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.

While there is a lot of travel and technology news to get to, the most important and awful news of the week was the terrible tragedy this weekend in Tuscon as an armed man opened fire at a meeting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, shooting the Congresswoman in the head and killing 6 people including a Federal Judge and a 9-year old girl and wounding many others. My thoughts and prayers are with them.

The business-related story of the week was the escalation of the war between American Airlines and many of its distribution partners (well maybe partners isn’t such a good term right now). While there was a lot of good articles written with different points of view, I will highlight four articles and leave some room for other news of the week.

1. First and foremost, you should read PhoCusWright analyst Douglas Quimby’s post. He covers short and long term implications of the pitched battle and 9 key issues to watch for.
2. Our favorite Professor provides a humorous, but pointed, commentary on a recent Business Travel Coalition press release (in-line with the press release text) on the latest developments.
3. The New York Times’s Travel section covers the topic from a consumer perspective as it’s getting harder to shop for airfare in this environment.
4. Flightcaster’s Evan Konweiser wrote an interesting defense of AA.  There are aspects which ring true, but he also makes a few leaps of logic which don’t fit the facts (e.g. Kodak didn’t decide not to bring a digital camera to market in 1975 only because it was a challenge to its film-processing based business model, but because the technology to deliver image quality that approached kindergarten sketches, let alone traditional film standards was decades away. Nor were there PC’s for consumers to upload them to, sites to share them with friends on or printers to print them on…unless you like the dot-matrix photos that were common at B’nai-Mitzvahs when I was growing up). Ah, the problems of taking an analogy too far. But there are some valid points here.  The airline and travel industry have the most “unique” (yeah, that’s a nice way to say it) sales and distribution processes in the world.

Now what else happened last week?

5. Verizon showed a lot of new devices at CES, the most interesting being the Motorola Xoom tablet prototype running Android Honeycomb. But of course the most anticipated announcement from Verizon is scheduled for Tuesday.
6. More news from CES: Skype acquires Qik for $100M. Good tuck in acquisition from a technology perspective. As Skype CEO Tony Bates said: “…the acquisition of Qik will help to accelerate our leadership in video by adding recording, sharing and storing capabilities to our product portfolio.”
7. Facebook raises $500M at a $50M valuation. Next stop NYSE, circa 2012.
8. Qualcomm buys WiFi silicon maker Atheros for $3.1B. A very strategic buy that enables Qualcomm to achieve its vision of being an end-to-end supplier in a networked world centered on a phone, with the phone able to communicate seamlessly with a multitude of networks, with CDMA, LTE and WiFi all under one roof.
9. Apple launches the Mac App Store. In many ways this is a massive shift in software distribution for Apple and funnily enough gobs more cash in their pocket as a result. But as MG Siegler explains, there are also changes in app design that are a part of some of these new apps.
10. Salesforce acquires DimDim. While many are dismayed at the loss of a free web conferencing service, this does fit nicely into the Chatter platform.

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.

Last week I presented on a webinar alongside PhoCusWright analyst Bob Offut, entitled “Travel Innovation and Technology Trends: 2010 and Beyond”, sponsored by my company Ness Software Product Labs.  I’m providing links to both the PDF of the slides and the replay of the webinar via WebEx below.

In the webinar, Bob talks about the Top 10 travel technology trends, based on PCW’s report that came out in March (subscription required).  Then I pick up at the 45:00 mark (slide 81 in the PDF) to discuss the impact of Cloud Computing and Mobile on the travel industry. Some highlights from the presentation:

• Cloud Computing and Travel
  • Watch out for Cloudwashers. There are a lot of people who are either trying to prey on those still confused about Cloud, some of which are purposefully obfuscating their solutions to cash in on the trend.
  • Cloud can be an important part of a modernization strategy, but isn’t an end in and of itself. Evaluate the “Six degrees of Modernization” and think about how Cloud can fit within the direction you chose.
  • The Public v. Private Cloud debate is interesting, but it’s not necessarily and either/or proposition. Private Clouds do lack certain attributes and benefit of Public Cl0uds, but think of the difference as an evolutionary process, not alternatives.
  • Moving to the Cloud requires a change in perspective from mere software development to a systems engineering mindset.
• Mobile and Travel
  • Mobile Devices are Becoming the Center of Traveler Interactions
  • 5-step Framework to a successful mobile strategy. Understanding the use cases of your customer and the role that you want mobile to play in their overall experience with your brand is critical.
  • Determining whether you want to take an mobile web-oriented approach or an app-oriented approach, and what platforms/devices your target customer is likely using make a big impact on the technology choices you make.

Anyway, enjoy the presentations. I had a good time and I hope you find the information interesting and useful.  Please let me know what you think. Contact me directly  or add to the conversation in the comments.

Last week Ness Technologies exhibited at PhoCusWright’s TRAVDEX trade show in Atlanta.  On the second day of the show I was interviewed for my reflections on the show and my views on some of the major technology trends going on in the travel industry.

I was mostly hoping to avoid an Albert-Brooks-in-Broadcast-News moment, so I would call this video and unqualified success!

For those of you who attended, please let me know what I missed or what your views were.  For everyone else, please add your thoughts on other industry trends of note.

Nothing pithy to kick off the list today, so here it goes:

1. A lot of chatter about  Twitter’s first Chirp conference. Mashable review of 6 Twitter App models that stand a chance,  and a list of takeaways from GigaOM.  But best of all is a post by Dan Howlett on how Seesmic CEO Loic LeMuir either doesn’t see the effect Twitter’s recent announcements are going to have or is just being willfully blind to the reality.
2. Good overview of why you should care about HTML5 from a marketer’s point of view from Hubspot.
3. The ancillary revenue (otherwise known as how we can squeeze extra fees from our customers) debate continues. First a post from UpTake on the PhoCusWright Connect blog and then another from Tnooz.
4. 5 Ways to organize for social business by Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang.  Great way to think about how to introduce/evolve social into your company’s operations (not just marketing). It almost reads like a maturity model.
5. An interview with the Director of Merchandising from American Airlines on why we’re seeing the explosion of unbundling in the travel industry and how American is approaching it.
6. Great post by Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang on Twitter’s new “Promoted Tweets” scheme
7. New Dachis Group member, the eminent social enterprise king, Dion Hinchliffe has another great post on how social has created a transformative disruption in the enterprise.  As always, great infographs by Hinchcliffe.
8. Enterprise Irregular Bob Warfield looks at evolutionary biology and network effects in considering the future of Apple and Adobe Flash.
9. Shel Holtz thinks Ning screwed its user base.  I understand where Shel is coming from, but perhaps I never bought into the whole “free”/ad supported network stuff post the dot.com bust. If you’re offering a rich experience it costs money to create and maintain it. Often online advertising just can’t sustain those costs unless the company can reach a tipping point in scale.  But those companies (see Facebook) are few are far between.
10. OK, I’m listing this one about Google Enabling Printing from the Cloud, because I’m not sure why this is news at all. The Intenet Printing Protocol has been around since I was in the network printer business over 12 years ago. HP has bee talking about this for a long time too. Is it just because it’s got Google magic pixie dust on it or because it’s got the word “Cloud” in the headline? Please let me know why/if you think this was newsworthy.

Back from a quick trip to Miami for a sales call (I know, it sounds terrible). But here’s what I found interesting and hope you do too. In a tip-of-the-cap to Spinal Tap, I’ve taken the list up to 11 for this week:

1. Excellent article by Timothy O’Neill-Dunne on how technology is transforming the travel industry
2. PhoCusWright Connect take on Hotel Prices on Google Maps. The entry of Google into meta-search (even if they don’t want to overtly call it that just yet) is an interesting development.
3. RedMonk’s James Governor drinks Microsoft Kook-Aid at MIX?
4. TechCrunch reports that Google is going to incorporate Adobe Flash in Chrome OS.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if I think what the new friend is doing is stupid.  The headline says it all.  I’m not sure what sane reason Google has for changing its stance as the leading advocate for HTML5 to embracing Flash. To say it’s about choice would be a trite answer.
5. Marc Benioff is becoming something of a guest-poster-in-residence on TechCrunch. His latest post is about how he feels the iPad is going to lead a revolution in how people interact with technology.
6. Great article by Enterprise Irregular Paul Greenberg on the state of Social CRM
7. Interesting study on the performance of the Top 45 UK travel sites. Not terribly surprising that customer service is weakest link, but also telling that the steps after search…that is the part when people actually look to book…otherwise known as the part where travel companies make money…perform weakest.
8. European LCC EasyJet wants to add booking options over Facebook.  Would you book an airline over Facebook? Or maybe the right question is: “Are there any reasons that you wouldn’t book a flight on Facebook?”
9. Lawson to offer ERP on AWS instances.  A big step from a company whose CEO Harry Debes predicted SaaS was a fad just 2-3 years ago.  Still this is not SaaS, and only Cloud-ish (it’s single-instances on the Amazon Cloud; doesn’t significantly change the game on pricing or upgrades), but a baby-step in the right direction.  Basically it seems that Lawson wants to provide hosted solutions, but doesn’t want to invest in its own datacenters. Much better analysis from industry pundits Vinnie Mirchinani and Frank Scavo.
10. What brand of Freedom Would you Like? Apple’s or Google’s? Seems to me that at least Apple’s pretty straightforward with their approach. Google? It’s a little more murky.
11. Bonus Round: Forrester analyst John Rymer’s take on the future of app servers.

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?

Now I may be relatively new to the travel industry, but I’m not new to controversy, so let me get this off my chest.

I like many others were glued to their computers listening to live audio streams of yesterday’s Apple iPad announcement, tweeting away.  Now I won’t get into the whole debate as to whether or not the iPad met expectations or not. That’s been discussed ad nauseum, here, here, here and here.  But I was reading through my RSS feeds and came across PhoCusWright’s (a leading travel industry analyst firm) take on The iPad Affect on the Travel Industry.  Mobile is growing in importance in the travel space, and it figures prominently in the solutions that my firm, Ness Technologies will provide,  so I certainly wanted to get their take.  But unfortunately, it didn’t take them very long to miss the entire point of the implications of the iPad.  Here’s the part that got me:

Yesterday’s iPad announcement…does not mean you need to build another app.

Ugh, you don’t.  Let the dust settle on this announcement before drawing up plans for your iPad app.  Let’s see how the consumer uses the device and then develop based upon their needs and opportunities.

HELL YES it means you need to redesign your app!  I mean why continue to constrain yourself to the capabilities of a tiny screen if you don’t have to?  The truth is that the iPad, especially as a super-media-consumption-device will let you do things that can’t be accomplished on a much smaller display.  While the iPad looks like a gigantic iTouch, the trick to unlocking the value of the iPad will not be to treat it that way.  Imagine the user  experience differently.   I thought that the MLB.com demo showed how you can significantly improve the user experience and the levels of interaction with the game.

Image credit: gdgt.com

Now imagine how a hotel could completely remake the education and trip planning phases of the traveler lifecycle if they used all 9.7″ of real estate and the touchscreen interface to immerse a potential customer into the experience that the hotel provides, using overlays to show details of rooms, launched video of featured activities, a tour of the spa, whatever.  But the point is that instead of a bland website or an app that is transactionally-focused, you can create an experience that should increase the likelihood of them booking.

Bottom line: Don’t judge yesterday’s launch or create your mobile app plans based on what you saw yesterday. Think about what the apps will look like 6 months from now after developers have had a chance to play with the SDK.  Now you can wait until the usage model is determined to make your decisions, but by then you will be behind your competition. 2010 is shaping up to be another tough year for the travel industry, don’t make it worse for yourself because you’re waiting to see what the future becomes.

Today I read a good post by CrispWireless CTO, Xavier Facon, entitled “Apps Call, but will your phone answer? Maybe not.” The post was a response to an MSNBC CES article bemoaning the fact that many apps exist on certain platforms, but not others.  This of course is not news.  Apple’s iPhone had 100,000, Google’s Android 20,000 and Palm’s WebOS just over a 1,000 (please make more, I like my Pre and do have app envy).  The fragmentation of the mobile industry across different operating systems and different hardware systems is well documented and is the bane of many software developers and testers across the world.

The crux of Facon’s post seems to provide tacit support a more standards-based approach coalescing around HTML5, but also acknowledging that the industry is not close to supporting a single standard and therefore they try to solve the quandary by re-writing the app across different platforms. At least Crisp seems to focus on keeping the functionality, something that many companies don’t do.  This is an important decision by Crisp because it helps maintain not just common functionality across devices, but also promotes a common design and better usability as users move from one device to another.

But I want to get back to the standards issue.  As much as software engineering teams across the globe would like to have a standard “write once, run anywhere” approach as they’ve been used to with modern languages like Java, I don’t think there is any likelihood of  this happening in the short to medium term.  It’s really not all that dissimilar to creating desktop apps for Mac v. PC, it’s just that there are more options in the mobile world.  The hardware platform providers like Apple, RIM, Google, Nokia and Palm each have different OS’ that they think create differentiation for their platform and provide better performance/user experience.   If you want to take advantage of the full capabilities of the device, you have to write for the platform.  And the reason behind it all is usability.

While using a standard language like HTML5 may make it easier to program across platforms, but it doesn’t allow you to take advantage of the specific capabilities that the OS and hardware allow for.   Plus you have to design for the form factor.  Mobile apps — perhaps I should  say “good mobile apps” — look vastly different from the content on the web.  They’re designed for action more so than information.  For fingers, not mice.  For use by broader segment of the population who may be less tech savvy.  I mean can you even imagine using an iPhone or Palm Pre without multi-touch and gestures?  Look how that changed the entire experience and drove usage through the roof.  In a recent PhoCusWright report Mobile: The Next Platform for Travel, they demonstrate the difference in presentation and usability between a standard web site, a mobile transcoded site and an app.   Now there are many WAP-enabled sites that run in a browser and provide something in-between the transcoded site and an app, but anyone that’s used a WAP site still prefers and app to get the same information.  Usability is what it’s all about.  The App strategy wins over a WAP strategy.

Google wants HTML5 because it wants a web-oriented portable computing device to better leverage the web apps that is the core of its business. Android is more of a strategy to extend it’s platform rather than to create a new one that is optimized for mobile.

Additionally, an app strategy rather than just a mobile web strategy provides a performance advantage. A downloaded app only needs to get refreshed data over the network rather than reloading the entire page each time.  It’s true that 3G and 4G networks are improving (if you have coverage; no apologies to AT&T coming. As tiresome as the Verizon ads have become, Luke Wilson is seriously annoying), performance is extremely important.  Abandon rates on the web are high for a 3 second delay.  Most people would kill for a 3 second delay on their mobile applications.
So while it may be a pain to code for multiple platforms, it’s the only way to go.

What’s your take?  Agree? Disagree?