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.

As an NY Islander’s fan I’ll always remember legendary NY sportcaster Bill Mazer saying “7:11, lucky numbers for the good guys”, in a sports special about the Islanders winning their first Stanley Cup over the Philadelphia Flyers on an overtime goal by Bobby Nystrom (assists by Lorne Henning and Wayne Merrick).  But on to the new from the week of July 11th, 2011.

1. Aliph, the company behind the Jawbone noise cancelling Bluetooth headsets, just raised $70M. I love their products. I just got my second Jawbone, the new Era, last week. Maybe they’ll invest all that money in making better earbuds.
2. Citrix buys Cloud.com to enhance the virtualization giant’s cloud infrastructure offering. Cloud.com is already a major player in the market and has a very high-profile client in Zynga. CloudAve’s Krishnan Subramanian provides great analysis of the impact of the deal on Citrix’s business and their competitors.
3. Google beats Wall Street EPS estimates by almost $1 and shares are up.
4. The concerns around Google’s use of Java in Android seem to keep escalating, especially with Oracle asking for Google CEO Larry Page to testify and Judge Alsup’s recent notice which references ‘willful infringement’ and could result in treble damages. If you’re interested in this story, you’ve got to be reading Mueller’s blog.
5. Tom Friedman writes that you need to be thinking like a tech startup when looking for a job in today’s market.
6. Building great applications is important, but it’s wasted effort if they can’t be deployed easily. F5’s Lori MacVittie introduces the application deployment lifecycle and says the enterprise needs to focus more effort on improving the application deployment process.
7. Is Microsoft moving to a single OS unifying the desktop, phone, gaming and home media platforms? Apparently those were the hints dropped at last week’s Worldwide Partner Conference. But I don’t quite buy it unless Microsoft moves to a lighter weight Chrome-y style OS.  And it’s harder to comprehend under a Ballmer-led Microsoft. Time will tell.
8. Citrix isn’t the only virtualization technology provider working on enhancing their cloud infrastructure play, as VMWare introduces its Comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure Suite.
9. With all the hype around Google+, that just adds to the complexity of managing social profiles and across tools in the enterprise. Enter OpenSocial 2.0.
10. On Friday July 15, the ITC handed down an initial determination in Apple’s favor saying that HTC’s Android products infringed 2 Apple patents. If this determination is upheld, it can have a major impact on not just HTC, but other Android licensees. Fantastic analysis by Florian Mueller.

This seemed to be one of the more interesting weeks I’ve seen in quite a while. Yahoo makes a big move in Big Data, Google+ launches, Homeaway IPO’s and much more. Good stuff, take a read through.

1. They’re dancing in the streets of Austin…well that isn’t so out of the ordinary on Sixth Street. But after a successful HomeAway IPO, with a $2.2B valuation, they’re dancing down on First Street too. Amazingly, while some thought HomeAway’s offering was overvalued, shared soared almost 50%, raising the valuation to over $3B. Perhaps lost in the news is the announcement that the VRMA/Pegasus switch concept is dead which should only brighten HomeAway’s outlook.
2. Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li says that Google+ could offer great utility if you’re a Gmail/Android user, but that it increases the amount of trust that you have to have in Google. But in an AllThingsD interview with Google’s Vic Gundrota and Bradley Horowitz, it seems as if Google+ is still in the “science project” phase as the purpose of the limited launch is to get customer feedback before a big launch.
3. Mobile payment startup Square raises a $100M Series C round and now has a valuation of $1 Billion.
4. Microsoft officially launches Office365, the subscription-based cloud version of the vaunted Office suite. It should be an interesting transition for the folks in Redmond, particularly from a revenue perspective. I do wonder how enterprise adoption will unfold, but unfortunately it looks like Office365 is basically unusable on mobile devices, so that will slow adoption dramatically.
5. HP is looking for a hardware partner for WebOS in the Microsoft/Nokia vein.
6. Yahoo! launched Hortonworks, a spinoff with the sole focus on developing and commercializing the Hadoop technology originally developed in the company. Hortonworks is a joint venture between Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital. This made big news at the Hadoop summit…and may be the first thing Yahoo! has done right in a while…but folks like CloudEra and MapR are making plenty of headway as well.
7. Another software leader born in the cloud commits to HTML5. First it was Facebook, not it’s Salesfore.com who has a big footprint within the enterprise. Just another example of how companies who are not bogged down by the baggage of the past 30 years can move faster to adopt new tech…which helps attract more customers. However, WindowsXP and IE 7 & 8 still hold back the pace of adoption of HTML5 in the enterprise.
8. It’s one thing when a company is no longer the darling of the media. It’s another when customers start to flee for alternatives. But can anything be salvaged when the employees plainly state they’ve lost confidence in the direction of the company? That seems the situation at Research in Motion. Worse yet, the tepid response from RIM seems to indicate they don’t yet believe there is a problem in the first place.
9. Everyone always wants to get the most of their employees, but the focus is often on “productivity”. How about tapping your employees “cognitive surplus”. Not familiar with the term? Check out this really interesting article and learn. Well worth the read.
10. A consortium of tech companies including Apple, Microsoft and RIM won the bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio.  That group looks like the epitome of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

Apple’s announcements at WWDC are easy to get excited about, but be sure to check out the pieces by James Kobielus on big data and Florian Mueller on the latest in the Oracle-Google battle over Java.

1. The event of the week was Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference and Steve Jobs’ keynote.   The major announcements were iCloud, iOS5 and Mac OSX Lion. I would say that only those that felt a new iPhone announcement was required (i.e. Henry Blodget) were disappointed.
2. eBay keeps up their eCommerce acquisition spree, this time buying Magneto, an open source eCommerce platform and rolling it into a newly formed X.Commerce unit along with GSI Commerce (the deal just closed) and other pieces. eBay originally bought PayPal to reduce purchase friction, but now has built a broad eCommerce and Payments platform that is driving most of the growth and about 40% of the revenues for the company.
3. Choice Hotels rolled out a new cloud-based PMS system which could help induce hoteliers to switch flags. The cloud based offering eliminates OpEx costs and dramatically lowers implementation costs. The system is being used by 4,000 hotels worldwide.
4. I don’t know anyone who seems to know more about databases than Forrester’s James Kobielus. So listen to him when he says that Hadoop is the future of enterprise data warehouses. But fear not: “All of your investments in pre-Hadoop EDWs, data marts, data hubs, operational data stores, and the like are reasonably safe from obsolescence”. That’s comforting J.
5. Brilliant analysis by Florian Mueller on Oracle’s case against Google with respect to Java and Android. I’ve written about this before and it looked more like posturing then. Google’s own admission that they rejected a license offer from Sun and willfully went forward is pretty damning. This looks like real trouble.
6. Some feel the GDSs are “evil” and are limiting innovation in the travel sector, while others see that the GDS still plays a vital role in travel distribution and deliver a higher average yield while offering a completely variable distribution cost. Who doesn’t like healthy debate…or a cookie.
7. TIMN’s Nilay Patel writes that phone numbers are “…a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers”, yet provides some hope for the future.
8. JavaScript has made an amazing evolution from niche technology to a foundational element of the modern web.
9. Room77 closed an oversubscribed Series B round of $10.5M led by General Catalyst Partners. The financing will go toward expanding the company’s core search technology and its global index of hotel rooms.
10. Fusion-io builds more momentum for technology IPOs and investments with a successful IPO and a $2B valuation. Fusion-io, the Utah-based startup that uses flash memory to make ordinary servers run faster, technology plays an integral role in the recent mega-datacenters built by Facebook and Apple. Incidentally, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is Fusion-io’s Chief Scientist.

In case you missed it:

1. Aloft Hotels, a Starwood brand, is rolling out a new “Smart Check-In” program which uses a RFID keycard & a push notification to a smart phone to let guests by-pass the check in lines and head straight for their rooms. I think this might be a better solution than trying to directly use NFC chips in smartphones.
2. Expedia & Groupon announced Groupon Getaways at the All Things Digital D9 Conference. Henry Harteveldt and Evan Konweiser provide perspectives. Both agree that consumers will like it but that travel suppliers may not.
3. Yahoo and Alibaba have made up (well sort of). But Alibaba’s Jack Ma thinks that Yahoo! would  be better off it were broken up, something that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has resisted thus far.
4. Just a day after American Airlines released an attack ad against Orbitz (the video has been made “private” by American shortly after the court decision) the courts ruled in favor of Orbitz and ordered American to reinstate their fares on the Chicago-based OTA. But fear not CourtTV fans, the legal shenanigans continue.
5. “Ooh, the cloud is scary…it’s unreliable to put complex, mission critical apps. You should keep it all on your own internal systems”. Yeah, right. Ignore the haters. NYSE Technology just built a custom cloud for financial markets. If a highly-regulated industry that relies on real-time data can implement the cloud, any industry can.
6. Oracle donates OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation. While @krishnan wonders about the ramifications wrt the LibreOffice fork of the project, I wonder whether the real purpose behind the move is to re-ingratiate Oracle to the Apache folks and bring them back into the JCP as part of a strategy in the ongoing litigation against Google for the forking of Java in the Android platform.
7. Nokia downgraded its earnings outlook and the markets responded with a vengeance knocking down the stock by about one-fourth to almost half the 52-week high price. Asymco’s Horace Dediu breaks down the value of the different components of Nokia’s business.
8. Groupon filed for an IPO and some of the information released made a few people wonder where the real value of the company lies and if the model is sustainable. What was most shocking to me is that in the last funding round – which was a BILLION dollars – 86% of the funds were paid back out to existing investors, board members and officers. I have never seen such an exit for investors between rounds. Crazy.
9. I was having a conversation with a client the other day about how to balance support of older platforms versus building their apps with an eye to the future. An hour later, Google announced they were dropping support for Firefox 3.5, IE7 and Safari 3. Good decision IMO. If only Microsoft built a version of IE9 (the only version of IE that supports HTML5) that worked on XP, life would be much easier for people designing web apps.
10. Ever hear of “Availability Zones”? In the wake of the Amazon outage a few weeks ago, you may want to learn. There’s not a lot of info out there on how they work, but F5’s Lori MacVittie does a nice job summarizing and putting it into context regarding application reliability and availability & DR in the cloud.

Mobile operating system fragmentation is one I’ve written about before. OS fragmentation is important to developers because it has a major impact in how long you need to support code and also what restrictions you have on bringing new features to market.

Android as an “open” operating system suffers from this more than iOS or even BlackBerry for the simple reason that while they do control the software, they don’t control the hardware manufacturers (although Skyhook may disagree to some extent) or the wireless carriers. Both manufacturers and carriers customize (or distort) the Android interface and device capabilities. That has led to a lag in Android OS upgrades on devices in the marketplace and therefore the costs to support apps in the market and creates time to market challenges for developers.

Netflix is the latest company to struggle with the Android fragmentation challenge. Months after introducing an iOS app (which works on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches)  they finally introduced an app for Android…or at least 5 Android devices.

The good news is that Google is taking positive steps to reduce the level of fragmentation and streamline the upgrade process, as announced during Google’s IO conference last week.  So hopefully the issues experienced by Netflix will be lessened in the future.

This of course is not limited just to the vagaries of streaming technology. I just got an HTC Thunderbolt…Verizon’s first 4G LTE phone…and the damn thing can’t run the MyVerizon app out of the box. I mean the whole thing is insane.

Please add your thoughts in the comments.

1. Farelogix is on a roll as they add Delta to their client roster and giving it a clean sweep of all the major NorthAmerican carriers (Air Canada, American Airlines, United/Continental and US Airways).  However, while utilizing a “direct connect” technology, Delta is taking a kinder and gentler approach to airline distribution.
2. The travel distributions wars have hit a whole new level as US Airways files an Anti-Trust suit against Sabre. The heart of the filing is to remove the exclusivity provisions that binds airlines to a single GDS and provide extraordinary market power to the GDS over the airlines.
3. Intel blew past analyst estimates and delivered record earnings. The numbers seemed to show a very healthy PC market, but some have questioned whether there was some channel stuffing of a sort going on. But in any case, Intel does need to make some progress in the mobile space.
4. This is one of the most interesting pieces of analysis I’ve seen in a while. While most people are concerned with the relative share of Android v. iOS, for all of Android’s market success, it’s had almost no direct effect on Google’s stock price, whereas Apple’s fortunes correlate to the iPhone’s success.
5. If Michael Krigsman believes these numbers, it’s good enough for me. But what they say are shocking. It’s frightening that the expectations of 3-out-of-4 IT executives is that their projects will fail before they even start. The reasons all make sense, but that’s part of why we at Ness feel that it’s important to take a product-development approach to all software initiatives.
6. Apple usually exceeds earnings expectations, but this is getting ridiculous – Apple beat Wall Street consensus estimates by more than $1B in revenues and $1.00 EPS for the quarter.  And that was over estimates that were 5% – 10% higher than Apple guidance. TC’s Erick Schonfeld points out that MacBooks, iPhones and China are driving Apple’s performance. The first two are not surprising, but the numbers out of China indicate are pretty amazing.
7. American Airlines put forward disappointing earnings and apparently had an interesting earnings call.  Apparently Wall Street isn’t buying, feeling that no matter all the talk about distribution, there are some fundamental challenges such as high labor costs that can’t be overcome.
8. Concur keeps making moves. The latest is a strategic marketing agreement & $40M investment in Cleartrip, India’s largest online travel agency.
9. Is there a Moore’s Law for solar energy? I certainly hope so. It’s not travel, it’s not software, but it’s definitely worth reading.
10. eBay buys Where.com as they hope to drive more mobile transactions through PayPal.

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.

Before we get into the Top 10, I just felt I had to share this parody of Magic Quadrants and Hype Cycles. Funny stuff.  

1. The biggest news over the weekend was the new feature that Southwest Airlines debuted – sunroofs – that didn’t go over so well [CNN Video]. Southwest grounded amost 80 planes and continued their effective use of social media to deal with customers concerns and media reports.
2. eBay acquires GSI Commerce for $2.4B to help retailers and big brands move into both online and mobile commerce. As part of the deal, eBay will divest of GSI’s sports merchandise business and 70% of ShopRunner and luxury flash sales firm Rue La La.
3. Google makes a hire full of intrigue: they bring on James Gosling, the guy who invented Java while at Sun.  This is interesting only if you remember that Oracle is currently suing Google for the illegal use (that is unpaid license) of Java in Google’s Dalvik engine, a derivative of Java, used in its Android mobile OS. Of Google had to pay a license fee to Oracle, could they, would they, still give Android away for free? And I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who doesn’t think that Gosling will be heavily involved in improving Dalvik.
4. The digital payments platform battle is escalating with American Express the latest to announce their new platform, called Serve. Amex has a lot of customer relationships to build upon through their card and travel businesses. But can they catch up to PayPal who has millions of customers who have already linked their bank accounts?
5. Cisco security guru Christopher Hoff wonders whether Amazon’s new dedicated Virtual Private Cloud offering is a strategic move or a defensive one against other private cloud providers.
6. Expedia makes a major move in APAC announcing a joint venture with regional low cost carrier Air Asia. The wise and sage Timothy O’Neill-Dunne muses over what this may portend for Expedia.
7. We all know that website page load speed has a major impact on conversion (check out this great infographic), so Google launched Page Speed Online, which provides a quick and easy way to accurately measure the speed of your website directly from the web.
8. Salesforce.com acquired Radian6, a leading social media monitoring platform for $326M. The acquisition should fit nicely with SFDC’s social CRM initiatives and enhance the company’s Chatter and Service Cloud offering. Read perspectives on the deal from Constellation Research Group’s Ray Wang and TechCrunch’s Leena Rao.
9. As another example that Google doesn’t get social networking, I submit to you “+1”. Totally agree with Ingram on this one. I would be surprised if this does not go the way of Wave (er, I mean the Dodo) or Buzz.
10. Limos.com raises $10M from Austin Ventures and launched a new service Limos.com for Business. I’m sure you can figure out that service is for.