“Making the Web Social”

Sounds like a pretty lofty plan, but that was the goal of the founding members of OpenSocial said Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering, Google. This is a technology that I feel is beginning to alter the way that people interact with the Internet, and is also effecting business. This post will give a brief history, show some current utilization, and then ponder into the void of the future to predict the evolution of OpenSocial and related technologies.

Short History

In 2007 Facebook made a bold step by releasing its API to developers to create applications on their platform. They did this because they soon realized that once users sign-up and start linking with their friends, they will eventually get bored. So adding the ability to continuously add new features that allow users to connect was a great plan. The problem with this scenario is that there are more than just 1 Social networking community (believe it or not!) In some regions, Facebook is not king, plus there are numerous niche community sites (add link) that do not want the same generic reach that Facebook offers, but they do want to have the ability to add applications and gadgets to their social community.

Enter OpenSocial. OpenSocial is basically a set of web standards that give programers the freedom to write code for a cool app, and have the ability to integrate it with a number of social communities and web sites. This makes developing a application much less of a daungting task, as you write it once, and instantly have an audience in the millions.

Some of the early adapters of this technology were virtual Tourist, myspace.com, Linkedin, Salesforce, Ning, hi5, FotoFlexer, iLike.com, orkut.com, RockYou.com, Slide.com, Flixter and Viadeo.com.

So what?

Open social has been deemed the main competitor to Facebook as it allows for one identity to be shared across several web based services. With the future of computer development transitioning to online software as a service, it will be interesting to see if there will be one dominant player, or if we will continue to juggle “just another inbox”

Have you noticed open social technology?

A recent study by Click Forensics has revealed a frightening trend for sites that generate revenue through advertising: fraud is on the rise!

“The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1 percent for the fourth quarter of 2008. That’s up from 16.0 percent in the third quarter of 2008 and from the 16.6 percent rate reported for the fourth quarter of 2007,”

One of the main sources of this type of fraud is BotNet traffic generators. These little programs are often embedded in viruses, trojans, and backdoor vulnerabilities. They basically give some control over your computer to a third party that will use your PC as a money generating machine for their ads.

So what does this mean for the Travel Industry?

If you use Google Ad Words to market your product / website, the likelyhood is that your ad dollars are going to these scammers. In the long run if this issue continues to grow, your budget will have to grow in order to attract the qualified leads that you require to grow your business.

In the meta perspective, the faith in online advertising may begin to diminish. The number of scammers is on the rise, and they are constantly looking for new ways to cheat people for money (I was personally on the receiving end of a sophisticated BotNet virus last week). As the reliability of leads begins to deteriorate, companies may start to feel that the Internet is not necessarily providing the most trackable advertising model.

If online advertising is a major focus of your ad spend, you may want to consider using a traffic quality service like Click Forensics or see what Google is doing with the Ad Traffic Quality Centre.

Well aside from my less than sexy title, this is a great find! Hubspot has just posted their webinar that shows companies how to combine SEO, Blogs, and social media (which I would argue includes blogs) to gain marketing results.

Check it out the webinar:

http://www.hubspot.com/archive/sbsm-webinar/

Twitter, the next wave of social media microblogging is sweeping the net. This post tracks the history of the application, its current uses, and what the future may hold for this little app.

If you are not familiar with Twitter, think of it as a mix of a mini blog and an instant messenger program like MS Messenger or ICQ. Users create an account and are given 140 characters to express their thoughts, their finds, and respond to conversation. After users create an account they can connect with friends and business associates around the world to stay in touch, share links and have a conversation.

So who uses Twitter and WHY???

Recently at the PhoCusWright Conference in Hollywood, I was the “silent panelist” for a panel on social media and blogging. My responsibility was to ‘tweet’ or post to Twitter during the presentation, and the audience was able to follow the conversation during the workshop. This usage of Twitter brought a new level of interaction during the workshop, and allowed those at home to follow some of the themes of the discussion.

Kevin May recommended that everyone using Twitter ‘tag’ each post with #phocus08, as a group we were able to generate buzz, and were the 6th most popular topic using Twitter at the time, which generated interest and additional traffic for the conference.

If you are looking to start using Twitter, here are some good recommendations from Social Media Today. If you are interested in the Travel industry, and are looking for some people to follow, you should check out Elliott Ng’s blog post at Uptake. He introduces a number of great travel Twitter users and companies.

Real Value, or Really Distracting?

During the social media conference, a great question was sked from the audience, “Is there any real value in using Twitter? Are you sure that you are not just distracting yourself, and wasting time?” This question becomes more relavant as your friend list grows, (mine is at 522) and you are constantly inundated with updates that range from the mundane, “on train an hour after leaving the office” to the inspirational. One tool that William Bakker recommended to me was TweetDeck, it allows you to layout your twitter feed, all direct replies, and direct messages. This really help to keep any relevant conversations accessible.

What does the future hold?

Well despite how much we may all love Twitter, one fact remains, they don’t have a business model. Their service has been scaled back; not more sms notifications in Europe and in Canada, and shakeups at their headquarters. These facts don’t give me great confidence that we will have Twitter in its current form for much longer, but with the amount of interest and users, we may see some future iterations of the service.

Just my two cents..

If you want to follow me, just add: PhilCaines

Update

Twitter was just described as “a crowd sourced information dissemination system.” Could this be the future of news? Worth the read.

The PhoCusWright perfect mini storm session was facinating, and featured a great panel of industry titans. Doug Quinby hosted Tina Fitch (EZRez), Rod Cuthbert (Viator Inc), Kenneth Purcell (Iseatz.com), and Ranjan Singh (Isango!).

Here is a summary of the session with some thoughts at the end. These are not quotes, but I tried to capture the main points:

The point was brought up that there are thousands of varied suppliers, what is it that they want?

RS: Differentiation

TF: Sexy representation and and easy to implement system.

KP: Multi Payment options, ie reward miles etc. Also are looking for priority placement.

What do consumers want from these sites?

TF: Consumers want alternatives during the buying process, early packaging options and multiple paths to the booking. The business should have the capabilities to upsell during and after the initial booking. (Email followup/rewards)

RC: Consumers treat destination product differently than other ingredients of the travel picture. Flights, hotels and cars are like bugers, fries and drinks, while activities are purchased after, and are like the dessert. There is not a large opportunity to bundle with other travel products.

RS: I agree and disagree. There are ‘Why not’ products like hop-on hop-off tours that can be bundled well with other products, and the ‘Why’ products which are often the reason WHY people are traveling to these destinations.

KP: Things like groud transport/parking are the most relevant to bundle with other travel products. 80% of the sales we see are in the transfer/parking market.

Will you look to develop Mobile apps?

RC: It is a great opportunity, however we would need an infrastructure upgrade to accommodate our vouchure confirmation model.

RS: Technology maturity will need 3-5 years.

Will these transaction based sites eventually change over to an ad based revenue model?

TF: We give our customers the tools to decide. They can combine onsite booking as well as ads.

Thoughts

This is a developing market that really lacks an underlying infrastucture. The lack of standardization is a barrier to further innovation. There are underlying issues such as the lack of consolidated availability means that consumers are often given bookings that can not be confirmed, and in certain cases, have to wait for a confirmation email. Free sell products represent the minority of destination suppliers, and there is a massive opportunity to bring these long tail suppliers online, well that is probably why I work with Rezgo ;)

PhoCusWright has again packed a lot of amazing networking, workshops and presentations into one conference. Well the morning of the main center stage conference is in full swing and the trending is looking interesting. We have heard from the VC community; William Carroll, Cornell, Jeff Clarke, Travelport Inc, Sophie Frost, Brightspark Ventures, Jake Fuller, Thomas Weisel Partners.

While there were strong references to economic trending with Philip C Wolf saying that “it didn’t look like a economy in recession at the bar last night”. Jeff Clarke was confident that there will be an upswing eventually. Jake Fuller on the other hand pointed out that there was no denying the current economic climate and how there was an inevitable loss of competition with smaller innovators being pressured out of the game. Sophie was talking about the drying up of investment capital for the next 18 months. She stated that that they are going to tighten their belts, cut expenses where ever possible, and then also lower their level of investment by an additional 10%. With Brightspark having a notable portfolio, this could be indicitive of a far reaching down swing in travel technology investment. Lets hope not..

Photo back: Tim Hughes, Kevin May, Phil Caines and Stephen Joyce. Front: Jaime Horwitz, Claude Benard, Sean Keener (Thanks Jamie for the great photo!)

Well the bloggers are joining forces once again at PhoCusWright. It was good to meet some old blogging associates after Stephen and I prepared for the Travel Innovation Summit. We are excited and ready to go as we are presenting at 12:08 on the dot today.

I am currently in the TIS showcase surrounded by some great companies. It seems like we are the only ones in our space for this competition, and there are many opportunities to network/partner with these innovators.

More info to come!

Is there a Google backlash? A little.

Are they still making money? Over $4 Billion a year in profit.

They have just launched their first mobile OS equipped phone, their first satellite, their own browser, and basically own online video, free email, online advertising, and oh yeah, the search world. So now they know what you are looking for, they know where you are, who you are talking to, and can take a photo of you where ever you are. This brother is getting bigger! Andrew Keen, a British-born author and entrepreneur in California’s Silicon Valley said, “‘They have amassed more information about people in 10 years than all the governments of the world put together.”

Look no further then Kevin May and company’s Travolution blog to see how the travel industry is taking to Google’s recent changes to their advertising model. Seems like travel folks are starting to feel peeved.

Well it turns out that the travel folks are not alone, the Guardian released this article highlighting some of the Pros and Cons of a Google world.

This is not to say that I am against Google, but that I am starting to be aware of its impact in my life, could you go a day/week/month with out it? I don’t think I could, and that is mildly concerning.

The list of competitors is complete, the first ever Travel Innovation Summit will now feature 28 travel technology competitors that range from small bootstrapping startup (Stephen and I…) to large multi-nationals (Sabre Rattling??).

Bruce Rosard (VP at PhoCusWright) just sent me some of the trends that have surfaced for the competition:

1. The growth of pure Travel 2.0 businesses is slowing—dramatically.
The Travel Innovation Summit demonstrators, along with applicants who were not selected for this year’s event, described very few applications involving new social networks or pure social networking.

2. Travelers will enjoy easy access to rich subjective, objective and experiential content for trip planning.
Look for the pairing of trip planning and established social network brands and other sources of objective and subjective content. To facilitate the learning and shopping process, first movers are emerging in semantic search. Tools that facilitate an easier trip planning experience by narrowing alternatives based on profiles, stated preferences and observed behaviors are coming.

3. Abundant, varied mobile applications are beginning to emerge.
Interestingly, many of the emerging mobile application innovations focus not simply on shopping and purchasing, but on a variety of content, including day-of-travel and concierge applications. Creative approaches to the mobile business model challenge also are arising.

4. The Long Tail is coming of age.
With low cost computers and more pervasive Internet access than ever, the Long Tail of travel is poised to spread beyond the traditional air, car and hotel market. Unique approaches, including Software as a Service (SaaS), are on the horizon for the effective, efficient distribution of additional content and services.

5. Air shopping is still a work in progress.
Innovators like Air Canada are redefining the airline seat as a product—think of a world where every seat is a SKU with unique characteristics and services—rather than a mere commodity. The complexities of air shopping mean new approaches are still in their infancy—with ample room to grow and mature.

6. Attention shifts from “learn, shop, book” in the travel value chain.
Innovators are recognizing that elements beyond “learn, shop, book” in the travel value chain can be monetized. Expect pre-trip, trip experience, and post-trip technology models to arise.

7. Building supporting business applications loses its luster.
Innovators are focused on the customer-facing applications in the travel value chain, with much less emphasis on the infrastructure services that support content development, content distribution, financial accounting and settlement, and even provisioning of Internet access.

I originally did a brief review of the original competitors and this post will finish with some of the latest entries into the arena. I have also added two new indicators, funding, to let readers know who owns the company and how much has been invested (I may need your help) and target: b2c, b2b, b2b&c.

I am biased in my reviews (maybe a little) because Rezgo is one of the competitors in this competition, so feel free to let me know if you think I am crazy off base.

Adventure Link

URL: http://www.adventurelink.com

Overview: Aim to be a GDS for the adventure travel segment. They claim to be “the 21st century equivalent to the ancient Roman Forum (minus the toga’s, of course)”. I am not exactly sure who powers who, but it seems that their back end in run by Trisept Solutions, and their product is fed by VaxVacation Access.

Funding: Not Sure

Target: B2B

Site look: 7/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 7/10

Innovation: 6/10

Success: 7/10

Clairvoyix

URL:http://www.clairvoyix.com

Overview:This is not my area of specialty, however their easy to understand design allows the common man to understand the process of Database marketing and the value it can have for any business. They give clear examples of this and it looks pretty good. They do need to update their Legal information on the bottom of the page though…

Funding: Seed/Early stage funding from goffventures.biz

Target: B2B

Site look: 7/10 (Update Legal)

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 5/10

Success: 8/10

Deal Base

URL: http://www.dealbase.com

Overview:A user generated hotel deal website that accepts deals from any source. They currently host over 7000 deals across multiple sites. Site guests can link directly to the hotel or booking site to complete the booking. I wonder if they have referral agreements in place or if they have an advertising based business model. Their Alexa ranking is quite low considering they are B2C.

Funding: Not Sure - Any Ideas?

Target: B2C

Site look: 7/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 5/10

Innovation: 6/10

Success: 6/10

escapia.com

URL: http://www.escapia.com

Overview: I think Bill Furlong (CEO) has been listening to some of Rezgo’s meetings, his model is very near to ours, except it is for a completely different market, vacation rentals. His system gives property owners a booking system (front and back end) that allows them to accept bookings through their website as well as through 3rd part marketing sites. (Not a bad idea;)

Funding: Venture Capital - At least 2 different rounds equaling over 2.8 million

Target: B2C

Site look: 8/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 7/10

Innovation: 8/10

Success: 8/10

17 More reviews to come. Look for them in the following days.

“The issue is no longer distribution; rather, it’s relevance.”

Brad Feld
Managing Director
Foundry Group

I couldn’t of said it better myself; the publishing landscape has changed for ever, the democritization of information and the proliferation of tools to distribute this information is impacting society as we know it. traditional news media has responded with over 95% of the top 100 newspapers all have blogs.

Technorati, the online blog catelog, has just released its 2008 State of the Blogosphere which highlights trends and themes from the blogging public, definately worth a read.

Some interesting highlights about corporate/professional bloggers:

• There is a strong differentiation between a ‘corporate blogger’ and a blogger who writes about their industry. With only 12% identifying themselves as truly corporate, while 46% are ‘professional’ (this is what I identify myself as)
• Corporate bloggers are pretty homogeneous (Male-70%, in relationship-75%, college grad-74%)
• The blogs are not making much money, of those that advertise, the median annual revenue was between $200-$300… better hope that added brand exposure can be justified ;)

The future of blogging

The article also asks senior analysts about their thoughts about blogging, and what lies ahead. I found an interesting comment from Jeremiah Owyang:

“The future of blogging will be an auto-synching of our lives directly to the web —often a quiet recording in the background”

I hope this comment was taken out of context, because I feel this 1984, Big Brother view of the future of blogging is kind of bleak. I find that blogs are most effective when they are not simple ‘reporting’ but add a human editorial view that sparks thought and conversation.

Here is the article for further reading:

PhoCusWright Debunks Six Online Travel Myths

Myth #1: The number of online travel buyers in the U.S. is declining. In fact, that number is on the rise, as documented in the recently published The PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Tenth Edition. In 2007, approximately 70% of online travelers (that is, adults who have taken a commercial air trip and stayed at a hotel for leisure in the past year, and used the Internet in the past 30 days) bought travel online, compared to 63% in 2006.

PhoCusWright dispelled this piece of misinformation—and debunked five additional online travel myths—at its first-ever Analyst Forum, held September 10 in New York City.

In addition to the misconception that online travel buyers are declining, The PhoCusWright Analyst Forum corrected these five other online travel myths:

1. More and more online travel shoppers use supplier sites than online travel agencies. While this belief is widespread in the travel industry, it is simply untrue, according to PhoCusWright, the travel industry research firm. In terms of popularity, online travel agencies are making a comeback (source: The PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey Tenth Edition or “CTTS10“).
2. Travel agencies are experiencing a resurgence as travelers return to traditional purchasing channels. Not so. In reality, even many formerly exclusive offline buyers are migrating online for travel shopping and buying, according to CTTS10.
3. The next generation of travelers prefers to do everything online. The truth is, less than half of what 18-28 year olds spend on travel is spent online, according to The NEXTgen Traveler™ report, jointly published by PhoCusWright and Ypartnership.
4. Social networks and travel reviews have the greatest influence on travel decision-making. The NEXTgen Traveler™ report reveals that while social media is widespread, destination Web sites and online travel agencies are favored by nearly half of next generation travelers during the travel shopping process.
5. Online travel markets need high credit card and Internet penetration to succeed. The structure and ambitions of the travel marketplace are even more important drivers than infrastructure. Case in point is India, one of the most dynamic online travel marketplaces today, where roughly 98% of the population does not use credit cards or have access to the Internet.

Ypartnership has released an expanded summary of the findings that they and PhoCusWright have found on the “Next Generation Traveler”

These findings are really inline with the projections of current online usage, here is a summary of the key stats for the next gen traveler:

• They are smart (30% with a 4-year college degree; 20% with at least one year of graduate school)
• Affluent (30% of households with an annual income in excess of $100,000)
• Multi Generational (50% Echo Boomers (18-28 years) and 50% Baby Boomers (43 to 61 years)
• 71% use the Internet to search for travel information
• 41% have taken a virtual tour of a destination
• 38% have built a trip itinerary online
• 58% cite the “ability to check the best fares/rates” as the most important feature in a travel web site
• 37% report being influenced by personal comments read on social networking or travel advisory web sites, but they frequent social networking sites such as MySpace.com (56%) and Facebook (30%) more than travel advisory or review sites such as TripAdvisor (14%);
• 33% have authored and posted a travel review online.

The summary goes on to state that these consumers are less likely to be influenced by advertising messages. With all of these stats taken into consideration, it is no surprise that the travel industry is in a battle against comoditization.

As Jeremiah Owyang points out with Facebook’s new advertising model, there are new attempts to engage this demographic, and advertisers are striving to penetrate this attention lacking group. These trends are leading me to believe that travel has to really engage the senses and imagination of this new market in order to prompt buying action. A recent interview with Jess Butcher, head of partnerships at online travel experiences company isango!, shed some light into this area.

She was asked what was on the horizon for travel, here is what she said:

“The marriage of ‘where-to-go’ inspiration and commerce functionality is still one that no one’s quite nailed online just yet and we really believe the opportunity here could be immense.   There are an increasing number of inspiration-style tools that take activity preference and demographic-detail into consideration, but they tend to culminate in standard flight/ hotel/ car booking engines.  There’s a proliferation of new community style-sites, technologies, widgets and trip planning tools emerging right now – from which we expect to see a bit of boom and bust cycle – but looking forward to seeing the winners.”

I agree, there is an ever increasing decline in what hotel, which airline, and which car rental company consumers choose, and more of a focus on “I did the most crazy tour when I was in ____________,  check out this amazing tour website!”

Mobile post sent by philcaines using Utterz.  Replies.

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50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing

If you are not familiar with Social Media, the great people at CommonCraft have a video explanation, Social Media in Plain English:

(Image showing India’s static Airline pricing structure. From the Boot - Thanks Tim and Ram)

Robert Crandall, former Chairman and CEO of American Airlines, has called yield management “the single most important technical development in transportation management since we entered deregulation.”

The world is getting smaller, and travel pricing information is easier to acquire then ever before, much to the chagrin of revenue management analysts. With trends towards openness and transparency, the question has to be asked, can the travel industry maintain its elaborate yield management structures, or will consumers be able to circumvent their efforts?

Yield Management -

Yield Management has, since approx 1990 when airfares were deregulated, effectively raised revenue margins. It is fundamentally accomplished by separating price points based on demand and consumers willingness to buy. It is most effective when a good is perishable, being that it has no value after a specific time (when the tour bus leaves, empty seats are lost).

You can see this in effect in most businesses in the travel industry, most notably the Airlines, Rental car, Hotel industry, and it is also starting to appear in the destination activity vertical. You have probably seen this in effect. Consider the last time you booked a flight online; The general rule of thumb is the further out you book a flight, the cheaper it will be (I know there are many exceptions), the closer the flight is, the less availability there is, and the demand is therefore increased as is the price.

How is the Internet changing this?

While elastic pricing will be around for some time, the ability for consumers to track pricing and trends is also increasing. The simple example from Cleartrip at the top of this post demonstrates how easy it is becoming to track the historic price point of every major carrier in India. Yapta is also making waves in the industry for giving consumers a tool that will essentially counter price fluctuations in the Airline industry. It tracks specific routes of interest, and allows you to buy at a historically ‘cheap’ price point, then if the rate drops further, Yapta connects you will a rebate cheque from the airline. So this is the first step in equalizing price points across different demand points.

A glimpse into the future

The ever secretive travel industry is starting to evolve; with the prominence of Internet booking, and supplier direct reservation capabilities, consumers are now given more choices as to where they can purchase their travel products and packages at the best price. Taking these trends towards transparency, it is my opinion that the age of the multi-tiered, dynamic segmentation are going to start to fade. This will be facilitated by the increased focus on upselling of ancillary product as proven effective by Ryan Air.

However, those last minute flights are sure to cost you an arm and a leg ;) So for now the responsibility is still on the consumer to plan ahead, and it is easier then ever to do so.

What do you see? Will consumers always be subject to an every fluctuating price scheme?

We are really excited to be participating in the PhoCusWright’s Travel Innovation Summit (PCW TIS). Rezgo has come a long way since its inception, we are gaining attention, building strategic partnerships and have a robust feature set that really sets us apart from our direct competition. Well I may be a little biased, and I realize that our competition at PCW TIS is not direct market competition. As we are competing for innovation and ingenuity, I thought I would do a brief review of the presenters at PCW TIS.

This is not a complete list, and I will be adding others as more information is made available. I will be giving an overview of what they do and a rating based on potential to shake the industry, how innovative they are, and the likelihood of success. So here is a brief rundown of the presenting companies at PCW TIS thus far.

Cadabra

Overview: Looks to be a one stop shop for those going to New Zealand. PRO: You can generate a customized itinerary including hotel and activities and even book all items through their website. CON: Currently only in New Zealand, search for hotel etc can not be filtered and organized (price, stars etc)

Site look: 8/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 7/10

Success: 8/10

ekit

Overview: Their primary business is selling of SIM and calling cards for travelers, as an ancillary bonus, users are given a travel journal and a secure travel vault for storing important documents digitally. PRO: Free add-ons to a comodity type product. The live tracking features a really cool. CON: Not really an innovative product, there are numerous free mobile blogging and document storage platforms on the market.

Site look: 4/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 5/10

Innovation: 6/10

Success: 6/10

Innovata LLC

Overview: Innovata is positioning itself as the leader in Airline timedable data managing, hosting, and reporting. They have a number of services ranging from Data Licencing, Hosted Services to Analitical Services. PRO: Seem to have multiple strong revenue streams. CON: I am not sure how scalable this business platform is.

Site look: 7/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 6/10

Success: 8/10

NileGuide.com

Overview: I met the CEO Josh Steinitz at last years PCW, he has made NileGuide a shaker for the trip planning and UGC review sector. PRO NileGuide has great filtering features to help find hotels and activities that interest you, and they have a growing database of product. CON: Lack of transaction capabilities limits their revenue potential.

Site look: 9/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 8/10

Innovation: 7/10

Success: 7/10

Update:

It is refreshing to see the updates to content, UGC and usability on Nile Guide. Josh Steinetz is heading in the right direction, the guides that can be dynamically generated are a great merger of oldword guides meet custom travel planning. I will be using this site.

Roundtrip Systems

Overview: Roundtip Systems seems to be giving emails a dynamic booking capability. PRO: Piggy backing emails for booking, saves time, widely used technology. CON: Product bookings lack scope and range of options and media.

Site look: 5/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 7/10

Success: 7/10

WorldMate Inc.

Overview: World Mate offers mobile information for traveler. Their free product has weather, currency and time information, and their subscription service has flight information. PRO: Nice interface, free account is a good incentive to use. CON: With the proliferation of mobile information, all of their data can be accessed through traditional websites.

Site look: 8/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 6/10

Innovation: 7/10

Success: 7/10

UPDATE

Worldmate has just presented their live software, it looks to have a great user interface, and a impressive feature set. I am happy to see the progress in such a short time period. Good job guys!

Yapta.

Overview: I met Tom Romary and the Yapta Team last year at PCW. These guys have a great product for the american traveller. They track flight pricing for consumers and can help consumers get reemburced if the price of a flight changes before they fly. PRO: Huge market potential. CON: I hope they have a solid revenue model ;)

Site look: 8/10

Potential to Shake Industry: 9/10

Innovation: 9/10

Success: 8/10

Rezgo

Overview: Well I can’t really be objective here, but I think we have a great product! So feel free to go to Rezgo.com and leave a comment on how you would rate Rezgo:

Site look: ?/10

Potential to Shake Industry: ?/10

Innovation: ?/10

Success: 11;) /10

What does this mean for the travel industry? What events are coming together to facilitate drastic changes?

These are questions that PhoCusWright will be addressing at their annual conference, this year in Hollywood. They are focusing on the new ways that consumers Search, Shop, and Buy travel products through the Internet. This started my thinking, and here are some areas that I have noticed that will be the big movers of this perfect storm:

1. Semantic Travel - With everyone and their dog online, it is becoming increasingly hard to make travel booking  decisions due to the sheer magnitude of content on the web. Semantic structuring of search attempts to disseminate all of the information, pricing and reviews that are the most relevant for your interests and present it to you in a concise format. Look at sites like UpTake.com for an example of where semantic vertical search is today. This will be the new Meta-search.

UPDATE: Yen and Tom just presented at TIS at PhoCusWright. They did a great job and reassured me that they are creating order out of the mess of information out there.

2. Google - With integrated flight search that has preferential placement of OTAs, Google is moving closer and closer to fully marketing travel products. They have out maneuvered Microsoft on the Yahoo bid, and now own online advertising, it is fair to anticipate some major shake ups from this daring company.

3. Free - Chris Anderson is coming out with another industry shaking book, Free!. He uses Google, Craigslist and Wikipedia as cases for the new economics of the Internet. Apply these same tenets to the Travel Industry and some interesting things will happen. Rezgo, (our product) for example has just released a Free Online booking solution for Tour and Activity suppliers, this has the potential to enable all of the longtail suppliers to sell their products through our partner OTAs as well as their own site. There is a lot of potential here.

What do you think will contribute to this new Perfect Storm for travel?

The fact is, the written press seams to have more credibility then online news and media distributors (for now ;) ) and having your company featured in an official press article is still great, free publicity. So for now you have to play their game.

Here are a number of Free Press Release Sites that I use to help promote Rezgo, and hopefully get picked up by official news agencies. If you don’t get featured by a large news agency, at least these sites will help your rank with Google. They are geared for the Tour and Travel industry and some may require payment, but most are free and generalized enough to help any company promote their press releases. Enjoy, and let me know if you have any others.

1. http://prcompass.com/
2. http://www.press-base.com/
3. http://www.clickpress.com/releases/index.shtml
4. http://ecommwire.com/
5. http://free-press-release.com/
6. http://www.prlog.org/
7. http://pressabout.com/
8. http://i-newswire.com/
9. http://free-press-release-center.info/
10. http://www.pr9.net/
11. http://www.pr-inside.com/
12. http://www.newyork-press-release.com/nationwide.php
13. http://www.newswiretoday.com/index.php
14. http://www.prleap.com/
15. http://prurgent.com/
16. http://www.pr.com/
17. http://prbuzz.com/
18. http://www.1888pressrelease.com/
19. http://pressmethod.com/
20. http://24-7pressrelease.com/
21. http://www.pressbox.co.uk/cgi-bin/links/add.cgi
22. http://www.prnuke.com/index.php?name=News&file=submit
23. http://www.prweb.com/
24. http://www.corporate.canada.travel/corp/media/app/en/ca/contributeNews.do
25. http://theopenpress.com/
26. http://travelindustrywire.com/
27. http://www.wireservice.ca/index.php?name=Submit_News

• http://www.vcfodder.com/ 
  • A straightforward look at the world of entrepreneurship and venture capital.
• http://www.sfentrepreneur.com/how-to-guides/
  • Great how-to guides on legal, marketing, presenting etc
    
• http://www.thefunded.com/
  • An online community of entrepreneurs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide.
• http://fundfindr.com/
  • The elevator speech meets YouTube, also a NVBC competitor.

If you know of any others, let me kow, but I hope this list can help all of you out there that are in a similar situation.

TravelMole just brought this interesting article to light. It turns out that for the first time ever, online ad spend has ‘outpaced’ traditional spending at $8 billion last year. It is projected that this will continue to increase to $22.8 Billion by 2012.

While this article does not contrast these findings with the dollar amount spent on traditional media over the past few years, it does raise an interesting point, where does traditional media fit in?

I found an interesting article on the IAB site that displays advertising spending trends over a 13 year period. As no surprise, internet has been adapted much more rapidly than either broadcast or cable advertising. Definitely worth checking out. In 2007 Internet advertising has surpassed both Radio and Cable network ad spend.

So what will the future look like for the remaining top media providers? Here are some trends that I feel will negatively effect the penetration of traditional advertisers in the next 10-15 years:

1. The Attention Economy - Gone are the passive zombies media bystanders. With TV on demand, video websites and Tevo, consumers now get what they what when they want, and commercials are not part of it!
2. Newspapers - Great for regionalized penetration, but with no instant feedback, and a low traceableness, not to mention the lowing of readership, the skies look gray for the traditional printed newspaper.

What do you think the future of news paper and TV distribution is? Is is a good complement, or will it eventually disappear?

This concept has been applied to the tourism industry, and there is quite a fit. PhoCusWright brought this to our attention at the Sept 2007 conference in Florida, and Alan A Lew wrote a great article on it in 2006.

In Mr. Lews article he makes some claims about the long tail market. “The long tail market has huge potential. However it is highly distributed and highly individualized. Therefore, accessing it requires marketing and distribution channels that are both broad and deep. To sell relatively less popular products requires being able to store smaller inventories and being able to minimize distribution costs.”

Being in a business that is attempting to help small and niche tour and activity operators, these books and articles have influenced my business development. In an attempt to provide a solution that encompasses all of the many facets and challenges for marketing and distributing a long tail tour providers product, we have revamped our product, Rezgo.

We are releasing Rezgo Free on June 1st, and are confident that this solution will consolidate the long tail of tour and activities.

We recognized that suppliers needed more than simple book-now functionality; we found that they need a tour management and distribution suite that centralized all of their sales channels. We found that tour operators were more concerned with power and simplicity then with a “feature rich, function less” system.

Rezgo Free eliminates all of the traditional barriers that tour operators face when trying to adapt a new technology. It is intuitive, 100% free to sell products through their website, and it also has the capabilities to increase distribution and consolidate all of their sales channels. This will help ease companies into structuring their products for online sales, and will give them a platform to grow their business with expanded Internet distribution and marketing.

Offering this solution for free is a challenging proposition for the business stake holders, but empowering tour operators to standardize their products will help the long tail of tourism flourish. What do you think? You can find more information on www.rezgo.com.

Here are a couple of terms that are really circulating on the news and at conferences. I will also give a brief definition to their intended meaning:

Perfect Storm - It now seams that everything is a perfect storm. Travel agencies needing help, airlines collapsing you name it.  Here is the Wikipedia definition:

“The phrase refers to the simultaneous occurrence of events which, taken individually, would  be far less powerful than the result of their chance combination. Such occurrences are rare by their very nature, so that even a slight change in any one event contributing to the perfect storm would lessen its overall impact. “

Walled Garden -  This term is of particular interest to me, I am all for breaking down the walls (I recently bought a piece of the Berlin wall :) This term is popping up in the context of media restrictions, inter-industry collaboration and especially the Tele-Com industry. Breaking down restrictions on collaboration is a trend that next generation businesses are going to have to adapt to. As Don Tapscott points out in Wikinomics “If you don’t stay current with customers, they invent around you”. This is in reference to restrictions on products that don’t allow for collaboration and modification.

Here is the Widipedia definition of Walled Garden:

“A walled garden, with regards to media content, refers to a closed set or exclusive set of information services provided for users (a method of creating a monopoly or securing an information system).”

So I hand it over to you, what BUZZ terms have you been hearing lately? Any interesting new ones?

Practical Ways that travel suppliers can get involved:

• Sustainable Travel International - Turn Key Programs
  
• Green Globe - Internationally recognized certification program
  
• Green Tourism Advice - Great top tips and case studies for accommodations and tour operators

Back Ground information on Earth Day and related topics:

• Earth Day Wiki - a good overview of the history of Earth Day
• Environmental Accounting Wiki - This new approach to accounting incorporates externalities and gives the full picture of corporate impact on the environment, worth looking into.
• UNWTO Sustaiable Developmensin Tourism - Great news and reports tracking the efforts that the UNWTO is undertaking.

Personal Goals:

I for one, am making little changes, I have sold my car and only walk, bike or take the bus. Here are some of my future goals:

• Limit my garbage to 1 grocery bag per week.
• Recycle everything that has the potential to be recycled.
• Support local produce (BUT I LOVE BANANAS!!)

How about you, do you have any great resources that you use to guide your environmental strategy? How about your personal goals, what changes are you making in your everyday life?