Two different announcements from Google came out last week with regard to their Android platform and taken together seem to indicate that they don’t care quite as much about their developer partners.

First was the announcement of Google’s App Inventor which puts app development in the hands of virtually everyone.  This would seem to not only diminish the relative value of the development skills that people have been investing in learning the ins and outs of the Android platform over the past year or two. And it would seem to contribute to an increased of low-quality apps that already seems to pervade the Android store, at least in comparison to those found on Apple’s App Store. I’m pretty sure that’s not a good thing.

The second item came from Google’s earning call when Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s SVP of Product Management said: “I think the most important thing beyond the growth [of the Android ecosystem] is that the most popular app is a browser.”  Rosenberg also noted that search on Android devices grew 300% in the first half of 2010. But monetizing mobile web properties is harder than monetizing apps.

So that tells me a few things. One Google doesn’t really care as much about app growth and still sees search as the key element of its mobile strategy.  But apps are theoretically how developers get paid.  Taken together with numbers quoted on how many dollars have been paid out between Apple and Google through apps it seems to me that if I were considering where to put my development efforts, I would be less interested in developing on the Android platform.

Do you agree with my point of view? Are you putting more resources behind iOS development, Android or some other platform (e.g. RIM or WebOS)?  Let me know.

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.

Well I’m back from vacation and I hope everyone had a great 4th of July weekend.  So what happened last week? Let’s see:

1. The big news of the week is that finally, Google buys ITA Software for $700M. Here’s some “expert analysis” via Tnooz that somehow includes me.
2. Rumored last week, a new airline standards group called OpenAxis emerges, rallying around Farelogix messages. As they are also proposing XML-based messaging schema, I’m not quite sure how technically this will differ from OpenTravel. They say that perhaps they will be more agile and move more quickly than OpenTravel, but it’s easy to say when you have only a few founding members. Let’s see if they create traction and whether they can remain agile once they reach any sort of scale as an organization. As an aside, and maybe I’m dating myself, but any group that has “Axis” as part of their title makes me feel uneasy (see WWII). I’m not making any comparisons, I’m just sayin’ I might have chosen a different name. Perhaps Valyn will license the Captain America imagery for OTA
   

   Image Credit: Marvel Comics

3. If you’re going Cloud, having a billing engine that supports granular metering, pricing and billing is critical.
4. RockCheetah founder, Robert Cole’s presentation on Mobile Distribution from the HITEC conference.  Other than a few quibbles on slide 18 (in my view the walled garden on searchability is more about security of personal information than control, e.g. Facebook; Apple doesn’t block AdMob ads, just collection of personal information), a very good overview of the intersection of travel and mobile.
5. Via Tnooz, 4 Vital Social Media Tips for the Travel Industry. The most important thing to note is that the 4 steps happen in exact opposite order for the buyer versus the seller.
6. Not only does it appear that the Google-ITA Software deal has hit a snag, it seems that other potential suitors have coming knocking on the doors in Cambridge [Update see article #1. Always hard to prognosticate].
7. YouTube says that it still sees Flash as an important part of their distribution, but unlike how it’s been reported in some places, it’s not because of the video CODEC, but because of the granularity of control that the player provides.
8. Timothy O’Neil-Dunne tells us what we already know – travel websites leave a lot to be desired by the consumer – but gives some good context as to why. The question is whether the people who run the travel websites will ever do anything about it.
9. Good post on CloudAve about the disservice that many engaged in the Public v. Private Cloud debate are doing for the industry. I’ve commented on the post itself.  Take the time to watch the embedded video of Amazon Web Services CTO, Werner Vogels’ keynote at last week’s Structure 2010 conference put on by GigaOM.
10. Great article, bad news. Harvard Business Review talks about the problems being faced by the VC community (and by extension entrepreneurs) and the coming VC shakeout

Well this ought to be interesting. After many fits and starts the deal is finally done, pending regulatory approval. The question is what is coming.  Google’s ITA acquisition micro-site says all the right things, but what’s not completely clear is what the “enhanced” search tools will be.  On the conference call this afternoon with analysts and press both Google CEO Eric Schmidt and ITA Software President and CEO Jerry Wertheimer were very vague about the future direction of the ITA products and business, with Schmidt noting that while no definitive decisions have been made the new offerings would be “very different than anything available today”.

There’s a fair amount of information on the a Google microsite describing the transaction, much of it establishing a bulwark against any possible anti-trust concerns, making the case that there is no anti-competitive impact to the acquisition.  This seemed a natural move after recent rumblings that competitors would try to block the deal, or try to jump in before it closed.

But let’s look a little closer.  While seemingly promising to honor commitments to existing QPX customers and pledging to stay out of the online travel agency business, it does seem as if the door is open to become a meta-search provider.  The statement that they “…will drive potential customers to airline and online travel agency websites” is slightly less than “code” for we will sell advertising to airlines and OTAs.  Sounds like meta to me.

Perhaps the most telling statement was their promise not to “lock out” competitors. That doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t compete with the current clients, just not shut them down.  So while the folks at Kayak.com, Orbitz and Bing don’t need to switch technology immediately, it’s probably prudent for them to evaluate alternatives post-haste.

However, if we let’s take a quick look at the way that Google views the travel industry, perhaps Google isn’t targeting meta-search and OTAs after all, but has the Big 3 GDSs in their sights.

How the future unfolds should be very interesting.

Well it was not a particularly newsworthy week. Partially because of the shortened week for Memorial Day as well as the expected lull between Google’s I/O conference and Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) that kicks off today.  But there were still a few items worth noting. As an FYI, I’m heading out on vacation on Friday for about 10 days (10 year anniversary + wife’s xx-th birthday), so no column next week. Not sure if I’ll squeeze out another post this week, so if not “Mahalo”.

1. Adobe announces new technology to power digital publishing for the iPad, iPhone that’s behind the Wired iPad app. Burton Group’s @pragkirk believes it outputs Objective-C, yet unconfirmed. Seems this is all Apple ever wanted. They didn’t care about the tool, just that it results in code that delivers high performance and doesn’t crash. So now if CS5 can output to HTML5 and this new tech, why do we need Flash again?
2. How would travel search look if fare search engines knew who you were? Interesting proposition, presuming that the travel suppliers kept a customer-centric perspective and tried to build a better relationship with their customers rather than implementing this solely to squeeze more ancillary revenues from travelers.
3. The much awaited Google Chrome will launch this fall.  As with any OS, I think adoption is going to be predicated on the availability of apps. If it’s just going to support Google Apps and web browsing, I think there’s limited uptake. So the announcements surrounding the Chrome OS will be more telling than the OS announcement itself.
4. Say what? HP CEO, Mark Hurd says that they didn’t purchase Palm to be in the smartphone business, but mainly for the underlying IP in WebOS to use on a variety of devices.  As an owner of the an H/Pre, up til now I was hopeful that there would be an investment into improving WebOS for the phone. Now, I think I’m more motivated to switch to the upcoming new iPhone or Android than when it looked like Palm may go bankrupt L
5. Amid all the debate about Facebook’s privacy policies, Mark Cuban wonders whether Facebook’s “simplified”, revised privacy policies actually hurt Google and provide a path for newspapers to chart out a new future.
6. At TRAVDEX, I mentioned how Siri might really change the game for travel search as a “do engine” rather than a simple search engine. Robert Scoble paints a picture of how location, search and social might transform how we plan and book travel and how we do other things in our daily lives by 2012.
7. Just days before WWDC, AT&T screws Apple again by abandoning “all you can eat” data plans. People who love their iPhones have abandoned them for Android solely to because of AT&T’s terrible service. This about-face a mere 4 months from the iPad announcement just gives AT&T haters another reason to hate. UPDATE: AT&T has said they’ll grandfather anyone who buys an iPad 3G through June 7, even though they’re currently backordered.
8. Social media superstar, Chris Brogan is launching a new site called “Man on the Go” where he will share his experiences and recommendations of travel gear, hotels, restaurants, etc. It should be interesting to watch what effect he may have on the travel industry. Already he’s highlighted a company called ExpertFlyer.
9. Not necessarily what I would call breaking news, but the New York Times notes that while the airlines have introduced new capabilities leveraging smartphones, they are still – as Henry Harteveldt says –  “prisoners of their past” from a technology perspective.
10. Looking for a place to eat while on the road? Good news. Yelp takes its restaurant reviews to the next level, integrating restaurant booking via OpenTable.  A smart move given that 3 out of 10 businesses reviewed on Yelp are restaurants. Another example of how companies are shortening the distance between investigation and booking.

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.

I’m introducing a new segment called “Insightful Conversations” which are interviews with industry executives in the technology or travel industries talking about industry news and trends.  Last week the big news came out of Google’s I/O conference with major implications for the mobile web.  To talk about the implications of the announcements by Google and Adobe and how they might impact companies’ mobile plans is Crisp Wireless CTO, Xavier Facon.

In the interview we discuss Flash v. HMTL5, app-centricity v. mobile web-centricity and whether brands and developers should alter their mobile plans based on the evolution of the Android platform, HMTL5 and Google’s open sourcing of the WebM VB8 video CODEC.  Some of the key insights from Xavier were:

• Adobe is an authoring tool vendor. It’s only natural that they support other platforms like HTML5, but it won’t reduce their support of Flash. But he’s bullish on the future of HTML5.
• Xavier breaks down the differences between Flash, H.264 and Google’s WebM CODEC
• Regardless of whether HMTL5 or Flash wins, Adobe wins. Developers will always need the best tools and Adobe will likely deliver them.
• HMTL5-based apps may make Apple’s section 3.3.1 meaningless. Apple won’t be able to tell what tool was used to create HTML5-based apps. The final code will all look the same.
• The most important thing of Google’s new Web Apps store is that it shows that they finally get that winners and losers is based on distribution, not technology.  There will be a convergence between the app-centric world of Apple and Google’s mobile-web centric approach.

Enjoy the interview.

Insightful Conversations – Xavier Facon – iTunes format

Insightful Conversations – Xavier Facon – MP3

About Crisp Wireless

Crisp Wireless is a mobile advertising company that offers a rich media mobile ad platform and a full catalog of beyond-the-banner ad units to enable premium brands to interact with consumers on mobile devices. The company makes it easier for advertising agencies to buy, create, and manage mobile rich media campaigns. Crisp also empowers publishers to take control of their valuable mobile inventory and maximize their mobile ad revenue. Leading brands including Lexus, Infiniti, Paramount Pictures, Estee Lauder, Skittles, and others have utilized Crisp Rich Media ads.  Crisp Publisher Partners include Hearst Magazines, Discovery Communications, A&E Television Networks, Fast Company, Inc., and others.

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.

Last week Dennis Schaal wrote an article pondering the question of what travel companies should do with their mobile and web strategies in light of the Apple/Adobe feud over Flash.  Dennis got input on whether to continue leveraging the Flash platform or wait for HTML5 to mature from several prominent individuals involved in the travel industry including RockCheetah’s Robert Cole.  And Robert got it exactly right…only backwards.

But I don’t want to bury the lead.  Let me state up-front: You should not stand on the sidelines and wait for the Adobe-Apple kerfuffle (nod to @jangles) to sort itself out.  This will take years.  Instead, be thoughtful in establishing your web and mobile strategy and get moving today.

Now let me outline where I have disagreement with Robert’s views.

Different platforms require different modes of presentation based on different usability strategies

Robert worries that uncertainty around the winner of the Flash debate will result in the “dumbing-down” (Dennis’ words, not Robert’s) of sites or the need to invest in multiple sites to support different technology platforms.

In fact, trying to provide the same experience over different devices or platforms is the epitome of dumbing-down.  “Write-once, run anywhere” is a siren’s call that can cause many apps to crash on the shores of poor usability and blandness.  Different devices have different use cases and capabilities.  If you don’t take that into consideration you’re making a fatal mistake.  Let me elaborate.

• Think of the use case: In software development, just like in web design, nothing is more important than the use case. For example, prospective travelers are more likely to conduct their primary research during the trip planning phase on their desktop/laptops, but are more likely to use their mobile devices post-booking and while in-situ (e.g. itinerary changes, alerts, making a dinner reservation).  So the kind of information that you present and how you present it should differ in each case. While the information you provide the “travel researcher” can have a lot of text, high-res images, and video, the information and options you give the mobile traveler need to be much more streamlined and transactional in nature.
• Consider the device capabilities: First of all you must remember that the desktop paradigm is based around the traditional WIMP (windows-icon-menu-pointer) construct while most smartphone and mobile devices are touch-based.  This changes almost everything about the way you need to present your information.  In a touch-based paradigm mouse-overs don’t work because you can’t physically do it.  The precision of ‘pointing’ is constrained.  Finally, and most obviously, not every device has the same screen size or can automatically switch from portrait to landscape mode. To not adapt for the different devices is to leave a lot of potential improvement to the user experience on the table. More importantly, why bother creating an app for a device if you aren’t going to take advantage of specific device capabilities like accelerometers, locators, calendars, or phonebooks?

Finalization of the HTML5 spec will take years, but won’t hinder adoption

It is true that the finalization of the HTML5 spec is not anticipated until 2012.  But that’s a very different point than saying that no one will be adopting it until the spec is finalized. If nothing else the web is fluid and reacts quickly.  Every desktop browser of note either supports HTML5 currently (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera) or has pledged its support (Microsoft for the upcoming IE9).

And the same goes for mobile browsers, which are increasingly based on the WebKit standard.  Check out this chart from a post in the O’Reilly Radar:

Overwhelmingly mobile browsers already support HMTL5 (with Microsoft pledging support in the future) and TODAY, none of these mobile browsers (nor really any mobile device I’ve heard of) supports Adobe Flash.

Add on top of this the fact that by all accounts over two-thirds of videos on the web – and perhaps as high as 90% – are available in the H.264 standard used by HTML5-powered sites, I’d say that video content isn’t a deal-breaker anymore.

Let’s get real about “Open Source”

Lastly there is the debate as to who is more open.  Is it Adobe or Apple? I think that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber (no relation) says it well.

“Open” is one of those terms that means a lot of different things to different people. Most should be able to agree, though, that open-vs.-closed is a continuum — shades of gray, not just black and white. A light enough shade of gray is “open”, dark enough is “closed”. The arguments are over where those thresholds lie.

I, for example, would argue that HTML5 is open, and that Flash is not. HTML5 is open, to my eyes, because no one vendor defines or controls either its specification or its numerous implementations. The specification is being written and decided upon by consensus by two standards groups, WHATWG and the W3C.

You can argue whether or not Apple’s policy regarding AppStore approvals make any sense and you probably have a good argument.  But I don’t think it’s fair at all to say that Apple is closed from a technology perspective.  Apple’s web vision is based on HTML5, CSS, Javascript and H.264 video — all industry standards that they do not control.  Adobe on the other hand freely licenses the Flash player, but not the platform. Adobe can make whatever changes to Flash of their own choosing and on their own timetable.  They may claim to take the desires of the development community into consideration in developing their product roadmap, but they are not required to. In the four years since Apple’s iPhone ushered in the age of the web and media driven smartphone there has been no mobile version of Flash available for any device and consequently no mobile device has supported Flash in all that time and we have lived to tell about it.

In my view, Adobe’s entire argument is merely a matter of timing. Only now when Adobe is finally planning to release Flash Mobile 10.1 (anticipated to be launched next month on the Android 2.2 OS…backwards availability or compatibility not assured…and H/Pre’s WebOS) after years of delay are they protesting.  How much longer should they have expected the rest of the industry to wait before they moved on to a standards-based approach? It’s important to remember that months prior to the release of the iPad and the announcement of iPhone OS4, it was Google who was the most vocal proponent of an HTML5-centric view of the future of the web.  Only recently has Google begun to embrace Flash on mobile devices driven by their “the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” strategy against Apple.

Yes, Adobe’s products have long been a favorite of designers (let’s not forget that it was Apple who helped them achieve that position), but they’re certainly not the most “open” company and there are plenty of alternatives for web and mobile app development to Adobe’s Creative Suite.

OK, one last thing. While Tnooz highlighted the largely sarcastic and self-serving ads by Adobe to show how much they love (i.e. loathe) Apple at this moment, I feel compelled to share a faux-ad that I found on TechCrunch created by an Apple fan that I found truly amusing

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

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