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”.

I’m gonna write up something separate on Google IO, but in case you missed it, here’s the other stuff of note that happened last week:

1. Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5B. Every Skype user in the world fears the folks in Redmond will kill Skype intentionally or unintentionally. The good news seems to be that Skype will a standalone division of Microsoft, ensuring the product and brand will continue to exist (for now).  Ballmer promised that Skype will “continue to support non-Microsoft devices”. Overall I haven’t seen many comments that are bullish on the acquisition (other than from Steve Ballmer), except for this one that suggests Microsoft is “buying an $8bn option on the future of the mobile telephony industry,” if VoLTE doesn’t pan out.
2. It’s deals like this latest one with Starwood, that gives you Starpoints for check-ins, that might create some actual utility for Foursquare, now that the novelty has worn off.
3. Expedia rolls out a flurry of new mobile apps including its first Android app and new iPhone and Android apps for its Hotels.com brand. This is the first tangible results of their purchase of Mobiata.
4. A lot of people really like Airbnb. When I was at I went to a party at a place someone rented with the service. But I always came back to the same concern about the concept – I don’t know a damn thing about the person I’m renting from or what I can really expect from the place I’m staying at. Well social networking to the rescue <sarcasm>. Airbnb Social Connections lets you tap into your social graph via Facebook Connect to help vet your choices. It’s a step in the right direction at least.
5. Tired of paying high airfares? This New York Times article explains how you can beat them with “hidden-city ticketing” strategies. Pretty cool.
6. HomeAway’s acquisition spree continues in advance of its IPO. This time the target is Second Porch, which will help shore up HomeAway’s social strategy.
7. NetSuite is looking more and more like a very serious player in the enterprise after a series of announcements at its SuiteWorld 2011 user conference this year. Forrester’s Kate Leggett provides a nice summary of what happened.
8. SilverRail’s train keeps on a rolling with their latest partnership with Sabre’s GetThere travel management and expense system.
9. Nilay Patel has a fantastic piece analyzing Skyhook Wireless’ 750 page complaint against Google. Reading it will be time well spent.
10. Many people consider Google Microsoft’s largest competitor. But perhaps VMWare is real stalking horse as the cloud gains in importance.

Of course the big news was the Earthquake off the coast of Japan and resulting tsunami. The devastation is complete in some areas. The before and after shots are stunning.

Please consider making a donation through the Red Cross.

Now here is the other news that caught my eye last week:

1. I’m putting this atop the list because I thought it was the best piece I read all week. Google developer evangelist Don Dodge Dodge always has some great insights in to what’s happening in the tech sector and particularly start ups. This piece is dead on. There are a lot of tech start ups, but not many cross the finish line.  For those of you who think that there’s too much attention paid to Valley start ups with little substance, this post is for you.
2. HomeAway files for an IPO to raise an estimated $230M. The move continues the momentum for travel tech in the financial markets. But what makes this a good offering is that it’s a company that actually makes money, generates cash and is only tapping the potential of a highly disorganized sector.
3. Last week was ITB/Berlin, the world’s largest travel industry trade show. It was my first time and was overwhelming in its sheer size. Tnooz’s Kevin May highlights some of the facts and trends from some of the presentations at ITB.
4. Travelport sells GTA to Kuoni for $720M on the eve of ITB.
5. There’s a lot of data out there in the travel industry and getting control of it and turning it into actionable information is a challenge. This article of by the CTO of Comtec begins to paint the picture.
6. Pretty much as expected, Adobe has semi-capitulated to Apple and has released a Flash-to-HTML5 converter. Now this is not saying that Adobe is giving up on Flash, nor is to say that other mobile device makers won’t still be hawking their ability to play Flash as a competitive advantage to Apple. But at least if you’ve made an investment to Flash as a development platform, you’re no longer held hostage to it as a technology any longer.
7. There was a very public spat between Verifone and mobile payment start up Square over security. I think it’s a testament to Square’s value prop and the amount of money on the table that Verifone called them out.
8. HomeAway takes a step towards taking online payments for rentals. If only that was in place when I booked my summer vacation in Cape Cod last month via HomeAway.
9. It looks like Google Maps’ new hotel pricing may provide fast results, but does speed count if the quality of the results isn’t there? RockCheetah’s Robert Cole gets right to the point: “Google will certainly get clicks for hotels instead of customers going to intermediaries,” Cole says, adding, however, that conversion rates may be “a totally different dynamic.”
10. Pegasus Solutions launches its MetaSearch Services product, extending the hotel metasearch to all 90,000 hotels that the company provides distribution services to.

Hope everyone had a happy Valentine’s Day!

1. Concur held its annual Fusion conference. COO Raj Singh laid out “4 Big Areas of Growth” (mobile, social, cloud and platform) in his keynote. The clarified the plans to integrate TripIt, hitting on the first two. But the cool stuff I think is in the new Concur Connect Platform that opens up new APIs for companies to extend off of the core Concur product. Today most people are thinking just of getting more value from the travel data (not a small thing), but I bet once people start mucking around, we’ll see some cool stuff that will strengthen Concur’s position in the market.
2. Maxroam, the mobile company out to disrupt mobile cell roaming. The company provides the world’s first free mobile phone roaming service allowing users to passengers to receive free mobile calls and SMS messages when they travel abroad.  Its first significant deal is to market the service through Ryanair’s channel, a natural fit marketing-wise with Ryanair whose mission is to reduce the cost of travel. Wonder if it will work in typical RyanAir fashion – roaming is free, but there will be a charge to hear what the other person is saying
3. HomeAway got $25M from Google in the fall, but they’re looking for an even bigger payday, plotting a $300 IPO, according to Bloomberg.
4. There’s a lot of concern about mobile payments and security, and rightly so. So I suggest that you read this piece (and related ones), which excepts a report by O’Reilly/PayPal report entitled “ePayments: Emerging Platforms, Embracing Mobile and Confronting Identity“. Good stuff. Better yet, download the full report.
5. RIM launches a Blackberry ‘travel app’, but let’s not over-react here. They didn’t “beat” Apple to anything. This appears to be mostly a re-skinning of the Worldmate app which has been available on the iPhone for about a year and a half. Plus it does not approach the scope of the rumored iTravel app, which may never make it beyond Patently Apple reports.
6. Vivek Wadhwa joins the chorus of those who dislike the current state of search technology. But what he describes what he wants from his “New Google”, sounds an awful lot like Siri, bought by Apple last year.
7. I love SlideShare. I think it’s a great way to share information…and now it’s getting better as the company launches a new web-based meeting service called ZipCast. Even better, it’s built on HTML5.
8. Orbitz reported Q4 earnings and the numbers are not good. The main culprit seems to be less traffic from Kayak.com (which is under arbitration), but there was also an affect from the loss of American Airlines inventory.
9. PhoCusWright just released a report on the tours and activities sector that’s got a lot of good data in it. But Rezgo’s Stephen Joyce puts it all in context for you. For a sector that most people don’t think about, it looks like a pretty interesting (i.e. there’s a lot of money in it and it’s very complicated). Certainly there’s a massive opportunity for the taking if someone could help make it a more orderly marketplace.
10. While there was a plethora of reactions at Apple’s new subscription policy, Google introduced One Pass that seems to satisfy many of the complaints against Apple (lower commission, sharing of some subscriber data). But does that mean Google will be successful? Not so fast says GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram.

Happy Halloween everyone.  Of course the most important event from last week was Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity/Rally to Keep Fear Alive. HuffPo provides responses from the “media”.

In other news…

1. Appropriate given that we’re at the height of the election season and have just recapped the Rally to Restore Sanity, another organization twists the word “fair” to protect their own interests in the status quo and to block a competitor’s progress (most political orgs insert “freedom”, “life” or “for a better America” just as disingenuously).  Hey, I don’t trust Google as far as I can throw them, but I really don’t see this as anything more than posturing in hopes of getting a concession.  Coverage with different persectives from The Wall Street Journal, Tnooz and TechCrunch.
2. Speaking of Google, they keep adding to their travel portfolio…this time indirectly with a reported $25M investment in Homeaway…at a stunning $1.4B valuation, the web’s largest vacation rental site.
3. While social technologies playing an increasing role in travel companies operations – and in just about every other sector too – it’s probably hard to find two companies that are approaching the integration of social the same way, both technologically and organizationally. Enterprise 2.0 guru Dion Hinchcliffe looks at who should be in charge from an organizational perspective. Should be considered required reading.
4. Vertical integration at work: the leader in online sales of tours and attractions, Viator buys OurExplorer, a Sydney, Australia based company that provides resources for discovering such activities. Ray Ozzie’s long and winding goodbye…or as some may refer to it “Here’s everything that I wish I did or would have liked to have done were I to have stayed around” letter.
5. RedMonk’s Michael Cote recaps the Adobe MAX conference and provides his usual sharp analysis. The most important takeaway is that it seems that Adobe has finally seen the light that they need to focus on web development tools and HTML5 and that Flash is to be treated as a feature rather than the platform. But time will tell whether their actions match their words.
6. Adobe tries to regain control over mobile device UI by launching Adobe AIR 2.5 for Windows Phone 7, Android and the RIM PlayBook. RIM made the biggest bet on AIR by essentially ceding future of the development platform for the device to Adobe – you want to build an app, you’ve got to build it in AIR. The technology is slick, but if for one reason or another Adobe slows down their investments in the technology, RIM has not given themselves – or their developer partners –  many backup options.
7. Adobe isn’t the only one who’s abandoning proprietary UI platforms in favor of HTML5. At This year’s Professional Developer’s Conference, Microsoft announced a shift in their strategy for Silverlight, the Flash-like runtime UI environment.  Seems like Apple has won the day.
8. PayPal grabs the lead on micropayments from Google again and announced a partnership with Facebook…invoking the ‘enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend’ strategy.
9. HTML5 wasn’t the only thing discussed at Microsoft’s PDC 2010. In fact it wasn’t even the most important thing (many will argue it was Kinect for Xbox). Altimeter Group’s Ray Wang breaks it down.
10. What’s one of the gates to cloud adoption? Not being able to differentate between “moving to and “building for” the Cloud.

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.

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.

Homeaway, the online vacation rental giant snapped up it’s second vacation rental site in less than a week, purchasing AlugueTemporada.com.br.  The move expands Homeaway’s footprint into South America and gives them over 12,000 property listings on the continent and 475,000 worldwide.  The move is pretty savvy given the upcoming 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, both taking place in Rio de Janeiro.  Start searching now.

It looks like the sleeping giant has awoken and is aggressively moving to enhance it’s leadership position in the online vacation rental market.  It’s surprising only in that it’s the first significant moves to increase it’s depth and breadth of properties since it raised $250M 16 months ago.  It also follows behind Homeway’s first major television ad campaign where they launched an ad based on National Lampoon’s Vacation during this year’s Super Bowl.

What comes next for the Austin, TX based Homeaway is unclear, but they are certainly on the move.  It should be interesting to watch.