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.

April 8, 2014. That’s the date that Microsoft has set to end all support of Windows XP. Yes, XP will almost be old enough to be Bar-Mitzvah’d at that point.  Oy vey.

That date is important to mobile developers because XP is the boat anchor that is holding back full-throated supported for HTML5-based apps.

Managing support of older browser platforms – especially when you have to balance desktop and mobile browsers – is a pain for everyone and the costs and resource requirements of doing so are significant. Last month Google declared that it is ending support for Firefox 3.5, IE7 and Safari 3 as of August 1.

While it’s hard to find reliable statistics on OS market share, XP sadly still plays a prominent role in many enterprises. And the limitations of XP are what’s holding many developers hostage to this day. A Forrester report from as recent as Q3 2010 indicated that a whopping 75% of PCs are still running Windows XP[1].

In Windows chief Steven Sinfosky’s appearance at All Things Digital’s D9 conference last month, Microsoft demo’d Windows 8 [prior coverage] the most important announcement in my view was that HTML5 & JavaScript would be the primary development environment for building apps. That Microsoft has made such a strong statement of support for the open HTML5 standard over a proprietary one (essentially demoting Silverlight to whatever is past the scrap heap) is a major coup for the HTML5 movement.

That is in addition to Microsoft’s move to add support for HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9 and 10.  But alas, neither of those browsers are available for Windows XP users.  Factoring in the limitations of XP and the resulting significant share of non-HTML5 compliant browsers IE 6, 7 and 8, application developers can’t fully commit to HTML5.

Here are some graphics I found on HTML5 browser compliance that I thought were worth sharing. They paint a pretty clear picture (Source: : http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus).

Therefore they stuck with the challenge of having to develop multiple presentation layers, rather than being able to consolidate under the HTML5/CSS3/JS umbrella. This naturally multiplies development, testing and support costs which can rob the ability of development organizations to invest those resources in other activities that move the product/service forward. Not good, right?

Yet this is exactly what Adobe should be thanking Microsoft for.  Many of the older desktop and web applications were built using Flash and Flex. So developers are handcuffed to these platforms and it makes investing in new versions and support for mobile devices (remember that iOS doesn’t support Flash) more challenging.  And there are 3 more years until XP goes away and therefore 3 more years that Flash hovers over the industry like a spectre.

Now my colleague Avinash Kaza writes that even if Flash goes away it’s not a big deal as Flash drives a relatively small portion of Adobe’s revenues and that tools are where the money is.  That is true to an extent. But Flash has had a halo effect on Adobe’s business far greater than the revenues indicate. By making Flash player free, it transformed Adobe into a web publishing platform, that drove the sales of its tools. Even though Adobe probably makes the very best design tools for HTML5, if Flash were to go away Adobe would lose that halo and be positioned as a great tools company.

I was just talking with a client who is trying to figure out how to bring their Flash-based app to mobile, with the iPad as a key target platform. Unfortunately there are no easy paths forward.  In the same boat as many other companies, they don’t have a lot of budget and many of their customers are accessing the app via IE 6, 7 & 8. They did ask me for projections of when XP will fade in the enterprise so that we could build a product roadmap to migrate the product towards HTML5. I thought I’d share some of the information I found so far:

• XP still has a significant role in the enterprise. Forrester’s data shows a 75% share for XP, but forecasted that Windows 7 would exchange share with XP.  This clearly hasn’t happened to the extent forecasted, but the chart that follows shows a much smaller number, but still significant progress. I believe that the Pingdom number includes consumer PCs too because of the relatively high share for Vista which most enterprises avoided like the plague (with good reason). We might have been in a very different place if Vista wasn’t such a disaster of a product. In my opinion, Vista cast a pall over Windows 7 that stunted enterprise adoption.

• Windows 8 is not due until (early) 2012. The demo and D9 looked great. I have not been able to find any info on projected enterprise adoption. While I love the Metro UI and tile interface, I wonder if the stark differences in UI will delay enterprise adoption because of anticipated higher training costs and impacts on user productivity during the initial transition.
• Here are current browser share that seem to show that gains by IE9 are correlated with Windows 7 adoption. Also to be noted is that Firefox users (based on the Gecko rendering engine) are pretty quick to update to the latest version (Firefox 3.6 has pretty good HTML5 support and Firefox 4.0 is even better)  – Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.

Did you find this information useful? Are you struggling with the same issues?

If you have chosen a particular technical direction, please share with the group and make us all smarter for it!

This post originally appeared on the Ness Software Product Labs blog. I lead the Travel and Mobile Practices for Ness Technologies.

The biggest news at last week’s All Things Digital’s D9 Conference was the first look at Microsoft Windows 8.  Steven Sinofsky, Windows Division President, appeared on stage with Walt Mossberg and got grilled pretty good…until the demo of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system.  The demo was very impressive, but also left some major questions about Microsoft’s strategy.

Love the Use of the Metro UI

You’d never guess it was Windows. Sinofsky kept referring to Microsoft’s desire to create a “modern” (even he used air quotes) approach to the OS. The UI adopts the tile metaphor used in Windows Phone 7’s Metro UI and has been redesigned around touch.

However, the remnants of the old operating system are still there for compatibility sake. So is this the proverbial “lipstick on the pig” (although it makes a very fetching pig; Miss Piggy would be jealous) or are we going to see a more lightweight, less buggy and flexible operating system when all is said and done?

It’s Official: Windows 8 is at the Core of Microsoft’s Tablet Strategy

One of the key pieces of information gleaned was that Microsoft, in opposition to the strategies of Apple and Google, is making their desktop OS the basis of their tablet strategy, not their mobile OS. Macworld’s Jason Snell (among others) thinks this decision will sink Microsoft’s tablet fortunes. Whether or not Microsoft mimics Apple’s strategy, the decision does pose a couple of key questions in my mind:

• Will ARM-based (or similar) tablets running an ostensibly heavier OS be able to deliver the kind of performance that users have come to expect of smartphones and other tablets?
• Will the new OS support instant-on/off usage for weeks or months or will it suffer from memory leaks and other ailments that cause Windows users to have to re-boot multiple times a week?
• What will the license structure look like? From what I understand, iOS and WP7 represent a much lower device license cost than OSX and Windows. And tablets are incredibly cost competitive. For years Windows PCs could under-price Macs because they used commodity components amortized over significantly greater volumes than Macs. But that doesn’t appear to be the case in the world of tablets. Will Win8-based tablets be able to effectively compete?If there are different license costs for the same OS that only differ based on the device type (desktop/notebook v. tablet…and what pray tell of the netbook), won’t OEMs go crazy? Especially those that will sell all types of hardware?

I’m All Thumbs: Nice Touch

One interesting UI innovation was the ability to choose from multiple on-screen keyboards and in particular a split keyboard that is supposed to be used to enable “thumb-typing”.

Microsoft Moves Behind HTML5 in a Big Way

But perhaps the biggest announcement, IMHO, happened at about the 7:35 mark of the video – that’s when Sinofsky said that the new developer platform for Win8 will be based on HTML5 and JavaScript. Immediately loyal Microsoft developers head’s exploded and they made their feelings felt in the forums.

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried summed up the announcement as follows:

Windows 8 essentially supports two kinds of applications. One is the classic Windows application, which runs in a desktop very similar to the Windows 7 desktop. The other type of application, which has to be written in HTML5 and Javascript, looks more like a mobile application, filling the full screen. Internet Explorer 10, which is part of Windows 8, has already been configured to run in this mode, as have several widget-like apps for checking stock prices and weather.

This is a huge announcement and really signifies a turning point in Microsoft’s stance on HTML5 and Silverlight (which Microsoft essentially already abandoned for Win7, but is still the developer platform of record on WP7) and perhaps WPF and the rest of the .NET stack. I haven’t seen much clarification on this seemingly offhand comment since. I also wonder if this direction will hasten the decline of support of IE7 and IE8 which have virtually no HTML5 support.

So demos are great, but it only gives you directional information on what their future plans are. I would imagine that more details will emerge and Windows 8 will be center stage at Microsoft’s Build conference(formerly Professional Developers Conference) this fall.

What were your reactions to the announcement? Please let me know in the comments.

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.

Lots of mobile platform announcements this week and that’s even before the Mobile World Congress kicked off. But some big travel industry news too, leading off with…

1. ITA Software renewed its agreement with Orbitz thorugh 2015. This is the first contract that was renewed since the announced acquisition by Google.  This should definitely help clear the way for DOJ approval.
2. Nokia chooses Microsoft for future smartphone OS platform in a move that wasn’t all that surprising.  Well except maybe to this ex-Nokia guy who is more bitter than 4-day old coffee grinds. Some may argue that Nokia should have licensed Android as WP7 has a teeney-tiney market share, but could Nokia have competed on an even field with HTC, Samsung and Motorola selling a modestly different version of the same phone?  At least being one of the few with a WP7 phone gives them a chance to appear different in the marketplace. Scoble agrees. Then again, what HP unveiled the other day makes this an even more difficult task.  Either way, the markets didn’t react well to the news.
3. Many people, including myself, have been advocating for HTML5 and promoting the mobile web over apps. But TechCrunch’s MG Seigler points out that while it all sounds nice, apps are still where the action is.
4. HP re-launches the WebOS platform it got when it bought Palm. All of the elements that make WebOS a delight (I do own an original Palm Pre) are there and improved upon. The only problem is that WebOS has almost no apps to speak of (see previous item). Getting developer mindshare is going to be a problem. And while they brought on a high-powered guy to take on the challenge, it might only be enough to leapfrog RIM. But that’s a pretty low bar. BTW, in retrospect, I think my first take on the HP/Palm acquisition was pretty on target.
5. Traditional web search is increasingly important and feels more and more like a system to be gamed – fairly or not. Here’s an interesting article in the NY Times that delves into the ‘black hat’ shenanigans that JC Penny used to dominate search. Fair tactics? No. But great results as Penny had one of its best recent quarters. The most interesting question about what happened is posed on the last page of the article: “Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers?”
6. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber looks into his crystal ball and sees what Apple will do next in response to the recent announcements from Google, HP, Microsoft and RIM.
7. Cloud provider Rackspace bought Anso Labs, one of the key figures behind the open source PaaS project known as OpenStack, also championed by Rackspace. Many rushed to wonder whether Rackspace will dominate the OpenStack community the way some complain Oracle and IBM have done with Java. Personally I don’t think so. I think Rackspace sees this as a way to maintain leadership in the cloud space and create mindshare with developers.  I believe OpenStack could be a really valuable platform for those looking to move to the cloud, especially those that may deploy on different IaaS providers across multiple geographies.
8. Mary Meeker who was the stat queen while at Morgan Stanley keeps the info flowing at Kleiner, Perkins. Check out her latest presentation.
9. After much pomp and circumstance, Amadeus finally sells Opodo to private equity firms AXA and Permira in a deal valued at €450M.
10. Google touts their new WebM CODEC as the open source future of web video…until MPEG-LA questions whether WebM is based on patents they control. It’s telling that thus far Google hasn’t agreed to indemnify others who use the WebM codec. As an old Vorlon friend of mine used to say: “And so it begins”.

Let me start out by saying that it seemed to be a good week for democracy in the Middle East (fingers crossed) and for Cheeseheads.

1. Jason Kincaid provides one of the better reviews of Google’s new Honeycomb Android OS that will be used on the upcoming Motorola Xoom tablet, amongst others.  It definitely looks like a big step forward and a capable competitor to the current iPad. But early reports indicate that the Xoom will retail for about $800, much more than the entry point of the iPad. And that doesn’t even consider what the iPad2 has in store for us. But a major step forward to be sure.
2. Almost as if acting out Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Microsoft (Darth Vader) finds the good inside itself to help Apple (Luke) stop Google (Emperor Palpatine…played by body double Eric Schmidt) from destroying video standards on the web (crush the Rebel Alliance).
3. Wanderfly raises $1M to continue to build out functionality in its social travel recommendation engine.
4. A nice analysis of the impact on flash sales on hotel marketing by Xotels’ Patrick Landman.
5. A post wonders what happens when TMCs become GDSs if the Direct Connect strategy takes hold. I often wondered who will fund the development that must follow at the TMC level. AirPlus International recently published some survey data that seems to drive to a logical conclusion.  I definitely understand the economic case on an airline level, but it’s still unclear to me how it pans out on a system level.
6. Phil Wainwright writes (say that 10 times fast) that Cloud Computing still needs a bill of rights. Spot on.
7. Verizon buys its way into cloud leadership through a $1.4B acquisition of Terremark. Forrester’s James Staten provides the analysis of the deal.
8. Travelport goes a long way to keep Orbitz from coming to an agreement with American Airlines. They are putting their money where their mouth is, but it feels like a desperate move.
9. Aria Systems, a leader in on-demand billing and a key technology for many SaaS companies, raised $20M. This follows on the heels of a very strong fourth quarter where booking tripled year-on-year.  But it was not all good news for Aria, as a key client, NetSuite announced its own billing and subscription product.  But on the whole, a great week for the company.
10. Last but not least, the travel industry’s cutest logo bags a $4.2M round from Expedia alums.

Lot of important stuff last week, but the most awaited announcement…of maybe the past 2 years…leads the list:

1. Many prayers have finally been answered as Verizon announced that the iPhone will be coming to their network in early February. It is anticipated that legions of dissatisfied AT&T customers will switch, but the bigger potential is with the millions of feature phone owners on the network.
2. There’s no way that GDSs can support airlines ancillary services until they do. For all of American’s posturing that GDS (and specifically Travelport) technology isn’t up to the task and the economics of working through intermediaries no longer make sense, Travelport and Air Canada strike a deal.
3. Google, in the spirit of “open”, decides to drop support for H.264 in their Chromium browser in favor of their own WebM CODEC. The move is pretty self serving, a direct competitive move against Apple as they try to hide behind fears of never-yet-levied royalty payments from MPEG LA. All while H.264 makes up two-thirds of video on the web. Yet for all Google’s posturing for “Open” they continue to prop up Flash, a decidedly closed technology.  But not to worry, plug-ins are here to save the day (Really? Plug-ins? In 2011?). WTF. MG Siegler pretty much covers it.
4. After 23 years, Bob Muglia seems to have been forced out of Microsoft. Josh Greenbaum believes that the changing of the guard is very much tied to the changing of Microsoft’s business and move to Azure-based services and the rise of importance of the Dynamics ERP suite to Microsoft.
5. Concur buys TripIt in a deal worth up to $120M.
6. In a somewhat surprising turn of events, the DOJ looks like it’s going to file a challenge to Google’s acquisition of ITA Software. Does that mean the deal won’t go through? Not at all. A similar process was followed with Google’s acquisition of AdMob. But interesting nonetheless.
7. In related news, American has chosen ITA’s Inventory Control solution, which will get folded into the overall Passenger Service System, Jetstream, that HP is building for the airline.  So ITA has one piece of HP’s PSS and HP licensed Pegasus’ RezView system for another. Hmmm. I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.
8. MySpace cuts almost half their jobs and is officially on the block. The only question…who would buy them?
9. Intuit continues its push into mobile payments and focus on small business, offering their GoPayment system for free for a limited time.  The mobile payments space is estimated to exceed $600B in 2014. PayPal is the current leader in the space having processed more than $500M in 2010.
10. Intel and Nvidia finally settle their patent dispute with a cross-licensing agreement that will pay Nvidia $1.5B over the next six years.  That just added the bad news at AMD which culminated in the firing of their CEO.

Sorry for the late post, just trying to get things done before the end of the year like everyone else

1. Google is starting to do what every company has feared…biasing results based on the promotion of their own content, not the “authority” and quality of the results. TripAdvisor is the first to feel their wrath, perhaps as a result of their blockade of their content to Google Places.
2. Bing held its “Search Summit”, adding a bunch of features that make it easier for users to get stuff done in search (hmmm, they actually have a theme going when you consider they’re Windows Phone7 ads) using contextual search and natural search techniques.  Pretty cool stuff happening again in Redmond. The natural flight search seems very similar to the kind of stuff that Apple bought Siri for. Apple better get its iTravel app out there soon. Enough with the patents already…ship something.
3. Is Twitter really the next customer service platform or is it just hype? There are great success stories like Comcast Cares and Best Buy’s TwelpForce for sure.  But how broad of an impact is it making? Forrester’s Diane Clarkson has a theory.  I wonder if it aligns with your experiences.
4. All smartphone browsers are not created equal…even across all the variants that are based on Webkit.  A must read for those of you developing mobile web sites.
5. OK, maybe now it’s starting to feel a little bit like a bubble. I mean a company with a lot of users, but limited monetization strategy raising $200M at a $3.7 Billion, with a “B”, valuation? Well maybe until you realize the company we’re talking about is Twitter.
6. In yet another escalation in their battle with American Airlines over AA’s direct connect strategy with Orbitz as the battlefield, Travelport is planning to bias flight results against AA by adding surcharge fees for bookings.  Just really interesting to watch as the world turns.
7. I wouldn’t put this into the “xxx is dead meme”, but Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri may be on to something here. And for all the enterprises who have invested a lot in Java, be sure to read this piece. But as Mike rightly states, there is no need for a stampede away from Java, but it may be time to re-think Java as a go-forward platform.
8. Amadeus’ Martin Collings, delivers an impressive piece as he lays out five convergence trends that will impact online travel in the next year. Well worth reading.
9. Rackspace buys cloud management player, CloudKick.  Rackspace, already known for their customer service orientation, and a provider of cloud and hosting services to many major web properties, has been quietly building up quite the portfolio of cloud management tools and notably introduced the OpenStack platform (a collaboration with NASA). As Cloud Ave’s Krishnan Subramainian implies, Rackspace is lining themselves up a value-added IaaS player, rather than getting caught in the commodity game.
10. Carol Bartz has yet to really explain what Yahoo is and their recent decision to sunset Delicious confuses us even further. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler thinks that this horribly mishandled announcement has killed customer confidence in Yahoo! as a reliable business. On the other hand, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram believes that it’s better for Yahoo to focus on fewer things and eschew the “we’ll be all things to all people” approach that got Yahoo in this mess to begin with. But as they define what they are not, I still don’t have a clear picture of what Yahoo wants to be.

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.