines distribution, but the FCC’s actions regarding net neutrality will be much more far reaching in their effect.

I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday weekend. For those of you in the Northeast, stay inside and stay warm. Only 4 more months until all that snow starts to melt.

1. An Illinois judge clears the way for American Airlines to pull its fares from Orbitz. Travelport certainly did a number on itself in how they managed the issue. Norm Rose wondered whether this would set off permanent changes in air distribution landscape, but just when it looked like a banner day for American Airlines …
2. Expedia puts a lump of coal in AA’s stocking. And then it just got a little sad when American tried to play the victim, when Expedia employed a Bush/Cheney-doctrine like move with a pre-emptive strike, rather than waiting for AA to turn their attentions to them. American may try to guide prospective flyers to Priceline and Kayak as alternatives, but given that Priceline doesn’t sell a lot of air travel and Kayak doesn’t actually take bookings, I’m not sure how well that’s going to turn out…especially if the prospective traveler has to go to AA.com to learn they should go to Kayak or Priceline in the first place.
3. Got predictions? The Tnooz staff and nodes do.
4. The prospects of Net Neutrality seem dim.  It seems the FCC is dead-set on screwing the consumer and benefiting the telecom providers. And while this legislation has more holes than in Swiss cheese on the wired ‘Net, look out when it comes to wireless Internet access. If you thought your cell phone bill was high now, just wait. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s looking like I’m going to be rooting on the Republican congressional leaders to save us from this ruling.  Wired shows us a PPT of what the telecom providers evil plan might look like. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wrote and interesting piece for the Atlantic. His last paragraph says it best.
5. How aggressive is your company’s adoption of Web 2.0 tools and techniques? The answer may materially impact the performance of your company.  McKinsey Consulting came out with a new research report says that “highly networked enterprises” were 50% more likely to report increases in market share and profit margins than other firms.
6. TripAdvisor deepens their Facebook integration, getting us closer to real social leverage in travel and not just “liking” different brands.
7. Robert Cole pens another opus on the state of the hotel industry. The Reader’s Digest version is that things are much better than last year, but keep things in perspective. If you want to pop a bottle of champagne, you may opt for Korbel instead of Krug.
8. Delta also makes a move against smaller OTAs, snubbing CheapOair, Bookit and OneTravel. I don’t quite buy Delta’s analogy between the Apple Store and BestBuy. Has Glen Hauenstein been to a BestBuy recently? It’s actually a pretty good purchasing experience and they do have an Apple Store-within-a-Store concept staffed by Apple experts. If his comparison was Target & Wal-Mart, I’m all in. But is Delta.com that great of a purchasing experience…on an Apple level? Hudson Crossing’s Tom Botts makes a good distinction between Delta’s move and AA’s – that Delta is just trying to enhance the quality of their distribution channel, as opposed to changing the fundamental relationship with the entire channel.
9. I amongst millions of people have come to depend upon Skype as an important business communication tool, trailing behind my phone and email. But to my great horror, Skype was down for more than 24 hours.  Dan York explains what a supernode is helps you understand the reasons behind the outage on his Disruptive Telephony blog.
10. In another blow to Travelport, United announces they will leave Apollo in favor of HP’s SHARES reservation system, used by Continental. One of the many system consolidations that will occur as a result of the merger.  On top of the AA dustup, this almost assures Travelport won’t IPO in the next year unless they have some dramatic wins.

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.

As a Tennessee Titans fan I’m still trying to decide whether to be happy or concerned at the acquisition of Randy Moss. Thoughts?

Anyway, on to the best of the week that was:

1. The vacation rental market is heating up and while Google hopes to get a piece with their investment in Homeaway, Pegasus and the VMRA have other ideas.  Even better is this piece by OpenTravel Alliance’s Valyn Perini.
2. Facebook enhances their platform for mobile with single-click sign on using Facebook Connect for mobile apps and opening up their Places API. With over 200M mobile Facebook users already (40% penetration) they don’t need to develop their own phone. They’re already available on every smartphone and many modestly intelligent feature phones. From a travel perspective, the important news is that they’re expanding their support for businesses to provide local deals as a reward for check-ins.
3. It’s always more fun to watch a good game of chicken from the sidelines. This one’s a doozy. American Airlines has threatened to remove all AA flights from Orbitz as of December 1. If it in fact happens, who do you think gets hurt worse?  J.P. Morgan Airlines analyst, Jamie Baker adds some insight into the financial implications.
4. Dell buys SaaS integration house Boomi. Kudos and great exit to Bob Moul, Rick Nucci and the other folks at Boomi. At first I didn’t see this as a great fit for Dell, but CloudAve’s Krishnan a reasonable explanation when he puts it in context with Dell’s acquisition of Perot Systems and their attempt to remake themselves as a services company like IBM and HP before them.  However, I’m still not convinced and think that Phil Wainwright may have the right perspective.
5. Robert Cole goes inside the numbers of Amadeus’ recent Travel Gold Rush 2020 report.
6. Is this the beginning of the social graph cold war? Facebook, which has been chastised for their sometimes lackadaisical position regarding the security/sharing of their members’ personal information, has become very much like the Hotel California – allowing data from third-party sources to come in, but it…or any other personal information…can never leave. Well I guess Google finally said “enough” and has stopped Facebook from allowing users to invite more friends to join by importing their Gmail contacts.
7. Everbread, a relatively new entrant to the flight search engine game announced 3 new clients for their Haystack product (almost a perfect product name, eh?). No disrespect to fellow Tnooz nodes, Stephen Ekbergh and Timothy O’Neill-Dunne, but while nice wins, Everbread still has yet to break through with any premier clients. But I guess at this point positive trends, not raw revenues are the best measure.
8. Good article talking about the value of multi-tenancy from a business alignment perspective, not merely a cost of operations point of view.
9. I think that we can all agree that Farelogix’s Jim Davidson is “not a witch”, but he is nothing if not combative. Another volley in his was with the GDS’ as he responds to Sabre’s 20 Questions.
10. What’s another billion to Larry? Oracle buys eCommerce player ATG to enhance m-Commerce play. Analysis from Forrester’s Brian Walker.

A lot of big news last week from Microsoft, Oracle and IBM agree on the future of Java, the iPad is coming to Verizon and notes from Amadeus Horizons 2010 in San Francisco.

1. Oracle and IBM team up to provide a unified future for Java. Should be good for the developer community for sure. But maybe not so much for Google with respect to the Java patent infringement suit concerning the Android mobile OS. Altimeter Group’s Ray Wang breaks it down.
2. Bing search goes social with Facebook integration.  Microsoft and Facebook announced a new partnership that brings Facebook “Like” and OpenGraph profile search to Bing using “Instant Personalization”.  I expect this will have a big impact for travel, especially for hotel, restaurant and tour/activity search and portends a big challenge for companies like TripAdvisor. And not for nothing, it’s definitely another shot across the bow at Google from both Microsoft and Facebook.
3. Microsoft “Launches” Windows Phone 7…phones to actually follow in a few weeks. While many seem to like the Metro UI, few seem to think it has a chance to succeed. Scoble says all WP7 has going for it is Office integration and that’s not enough. Mary-Jo Foley says Microsoft’s real target for WP7 is feature phone owners. But most feature phones are free or close to it. The initial price with contract for the WP7 devices is $199. This will be a tough road to hoe.
4. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Spirit Airlines’ “edgy” marketing sure gets results.
5. The iPad is coming to Verizon and the iPhone won’t be far behind. Only a few more months and I’m free of my Pre!
6. Amadeus completed its bi-annual Airline IT conference, Horizons 2010. Tnooz’s Dennis Schaal recaps the first day. On the second day the highlight was a terrific talk about the future of technology in travel by Forrester analyst Henry Harteveldt.
7. The worst kept secret is out: Amadeus officially puts Opodo up for sale…er, is “evaluating strategic alternatives” with JP Morgan.
8. A terrific look at the private sale model by Matt Zito.
9. Is there such a thing as too much Cloud Security? Cisco’s Christopher Hoff poses the question.
10. IDC Staranalyst Michael Fauscette keeps the great posts coming. This time he suggests a couple of important fixes to remove barriers to creating a collaborative, social enterprise

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.