1. Airline cutovers are challenging and fragile projects. So it’s not surprising that there are often hiccups, but the problems during the cutover at AeroMexico had some fairly significant impacts to travelers.
2. Building airline systems is hard work too as HP is reportedly working through some challenges with their Agiliare Passenger Service System which is the basis of American Airlines’ Jetstream product. HP reportedly let go upwards of 200 contract developers. But conflicting sources make it hard to know whether this is just growing pains or something more significant. The only thing for certain is that many people are watching.
3. There’s a lot that I like about the OpenStack cloud platform – it’s been built by real rocket scientists and can be deployed on any infrastructure. Citrix has taken the platform another step ahead by launching Project Olympus – the first commercialized distribution of OpenStack which will include a Citrix-certified version of Open Stack along with a cloud optimized version of Citrix XenServer as hypervisor. A shrewd move by Citrix to counter the momentum that VMWare is creating.
4. Software AG buys Java performance specialist Terracotta with the stated goal to build a cloud application platform that would compete with the big boys – IBM, Oracle and VMWare. Perhaps it’s a little ambitious of a goal given its current enterprise application lineup.
5. After a period of rumors, Twitter officially buys TweetDeck. One hopes that Twitter leaves TweetDeck alone, or at least doesn’t make many significant changes. Here’s a story from the inside on how it all went down.
6. Getaround…the Airbnb of car rental wins TechCrunch Disrupt. Getaround is an alterative to ZipCar and traditional car rental agencies allowing customers to rent personal cars by the week, day or hour.  Besides winning the $50K, the must be real happy about this next story.
7. Can Airbnb really be worth $1B or are we just partying like it’s 1999? At least the folks at Andreesen Horowitz thinks so as they lead a $100M investment into the alternative lodging startup.
8. Choosing between developing native apps or going down the mobile web route is a decision that companies struggle with all the time. This article points out two key considerations for commerce companies – native apps have significantly higher conversion rates and can deliver better performance than mobile sites, also impacting conversion. Just something to keep in mind.
9. PayPal files suit against Google and some former employees, specifically recent hire Osama Bedier who joined Google to help create Google Wallet, a direct competitor to PayPal’s mobile payment platform.
10. Kayak reports stellar results in advance of its planned IPO.

Can’t think of anything pithy to lead off with, so without further adieu:

1. Infor, the third largest ERP vendor, who also has a growing hospitality software business, it trying to strengthen its position and broaden its vertical ERP offerings with a $1.8B unsolicited bid for Lawson Software (the 6^th largest ERP vendor), backed by private equity firm Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate is an investor in Infor and SSA Global (which has been rolled up under the brand along with Baan, GEAC and Softbrands). How this bid moves forward should be interesting to watch given that Carl Icahn (who I once personally pitched for VC money) and Romesh Wadwhani are Lawson shareholders and shrewd negotiators. Constellation Research Group’s Ray Wang provides analysis. If you’re interested, you may also want to check out this look at the finances of some mid-cap ERP vendors, including Lawson.  .
2. HP unveiled their new strategy at their analyst summit: public cloud, big data analytics and mobility (via WebOS). They must have spent months coming up with the top 3 hottest segments in tech as their platforms for growth. But seriously they have a lot of challenges ahead to create differentiated offerings in these sectors. Also, they have to decide what they’re gonna do with the legacy hardware (computers and printer) businesses, which drive a lot of HP’s brand and revenues, even though it contributes less to their margins (except for the printer ink business). What’s a bit worrisome to me is that acquisitions will play a key part in the execution of the plan. I still wish that Leo would have tried to recreate the focus on innovation that was pervasive at HP when Bill and Dave were in charge.
3. One set of Expedia alums tried to launch the next big travel startup under the TravelPost moniker, but that didn’t work out so well. But another group of ex-Expedia “braniacs” (Dennis’ words, not mine) hope their venture works out better.  The Montreal-based start up called Hopper is a new natural language search engine for travel. Beyond the natural language angle, speed seems to be very impressive. I hope to get a closer look soon, but it seems to be a company to keep an eye on.
4. Remember when Kayak said they weren’t in the direct booking business, then they were and then they weren’t again? Well they changed their mind again, at least for the hotel sector as  they decided to take direct hotel bookings using the Travelocity Partner Network to handle the booking process.
5. There has been a flurry of activity in the tours and activities sector in the past few weeks. The latest is the launch of Pocketvillage, a new meta-search engine focused on the tours and activities sector at ITB/Berlin.
6. As someone who’s traveling more and more, but having my mileage spread across multiple carriers and typically flying steerage, er,  Econcomy class, having access to a nice airport lounge via an affordable day passes seems like a good idea.
7. Synxis had a fairly significant outage (24-30 hours by most accounts). It’s not the first to happen in the travel sector, and certainly won’t be the last. It’s not completely reasonable to expect 5-Nines uptime, but these days that’s what we do expect and, sadly for Sabre/Synxis, we now have Twitter and Facebook to voice our displeasure. But the one thing that is disturbing to me is that so far they haven’t been able to identify the root cause of the problem. Not terribly confidence inspiring.
8. Travelclick acquired Rubicon to extend their offerings for hotels. The companies will merge the products under the Hotelligence360 brand. The acquisition may also help TravelClick extend its services to the airline and car rental segments.
9. JetBlue – the musical…well sort of. JetBlue is becoming the “official and exclusive airline” of Catch Me If You Can, slated to open at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway April 10. Lisa Borromeo, the airline’s manager of brand and partnerships says this dovetails nicely with JetBlue’s mission “to bring humanity back to air travel, resurrect the glamour and joy of flying in the 1960s, the industry era created for the Broadway show”. Another nice move for one of the few companies that realize that branding does not equal advertising, but part of creating an emotional connection with customers that engenders loyalty.
10. I know a number of people who struggle to figure out how to measure the impact of their social media activities (me included). To those folks, this “open research” report from Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang, should prove useful.

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving (at least in the US). Thanks to everyone in all the other countries who I hoped worked extra hard to make up for the fact that we were in a turkey coma for a few days.

Here’s what I thought was interesting from last week, along with my usual commentary:

1. How much is Kayak worth? You can interpolate a value of $857M based on some of the information in their registration statement. But are you a believer? For a company who’s net income was just a hair over $6M through the first three quarters of 2010, it feels a little dot-commy. But they have perhaps the best iPad travel app and some great ads, so who knows. I guess as long as they don’t break out a sock puppet, they’ll probably be OK.
2. Do you remember when Novell was THE network operating system company? NetWare was king as was the 5-1/4” floppy disk. They squandered opportunities in office productivity (WordPerfect), groupware (GroupWise), network management (ZenWorks). And in tryin got reinvent itself as a Linux house with the acquisition of SUSE didn’t really work as they are a distant third to RedHat and Oracle (Sun). But hell, they did fetch $2.2B and that’s still a lotof money by any measure. But there is a measure of synergy with Attachmate and particularly NetIQ’s product lines.
3. Yay! iOS 4.2 drops and the iPhone and iPad operating systems are brought back into balance. Even better, I’ve now got multi-tasking, printing and streaming on my iPad.
4. Jury awards Oracle a $1.3B judgment against SAP in the TomorrowNow case.  This is a major blow to SAP and will also have implications in the war with HP (where Leo Apotheker, now HP CEO, but was SAP’s CEO) and in Oracle’s litigation against Google with respect to Android’s alleged infringement of Java intellectual property. Interesting times.
5. The war between airlines and the GDSs continues to escalate. So far the only winners are the lawyers.
6. As a marketer, I’m always interested in understanding buyer psychology and how it needs to play into your marketing and product development plans. So the guest post on Tnooz on the subject was of interest to me. However, I’m not totally in agreement with with everything in the article.  I agree that different segments of the market have different expectations and may require different experiences to move them to action and develop brand loyalty. But I think the point about social proof was only partially addressed. Social proof only matters if I believe that the people reviewing, commenting or contributing in some way have similar interests and desires as I do. And this is an area that I think many travel companies are missing out on really integrating with users’ social graph
7. This one made me laugh. In Japan they actually NTT DOCOMO had to invoke Darth Vader to promote the Android-based Samsung Galaxy S against the iPhone. The iPhone has about two-thirds of the market in Japan.  Could they do more to further position Google as the Evil Empire?
8. Timothy O’Neill-Dunne has a great article on the dynamic pricing conundrum (once you get past the romance novel graphic…TOD is such a softie). The cost and response time implications are particularly interesting. I would love to see some of the data behind his assumptions.
9. It looks like the release of Google ChromeOS is growing closer.  But I’m almost surprised that so much interest seems to be invested in what amounts to a netbook OS. I mean there’s not even that much interest in netbooks anymore as the momentum is behind tablets…even ones that won’t ship for months like the RIM Playbook. And even within Google there seems to be conflicting points of view as to the future of the Chrome OS.
10. Mobissimo becomes the first company to offer a travel search engine within Facebook.  It’s interesting, but I’m not quite sure if it’s differentiating or defensible just yet. But I am sure that Dennis got the Tom & Jerry analogy wrong vis-à-vis Kayak. Jerry Mouse is the cute one who outsmarts Tom Cat. And it seems Kayak, led by the handsome Steve Hafner, who has massively outraised Mobissimo and is on the cusp of an IPO, looks more the part of Jerry in my estimation.

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.

Travel industry analyst firm, PhoCusWright, recently posted that “Kayak Takes on the Big Guys“, noting the apparent changes in their business model, and poses the question whether Kayak can still be considered a meta-search player.  Kayak’s introduction of ‘booking facilitation’ and ‘Private Sales’ are pushing them closer to becoming an OTA in some aspects.  However, Kayak CEO, Steve Hafner, maintains that is not the goal, explaining that they intend to evolve into a full service travel planning site, but will retain it’s advertising based revenue stream and ‘media company’ status.

Lorraine Sileo, PhoCusWright vice president, research has said “Kayak has become another intermediary or layer that never replaced any of the other steps in the search, shop, buy process. This move is important to their long-term success.”

Sileo’s comments about Kayak never replacing the other steps in the booking process  are even more important given a few items in the news this week that I saw:

• Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference 2010 in San Francisco this week, Priceline President and CEO Jeffery Boyd noted that OTAs’ (Online Travel Agencies) decision to remove booking fees on airlines has really started to level out the playing field across direct and indirect booking channels.  So the primary consumer benefit behind meta-search, to find the best prices across channels and sites, seems to have been mitigated.  So is the NEED for meta-search reducing? Is that the reasoning behind the changes in strategy that Kayak is taking?
• The second item in the news was a report from Kevin May, editor for tnooz, that Google may have travel in it’s sights by extending it’s Comparison Ads pilot.  May even says that “Comparison Ads is effectively a metasearch…of products already in the AdWords system.  It looks and feels like a scaled-down Kayak in terms of functionality.”  I always believe that anytime Google sets its sights on a market, those in it should start to step up or change their game.  And if you’re a search company — that also relies on advertising as a primary source of revenue — is Google the one that you want to compete with? Direct, undifferentiated competition with Google doesn’t sound like a game most companies would want to play.

To me what’s most interesting about all of this is that it’s happening in advance of a much-rumored IPO for the company. Some thought that the IPO was a driving force behind the $60M TV ad campaign that Kayak recently undertook.   Of course it’s always better to make these changes prior to the IPO so that there’s some consistency in the earnings and therefore stock price…especially while restrictions are in place.  But how these changes may impact the company’s valuation are beyond my comprehension.  I’ll leave that to other folks smarter than me AND the investment bankers — just over a year ago, I might have clubbed the two together

So what do you think is in Kayak’s future?