HP Cloud plans unveiled, OTA earnings reports and more:

1. At HP’s analyst day last month, CEO Leo Apotheker laid out HP’s plans to remake the company with three main legs to the stool: Cloud, Mobile & Big Data. Well it looks like a fourth trend – social – is how HP’s cloud plans got leaked before a formal announcement. I will say this is a more aggressive push to remake HP as a cloud platform provider than I expected. If we can believe the LinkedIn posts.
2. A recent darling of the travel industry and the pages of TechCrunch, Gogobot, the social travel recommendation engine, have now added content from Foursquare and Facebook Places. This will not only add a ton of content to Gogobot, enhancing the quality of their recommendations, but may also provide users a good reason to check in…something that has been missing since the novelty of the check-in has worn off. If you’re interested in this story, you may also want to read Joe Buehler’s PhoCusWright report entitled “Social Media in Travel Planning” [subscription required].
3. For some reason it seems I’m hearing a lot about loyalty programs recently. Here’s a study that shows that travel & hospitality gave out $17B in rewards points & miles and is the 2^nd largest industry in the $48B loyalty sector, behind retail.
4. Mobile is continuing to impact just about every part of business. Oracle announced enhancements to their BI platform that provides iPhone and iPad users with the software’s full range of capabilities, with no need to rewrite existing dashboards and reports.
5. Mobile apps in travel are only hitting the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential. Sabre Holdings Director of Mobile strategy expects that in five years “…mobile will account for the bulk of travel changes and in some cases travel bookings too”. I think he’s not aggressive enough.
6. Priceline released very strong Q1 earnings with revenues increasing by 38% and net income nearly doubling compared to the same period a year ago. International saw the strongest results with 80% revenue growth. In other Priceline news there was some executive re-shuffling, ostensibly as part of a planned succession plan.
7. Unfortunately, the news is not as positive for Orbitz who saw its quarterly loss double to $10.8M from a year ago.
8. Keeping with the OTA trend, Expedia continues its international gains with a partnership with South African Airlines to distribute hotel inventory, displacing GTA.
9. When an Open Source version of .NET known as Mono appeared on the scene in 2004, some expected Microsoft to crush the project swiftly and definitively. They did not. However, seven years later, it looks like Attachmate, Mono’s new owners, may have done just that.
10. Has the cost-benefit story behind public cloud supporters been de-bunked? Is it even the right question? Be sure to read Forrester analyst James Staten’s blog post on cloud economics too.

There are times I wonder whether this post is still of value to people, but then I ran into Amadeus’ Debbie Iannaci at the ACTE conference last week and she says she reads it, so for now it stays. But I’d love to hear from others too.

1. ZipCar had a very successful IPO, as the stock soared more than 50% over the initial offering price of $18/share. This bodes well for other travel IPOs such as HomeAway or Kayak. But Henry  Blodget says while the IPO was great for people who were in at the initial offering, Goldman & JP Morgan actually screwed the company by significantly under-pricing the offering to the tune of $5oM.
2. American Airlines who have already pushed their chips into the middle of the table in the Direct Connect poker tournament have now thrown their gold watch and car keys into the pot by bringing an anti-trust suit against Travelport and Orbitz. I’m not going to editorialize , but could you see Hasbro suing Wal-Mart if the latter didn’t want to sell the former’s products? The way this story has evolved it feels so reminiscent of the NFL lockout I wonder if DeMaurice Smith is moonlighting for AA now that he’s reduced his NFLPA salary to $0.68.
3. The long-awaited BlackBerry PlayBook debuted to less than stellar reviews. Many do seem to show a light at the end of the tunnel for RIM, but seem to underscore the fact that the device is not quite ready for primetime and was launched out of fear of losing the tablet market entirely. The other odd thing is the concept of the BlackBerry Bridge. It seems to be a kluge acknowledging the lack of native email and calendar apps. But it’s also being seen as a means to provide the security that attracted so many enterprise customers in the first place. But if that’s the case, why not build the capability into the device? Again, most likely because the PlayBook was rushed to market. Perhaps RIM needs to heed the words of Orson Welles from when he was hawking Paul Masson.
4. Phil Wainwright fires another missive at the Private Cloud folk, who writes “…an enterprise that builds a private cloud will spend more, achieve less and increase its risk exposure…” The best part about the piece is that his point of view is informed by two top enterprise cloud architects who built private clouds.  A really good read.
5. A minor PR blunder for Sabre as they tried to spin the AA/Expedia deal in which Expedia agreed to establish a direct connect with AA using GDS technology. Chris Kroeger, SVP of marketing for Sabre went perhaps a step too far as he claimed that Sabre has direct connects with “hundreds of other airlines globally”. Of course the type of direct connect that AA and Sabre are talking about are not the same. Positioning the GDS as an aggregation technology that can enable efficient comparison shopping is a good idea, but on the DC characterization I don’t like when people try to obfuscate or confuse the facts.
6. There has been a lot of talk about the potential of NFC in the travel sector and retail in general. But it seems that it remains over-hyped if only 1 in 5 smartphones will have NFC…by 2014.
7. Perhaps it was tepid sales of the Motorola XOOM or just reading the writing on the wall, but the changes that Adobe announced to enhance support for HTML5 and a new release of Flash Builder 4.5 are a step in the right direction to keep one of the most important digital design technology leaders relevant. And this should bring a sigh of relief to those with significant investments in Flash.
8. I knew that Priceline (and many of the larger OTAs) owe a lot of their earnings to hotel bookings, but the recent analysis at Forbes – showing that only 2% of PCLN’s stock value comes from airfare – was still a little surprising, especially after the fanfare of their hookup with American Airlines.
9. Congratulations to SilverRail Technologies for another $5M funding round, bringing their total just shy of $15M.
10. Surprisingly, Cisco killed the Flip camera less than two years after they bought it for $590M. The move was surprising in many ways as it was the top selling camcorder and was profitable as a standalone unit. Michael Wolf examines the other options that Cisco had.

Sorry for the delay in posting, but I’m been flat out here in India as I am getting further up to speed with my new role at Ness Technologies Software Product Labs. Now that the excuses are out of the way, let’s get to the Top 10.

1. I’d be remiss if the first one out of the gate wasn’t the public announcement of Ness SPL’s relationship with travel IT giant Amadeus.  For the past year Ness has built an engineering team in Bangalore, supporting Amadeus’ continued investment in building industry leading software products for the travel industry.  It also signals Ness’ focus on providing software product engineering services to the travel industry.  If we can deliver for Amadeus, we can deliver for anyone.  Call me!
2. GM’s Augmented Reality Windshield: This is potentially very cool. Nice that it can highlight road signs, but better if it could superimpose hi-fi versions of signs I can’t see clearly.  Also the ability to check out where the drivers eyes are looking could be potential liability issues for drivers who crash while texting, dialing or otherwise distracted.
3. Google May Leave China on April 10. I can’t imagine they want to really do this, but their public stand has kind of boxed them in a corner.
4. Priceline Introduces Pay-at-Checkout for hotels.  I guess I didn’t realize that with online travel agencies (OTAs) that you had to pay the hotel fees at the time of booking.  I guess I never booked a hotel through an OTA because this seemed like standard operating procedure.
5. Musings from the Mobile Upfront: Recap from Mobile Upfront and insights from mobile guru @tgruber
6. Security Risks of Multi-tenancy.  Just goes to show that architecture in the wrong hands is dangerous and usually that’s at the core of bad software.
7. Cloud killing the enterprise software market? Hold that thought. I agree that there will probably be a lot of private/hybrid-cloud implementations, although don’t believe that’s a very good strategy, other than trying to recoup existing infrastructure investments.  It’s one thing to get leverage from what you already have, but let’s hope that few are actually thinking about buying a bunch of hardware to build-out new private cloud infrastructure.  This makes me think back to a post from last summer: Who will be the first to offer cash for infrastructure? I still think it’s a good idea.
8. Why RedMonk’s @sogrady is against patents – the system is broken.  But what if the system could be fixed. Then again this is an awful lot like tort reform. Too many special interests to make it happen and too many frivolous lawsuits/patents.
9. Webciety and Enterprise 2.0: A snapshot of today’s social computing conversations.  Notes and perspective from CeBIT on the opportunities and concerns about E20 by the one and only Dion Hinchcliffe
10. Enterprise 2.0: efficiency, effectiveness, blame and responsibility.  More good hard truth from Dennis Howlett.

Let’s see what came up:

1. Forrester analyst John Rymer’s take on Oracle’s Cloud strategy. And for a bonus, a slightly different interpretation by fellow Forrester analyst Stefan Reid.
2. Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDnet: The Facebook imperative for enterprise software.  Hinchliffe is great. Longish articles at times, but good insight. Riffing off Benioff’s recent proclamation that enterprise software should look like Facebook (not sure I want my enterprise software UI changing every 3 months), he asks important questions like “Should Enterprises be Social” and has a Top 5 list of why IT should be social (I certainly won’t limit to IT).  But I think that social is critical for organizations, particularly global organizations, who want to innovate.  R&D has gone global and the best way to harness that is to make sure those teams are social with each other, collaborating and sharing.
3. David Linthicum: Cloud Provider Roulette.  Bottom line: If you are evaluating cloud computing technology today, you have to consider that your choice could be bought up this year or next. That means you need to make sure your legal agreements are rock-solid and spell out what happens if your provider is acquired
4. Wyndham Hacked for Third Time. Not good. Wyndham please talk to me about security testing.  Related article noting that recent research shows that the hospitality industry is hit hardest by hackers, with the natural focus on payment card information.
5. Tnooz: Will Priceline come back to the field?  The concentration of revenue in the OTA (online travel agency) business is pretty staggering.  It’s the Pareto Principle on steroids.
6. Tnooz: TripIt maps employee travel with TripIt groups.  Pretty cool way to keep tabs on the organization. Would be very helpful in case of a crisis and there was a need to know/get in contact with employees at a moments notice.
7. Daring Fireball: Thoughts on Windows Phone 7 by John Gruber (not related, but I’d be somewhat glad if people confused him with me. Would certainly help me get gigs on the speaking circuit)
8. Keeping in the iPad theme this TechCrunch article on Apple’s HTC patent Lawsuit indicates that the real focus of Apple’s ire is (spoiler alert) Google’s Android OS (ok, not really a spoiler).
9. Three theories why Google pushed Buzz out the door.  What’s more interesting to me is that it seems that the Buzz experience is vastly different on an Android device, with all it’s location-based goodness, than on a web client. Is this really targeted more at Foursquare than Twitter?
10. And last but not least: Ballmer’s really committing Microsoft to the Cloud. Yet somehow I still don’t quite believe it.