That’s the title of a post I wrote for Tnooz last week as the HITEC show was set to kickoff. As some of the commenters wrote, the advice I give isn’t just useful for hoteliers, but for any company considering leveraging the cloud.

Here are a couple of highlights from the article:

• According the recent IBM Global CIO study, cloud computing notched the highest gains in interest in CIO roadmaps than any other technology
• Cloud computing is not just hot in the enterprise, but was central to many PMS and hotel technology announcements at HITEC
• in evaluating whether to choose a cloud/SaaS solution over on premise you also need to do an honest evaluation of your own IT organization’s ability to manage your infrastructure. Google’s cloud-based Gmail service offers 99.984% availability, which is 46 times better than the averageMicrosoft Exchange implementation.
• Despite the articles about cloud failures and warnings about security, the cloud is probably more secure than your own infrastrucutre and is in use by financial institutions and governments that have more regulatory compliance requirements than travel. Further, major cloud platforms offer better physical and network security than virtually all hotel chains can provide.  These examples show that the cloud is not inherently less secure or less available than on premise solutions.

Finally were the Top Six Questions to ask companies offering cloud-based systems:

1. Is it really cloud or just cloud-washing?
2. Do you have Service Level Agreements on RTO/RPO?
3. What are the application availability SLAs?
4. Is there an offline mode?
5. What about integration with other systems?
6. How can I get my data back out (aka data portability)?

Click here to read the original article.

Over the past few days Tnooz has published a 3-part series that I wrote on how to develop a mobile strategy for travel companies, as summarized in the below graphic.

You can find the article in Tnooz (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) or download the original white paper on the Ness Software Product Labs site.

Thanks for reading and comments always welcome. Let me know what you thought of it.

I just read an article today in Tnooz where American Airlines claims Sabre coordinated a social media campaign against them and then complains that their executives have had to work really hard to deal with the turmoil from the response by Expedia, Sabre and Travelport resulting from AA’s own move against Orbitz.

I have to say that the reactions from American are almost comical. And forget about the social media campaign. That’s window dressing. What I’m surprised at is the complaints in the article:

American alleged that its sales team “spent all of their professional time and resources addressing it [Sabre's biasing actions].”

In an affadavit as part of the American complaint, Cory Garner, the airline’s director of merchandising strategy, alleged that Sabre’s biasing actions weighed heavily on the “time and resources” of the airline’s executives and other managers, including Garner, the chief commercial officer, vice president of sales and the distribution strategy team. These executives had “to forgo other areas of responsibility at the expense of financial performance for American,” Garner alleged.

Some may say that all that matters is that the software works…I ain’t one of them.  The technical decisions that a  software provider makes are critically important.  It’s as important in the travel industry as it is in traditional enterprise software, especially as a lot of companies in the travel industry are looking to modernize their applications and many of them are looking at adopting technologies like Cloud Computing and SaaS.   So whether your on the sell side or buy side it’s important to understand these new technologies.  This the theme of my recent 2-part series in Tnooz.

If you’re a buyer of travel technology, the technology choices of your supplier goes directly to the sustainability of your vendor, their ability to deliver their solution at the right cost and the performance and functionality you require – now and into the future.

If you’re a provider of travel technology, it’s a question of whether you’re positioning yourself appropriately to meet the future needs of your customers. Especially given the pervasive use of legacy technology in the industry.

Part 1 provides the context and acts as a bit of technology primer.

In Part 2 I lay out the top 10 reasons that you should care about how your travel technology provider builds and operates their products.

The week was pretty much dominated by the launch of Facebook Places, but a few other things happened too…including a $7B acquisition by Intel that I only partially get as a lot of dollars must have gone for parts of Intuit’s business that’s far afield from Intel’s chip business. But who am I to judge. Anyway, here’s this week’s list:

1. I really liked this article on how to identify productive, creative types (hat tip to Forrester analyst Mike Gaultieri).
2. Yet another travel search contender with a quirky name and a unique twist on presentation of results – Hipmunk.  Ding-dong, the fare matrix is dead? Check ‘em out and decide for yourself.  Pretty ballsy to start up a company like this, just weeks after Google buys the leader in the space.
3. Excellent analysis and insight into the Oracle-Google patent fight from RoughlyDrafted. This is not the simplistic money-grab as one might think. So if Google has to pay royalties for Java, can they still give Android away for free?
4. It’s looking more and more like NFC is coming to the iPhone next year and other devices. I’m still not sold on the use case.
5. The opening weekend didn’t go so well for RIM’s Blackberry Torch? Should RIM start marketing the Torch as a “Limited Edition”?
6. The list of iPad-versaries continues to build. Up next: what I’m calling the “EvilPad” from Google and Verizon. The twist? It’s based on Google’s much anticipated Chrome OS, not Android. I wonder if Verizon will prioritize traffic for EvilPad users J
7. Facebook announces Places.  This is perhaps the most reported announcement of the week and there are a ton of articles about what it means, but the best was probably from Altimiter Group’s Charlene Li.  Much of the initial focus was on what this means for Foursquare or Gowalla (and perhaps how quickly they can sell themselves to Google, Apple or Microsoft), but others think that Yelp has the most to fear. From a travel perspective, you can find good insights from Tnooz and Troy Thompson at the Travel 2.0 blog.
8. Intel buys McAfee for $7.68 Billion…that’s with a “B”.  I can understand the need to add security directly onto the chip, but that’s a pretty penny to pay for it and so much of McAfee’s revenues seem off-task for Intel. It certainly can’t be that Intel felt they needed to augment their brand recognition. Maybe they just felt they needed the deal to remind people that they’re still here?
9. Travel rewards startup Topguest, which only went into beta a few weeks ago, is the first travel related company to integrate with Facebook Places.
10. Product quality is a big issue and there are a number of ways to improve it.  CIO Magazine’s Thomas Wallgum recaps 7 steps to improve software quality from Forrester’s latest report.

…or at least July 2010.

With the announcement of the Open AXIS Group a few weeks ago there’s a lot of questions about the eventual role that it will play in setting messaging standards. Will it help move the industry forward or will it simply result in a fragmentation of messaging frameworks (vis-a-vis OpenTravel) that slows the industry down?  In the end, it’s up to the industry to decide.  So far it sounds like the Big 3 GDS’s want a single framework but haven’t made any official pronouncements on how they feel just yet.

But don’t wait for them to have your voice heard!

This blog, in coordination with Tnooz and Ness Software Product Labs has created a survey to find out what you think. Please take 5 minutes to fill out the survey.  The survey closes out at the end of the month.

We’ll be posting results in another week or so in Tnooz in a follow up to the original story.

Well I’m back from vacation and I hope everyone had a great 4th of July weekend.  So what happened last week? Let’s see:

1. The big news of the week is that finally, Google buys ITA Software for $700M. Here’s some “expert analysis” via Tnooz that somehow includes me.
2. Rumored last week, a new airline standards group called OpenAxis emerges, rallying around Farelogix messages. As they are also proposing XML-based messaging schema, I’m not quite sure how technically this will differ from OpenTravel. They say that perhaps they will be more agile and move more quickly than OpenTravel, but it’s easy to say when you have only a few founding members. Let’s see if they create traction and whether they can remain agile once they reach any sort of scale as an organization. As an aside, and maybe I’m dating myself, but any group that has “Axis” as part of their title makes me feel uneasy (see WWII). I’m not making any comparisons, I’m just sayin’ I might have chosen a different name. Perhaps Valyn will license the Captain America imagery for OTA
   

   Image Credit: Marvel Comics

3. If you’re going Cloud, having a billing engine that supports granular metering, pricing and billing is critical.
4. RockCheetah founder, Robert Cole’s presentation on Mobile Distribution from the HITEC conference.  Other than a few quibbles on slide 18 (in my view the walled garden on searchability is more about security of personal information than control, e.g. Facebook; Apple doesn’t block AdMob ads, just collection of personal information), a very good overview of the intersection of travel and mobile.
5. Via Tnooz, 4 Vital Social Media Tips for the Travel Industry. The most important thing to note is that the 4 steps happen in exact opposite order for the buyer versus the seller.
6. Not only does it appear that the Google-ITA Software deal has hit a snag, it seems that other potential suitors have coming knocking on the doors in Cambridge [Update see article #1. Always hard to prognosticate].
7. YouTube says that it still sees Flash as an important part of their distribution, but unlike how it’s been reported in some places, it’s not because of the video CODEC, but because of the granularity of control that the player provides.
8. Timothy O’Neil-Dunne tells us what we already know – travel websites leave a lot to be desired by the consumer – but gives some good context as to why. The question is whether the people who run the travel websites will ever do anything about it.
9. Good post on CloudAve about the disservice that many engaged in the Public v. Private Cloud debate are doing for the industry. I’ve commented on the post itself.  Take the time to watch the embedded video of Amazon Web Services CTO, Werner Vogels’ keynote at last week’s Structure 2010 conference put on by GigaOM.
10. Great article, bad news. Harvard Business Review talks about the problems being faced by the VC community (and by extension entrepreneurs) and the coming VC shakeout

A few weeks ago I wrote about how Microsoft’s Pivot technology, developed in Live Labs, could potentially revitalize hotel search or travel search in general.  Well today Microsoft is using the technology to power Silverlight PivotViewer which is now available for download.  I’ve embedded the following video where Microsoft tries to give examples of how different sectors can use the Pivot technology (4 minutes).

In a TechCrunch article they highlighted Hitched.co.uk, a wedding planning site as one of the first websites to implement Pivot.

So with this very cool capability to visualilze data and search, who will do it first in the travel sector?  Will you?

Last week Dennis Schaal wrote an article pondering the question of what travel companies should do with their mobile and web strategies in light of the Apple/Adobe feud over Flash.  Dennis got input on whether to continue leveraging the Flash platform or wait for HTML5 to mature from several prominent individuals involved in the travel industry including RockCheetah’s Robert Cole.  And Robert got it exactly right…only backwards.

But I don’t want to bury the lead.  Let me state up-front: You should not stand on the sidelines and wait for the Adobe-Apple kerfuffle (nod to @jangles) to sort itself out.  This will take years.  Instead, be thoughtful in establishing your web and mobile strategy and get moving today.

Now let me outline where I have disagreement with Robert’s views.

Different platforms require different modes of presentation based on different usability strategies

Robert worries that uncertainty around the winner of the Flash debate will result in the “dumbing-down” (Dennis’ words, not Robert’s) of sites or the need to invest in multiple sites to support different technology platforms.

In fact, trying to provide the same experience over different devices or platforms is the epitome of dumbing-down.  “Write-once, run anywhere” is a siren’s call that can cause many apps to crash on the shores of poor usability and blandness.  Different devices have different use cases and capabilities.  If you don’t take that into consideration you’re making a fatal mistake.  Let me elaborate.

• Think of the use case: In software development, just like in web design, nothing is more important than the use case. For example, prospective travelers are more likely to conduct their primary research during the trip planning phase on their desktop/laptops, but are more likely to use their mobile devices post-booking and while in-situ (e.g. itinerary changes, alerts, making a dinner reservation).  So the kind of information that you present and how you present it should differ in each case. While the information you provide the “travel researcher” can have a lot of text, high-res images, and video, the information and options you give the mobile traveler need to be much more streamlined and transactional in nature.
• Consider the device capabilities: First of all you must remember that the desktop paradigm is based around the traditional WIMP (windows-icon-menu-pointer) construct while most smartphone and mobile devices are touch-based.  This changes almost everything about the way you need to present your information.  In a touch-based paradigm mouse-overs don’t work because you can’t physically do it.  The precision of ‘pointing’ is constrained.  Finally, and most obviously, not every device has the same screen size or can automatically switch from portrait to landscape mode. To not adapt for the different devices is to leave a lot of potential improvement to the user experience on the table. More importantly, why bother creating an app for a device if you aren’t going to take advantage of specific device capabilities like accelerometers, locators, calendars, or phonebooks?

Finalization of the HTML5 spec will take years, but won’t hinder adoption

It is true that the finalization of the HTML5 spec is not anticipated until 2012.  But that’s a very different point than saying that no one will be adopting it until the spec is finalized. If nothing else the web is fluid and reacts quickly.  Every desktop browser of note either supports HTML5 currently (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera) or has pledged its support (Microsoft for the upcoming IE9).

And the same goes for mobile browsers, which are increasingly based on the WebKit standard.  Check out this chart from a post in the O’Reilly Radar:

Overwhelmingly mobile browsers already support HMTL5 (with Microsoft pledging support in the future) and TODAY, none of these mobile browsers (nor really any mobile device I’ve heard of) supports Adobe Flash.

Add on top of this the fact that by all accounts over two-thirds of videos on the web – and perhaps as high as 90% – are available in the H.264 standard used by HTML5-powered sites, I’d say that video content isn’t a deal-breaker anymore.

Let’s get real about “Open Source”

Lastly there is the debate as to who is more open.  Is it Adobe or Apple? I think that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber (no relation) says it well.

“Open” is one of those terms that means a lot of different things to different people. Most should be able to agree, though, that open-vs.-closed is a continuum — shades of gray, not just black and white. A light enough shade of gray is “open”, dark enough is “closed”. The arguments are over where those thresholds lie.

I, for example, would argue that HTML5 is open, and that Flash is not. HTML5 is open, to my eyes, because no one vendor defines or controls either its specification or its numerous implementations. The specification is being written and decided upon by consensus by two standards groups, WHATWG and the W3C.

You can argue whether or not Apple’s policy regarding AppStore approvals make any sense and you probably have a good argument.  But I don’t think it’s fair at all to say that Apple is closed from a technology perspective.  Apple’s web vision is based on HTML5, CSS, Javascript and H.264 video — all industry standards that they do not control.  Adobe on the other hand freely licenses the Flash player, but not the platform. Adobe can make whatever changes to Flash of their own choosing and on their own timetable.  They may claim to take the desires of the development community into consideration in developing their product roadmap, but they are not required to. In the four years since Apple’s iPhone ushered in the age of the web and media driven smartphone there has been no mobile version of Flash available for any device and consequently no mobile device has supported Flash in all that time and we have lived to tell about it.

In my view, Adobe’s entire argument is merely a matter of timing. Only now when Adobe is finally planning to release Flash Mobile 10.1 (anticipated to be launched next month on the Android 2.2 OS…backwards availability or compatibility not assured…and H/Pre’s WebOS) after years of delay are they protesting.  How much longer should they have expected the rest of the industry to wait before they moved on to a standards-based approach? It’s important to remember that months prior to the release of the iPad and the announcement of iPhone OS4, it was Google who was the most vocal proponent of an HTML5-centric view of the future of the web.  Only recently has Google begun to embrace Flash on mobile devices driven by their “the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” strategy against Apple.

Yes, Adobe’s products have long been a favorite of designers (let’s not forget that it was Apple who helped them achieve that position), but they’re certainly not the most “open” company and there are plenty of alternatives for web and mobile app development to Adobe’s Creative Suite.

OK, one last thing. While Tnooz highlighted the largely sarcastic and self-serving ads by Adobe to show how much they love (i.e. loathe) Apple at this moment, I feel compelled to share a faux-ad that I found on TechCrunch created by an Apple fan that I found truly amusing

For the folks who may now be finding my blog for the first time on PhoCusWright Connect, I provide a weekly shot of curation every Monday, highlighting 10 articles that I felt were worth reading from the week that was. Travel is certainly covered, but so are other topics and technologies. Enjoy.

1. Great roundup by Robert Scoble, showing some of the diamonds in the rough being formed in the crucible that is Israel. Scoble sums it up best himself: “Why should Silicon Valley look to Israel for good ideas? Well, because, simply, this small country has more than its fair share of great ideas, especially when it comes to social networks.”
2. Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang looks at the evolution of the Social CRM market. Expect many of today’s species to be extinct.
3. In the battle to determine standards for airline ancillary revenue, APTCO scores a win with support  from GDSs, OTAs and corporate travel management companies. However, direct connect proponents hold firm.
4. Sameer Patel has a nice post about marketing investments v. expenses. I like the term transactive elasticity. It’s new to me, but meaningful. Very much reminds me of traditional marketing “manipulations” that Steven Sinek writes about in “Start with Why”.
5. How much web video is available in H.264? Perhaps as much as 90%.  Adobe, we’re way beyond the tipping point.  Thanks for playing.
6. Nice post on the intersection of PR objectives and metrics and how digital/social channels have changed what we need to look at.
7. HTNG releases new specs on Kiosks, Payment Systems and Distribution.
8. Dennis Schaal from Tnooz asks who will fill the travel meta-search void if Google completes the rumored acquisition of ITA and shuts down their contracts with other meta-search engines and airline websites.  Expedia and Amadeus are contenders for sure, although I very much doubt that Expedia would come to the rescue of Orbitz.
9. Another week, another multi-billion dollar acquisition. This time SAP buys Sybase for $5.8B.
10. Simply terrific post by Tech Crunch’s MG Siegler on the converging paths taken by Twitter and Facebook.  Which one do you think is “Jacob” and which is the “Man in Black”?