Blog

We've Been Bad

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:15:00 GMT

Boy, have we been bad about updating ... front page last updated in August.

Good news is we've also been busy. Our infrastructure is finalized and we are in our new (old) offices at the Naples Municipal Airport (KAPF, for you airport buffs). The only downside is that our office looks out over the transient jet ramp, so if you call us we might occassionally have to apologize for the jet noise!

In the past few months, we've put together a couple of interesting projects for some interesting clients, none of which we can talk about, of course ... but in general we're sticking right around what we know. Basically, we make those random, implausible, "can we ..." type ideas into reality. We thrive on figuring out if and how to LEGALLY, and without violating your vendor licenses make your ideas come true:

Got a crazy idea to market only to loyalty club members who live in North Dakota, drive a Lexus, really like playing the new JAWS(tm) Linked Jackpot game from Aristocrat? We can help you do that.
Want to make a special offer to martini drinkers with over 10 room nights last month who have an affinity for Konami's African Diamond? We can help you do that.
Let's not ignore the little stuff ... need a custom iOS or HTML5 application to keep you guest's aware of happenings on property? Piece o' pie.

If you've got an idea you'd like to develop and/or evaluate, we'd love to hear from you.

We have a pretty deep bench of well qualified developers, trainers, project managers, and quality assurance professionals with a a variety of skills ready to help you.

My, We've Been Busy

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:29:00 GMT

Or, "Holy Crap It's August Already!" ... and the good news is that we're much farther along than it would appear from our lame-o website.

We're closing in on finalizing our infrastructure ... office space, broadband, phones, legal, and most importantly, our products!

Strategists and technology types today chant cloud cloud cloud, but reality dictates that transition to the cloud will take time. Investments have been mad, property-side technologies selected and implemented. Until our systems live completely in the cloud, there remains a standing requirement to remotely harvest but centrally aggregate and analyze data from disparate systems.

Let's face it, accomplishing anything remotely approaching success in this arena has been a chore and a key revenue stream for one-off integraters (I should know, I was one).

We're here to tell you there is a better way. We're happy to announce the Atri Leo Managed Information Framework.

Simply put, it's integration as a service, and here's how it works:

1) We ship you a little black box.

2) You open the package, plug in a network cable and wall wart.

3) Done.

We manage. We monitor, We update. We fix.

Madness, I know, but it's true. We'll handle it all.

Obviously, there's lots more to follow and we encourage you to follow us on those new fangled social media sites for upcoming announcements ....

"The Wrap Up Show" live at HFTP

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 02:03:52 GMT

My final HFPT official HITEC blog entry for (HITEC) 2012 just went live at blog.hftp.org.

The Wrap Up Show

Meridian in big at Venetian-Palazzo

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:04:00 GMT

I wrote about Meridian in my most recent HFTP blog post (Brad's Laws). I really felt it was one of the standaouts from this year's HITEC, despite the fact that they were kind of hidden back in GuestRoom 20x under a Cisco router.

Turns out that they had a big win under their belt! Techcrunch is reporting today (link) that Venetian-Palazzo is rolling out their VP Pocket Concierge product powered by Meridian (iTunes: link). This is a big win, and I'll bet it's not the last. Meridian seems like a smart young company doing things right. From my brief chat w/ CEO Kiyo Kubo at HITEC I predict exciting things ahead for this company and for this technology.

Watch 'em, and remember you heard it here first. Well, not here, but .. over there, in that other blog, but you know what I meant.

"Brad's Laws for Good Hotel IT Products" now live at HFTP

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:36:46 GMT

My latest HFTP official HITEC blog entry just went live over at blog.hftp.org.

Brad's Laws for Good Hotel IT Products

Enjoy.

The Nexus 7 ... for hospitality

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:54:00 GMT

If you're follow along at home, you know that "she who controls such things" has graciously allowed me to pre-order a Google Nexus 7 tablet (link), For research, of course ...

The device is getting pretty good reviews, even a bit longer term ones like the latest from Ars (link). which sum up saying:

The Nexus 7 is going to become the go-to device for people who find the iPad too large, or find it too expensive. We're sure the latter exist, but after all this time the question remains: does the former? We find the 7-inch screen a downside in some respects, but many gadget companies have hoped against hope that this is really a form factor consumers want, apart from the iPad, if only they could nail the execution. Finally, we'll find out if they're right.

But here's the rub. Ars and others are looking at this as a consumer device. What if we look at it as something else, say a content delivery device in-room or maybe remote POS? Companies have tried to shoe horn the iPad into those rolls for a few years since the device's release. With a starting price point of 499 I havent' seen the technology enter wide adoption. Oh sure, there are a smattering of news stories (google), but I think in all but high-end luxury situations, iPad is just an expensive widget asking to be pilfered. Even locked down (instructions), I'll bet that less than scrupulous guest can be tempted steal first and figure out the details later.

Enter Nexus 7, being sold at cost (link) with a sticker price of 199 for the base 8GB model. At that price point, I think more vendors and hoteliers will be willing to take the plunge and experiment. The device isn't exactly cost competitive with other in-room tech like that fancy IP phone w/ the screen that nobody uses, but it's getting close. Also, and excuse my bluntness, Nexus 7 isn't as high falootin' as an iPad making it a, shall we say less obvious (?) target for those who would do evil? Heck, at 199, I can just bolt the damn thing to the desk and have it be the LCARS (link) for the room.

Nexus 7 also runs Android, while admitedly not the greatest tablet OS on the planet, has certain ecosystem advantages over it's Apple cousin iOS. Apple, quite on purpose, has made it a PITA (look it up) to load proprietary software. Maybe it's just my experience, but the enterprise deployments we've done on iOS were kinda painfull, requiring enterprise distribution participation from Cupertino and/or some fairly pricey thrid party server technology. This is by design, and for a consumer device iPad entirely appropriate.

Google, on the other hand, doesn't give a rats patooty what you do with its OS, Android is open source, after all ... just ask Amazon what that means. They're also not so picky about what you load on your hardware either.

So, long and short ... what do I think all this means? I think that the availabiltiy of cheap(er), smaller, less attractive (to theives), and arguably more manageable platform, we may just (finally) see some new revenue options and innovation coming to a space that could definitely use a good dose of it.

It ain't all double rainbows in the cloud

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 17:23:00 GMT

I promise you that in the coming days and weeks, people will use the Amazon AWS outage the other day to support their arcane assertions that the cloud "isn't ready." I can hear 'em now ... "See! See!" they'll squeal. "All those companies lost revenue because they were on the cloud." These folks will use this outage to justify their massive, year over year capital expenditures.

These folks are wrong. All those companies lost revenue because they didn't build in an appropriate way for the cloud to fail gracefully. Even basic planning can keep you up and running, especially on a transactional commerce site, during even the worst of outages. You just need to plan ahead. Sure, you might drop some sessions, but you'll still be online.

For those that really listen, I don't and never have advocated a dedicated, cloud only strategy. Depending on your architecture, the case can be made that critical infrastructure like internal fraud processing be self-hosted ... but do you really need those app and web servers in your most expensive, bullet-proof, multi-circuit-failover bunker you got there? I think not ...

Self-hosting advocates have to plan hardware refreshes for MAX capacity, and the money spent comes straight from the capital budget. Why not uses the cloud to intelligently respond to actual demand? AWS in particular, although not exclusively, offers some great tools for starting / shutting down capacity based on metrics that you as SME's for you product define. And guess what? You don't pay for it if it ain't running. Want to hedge your costs down a bit? Do that same planning, but take your MIN capacity figure and buy yourself some reserved instances. Those guys are going to be running all the time anyway.

As an added bonus, the bill for AWS is paid out out monthly, which you can take from operational budget rather than CapEx. My CPA says that's a good thing ... bet you're CFO will think so too.

Do yourselves a favor. Ignore the naysayer(s). Consult a really good strategic architect and move some of your stack to the cloud. While I'm by no means capable of designing that kind of fault tolerant system, my JOB as the guy running the show is to make sure I have access to people that can.

Forbes on Hipmunk ... the World's Best Travel Site

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 16:42:00 GMT

There are many many many lessons to be learned in this article on Forbes.com about one of my favorite travel sites, Hipmunk.com. Author Bruce Upbin (link) hits the nail on the head with his "big point"

This is the big point. There was a time when it was really novel and boss for an e-commerce site to expose tons of data simply because it could. That was a sign of technical superiority and implied intelligence. But that novelty has worn off. The winners from here on out will the ones who make the Web functional and simple.

Usability rules on Hipmunk, and if you take a look their flight and hotel search pages, you'll see they're entirely about utilitarian functionality. No ads. Search results in the order you want ... In the case of flight search, results can be ordered by so called "Agony", Price, Duration, Departure, Arrival and filtered by a variety of parameters. Notice nowhere did I say that you could sort by whoever paid the most for placement or bought the most ad space on any given page.

Hotel results are sortable by "Ecstasy", Price, Quality, and Distance. Results are simple to intuit, and not jumpled up with piles of text and pictures. The map shows relative positions without becoming a jumble of awful blobs. Appropriately, additional information about properties is available just a click away, but I don't have to plow through it all like many other travel sites.

I mentioned a post or two ago (one, actually) that Hipmunk.com had was one of the lucky ones, and I still agree with that premise. The difference between this and many other travel sites is that they've taken what luck gave them, and executed on it. The team is focusing on simplicity and usability, building transaction revenue rather than ad revenue.

I like this model, and it appears others do too. Hipmunk is gaining real traction. I wonder if traditional OTA's have too much sunk cost in their ugly, old, verbose OTA sites to pivot and learn the lessons Hipmunk is teaching .... turn your busted-ass travel site in to lean, mean revenue-making machines.

Hipmunk.com is one of the lucky few

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 14:40:00 GMT

The truth to be implicitly found in this article from The Next Web by the founders of Hipmunk.com is that luck and history matter in the startup game, and it's even worse in travel. Adam Goldstein writes:

I left a voice message for one of the big data suppliers for traditional travel agencies. I received an email reply—two months later—with a ten-page form for me to fill out. And that was the most accommodating company I spoke to; the vast majority never returned my calls.

99% of people with a great travel idea won't get through to the Orbitz's of the world, or anyone else. They'll die a quiet death without Y-Combinator, an angel round, or an A-Round. We'll probably see a few at HITEC this year. Very very (VERY VERY) few companies have the luxury of time that US $5.1 MM in capital brings.

In the interest of full disclosure, ever since Delta "made their site better", I now used Hipmunk to find the lowest fares on the routes I want. When I find 'em and click through I'm booking on Delta's site. I'm not sure if that works on all airlines or just Delta, but it suits my needs very well.

link: http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2012/06/23/how-i-launched-hipmunk-in-an-industry-i-initially-knew-nothing-about

On Doug Rice being inducted into Int'l Hospitality Hall of Fame

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:38:12 GMT

Take a quick read over at HFTP Connect (link) ... looks likd Doug Rice is going to be inducted into the International Hospitality Hall of Fame, and I for one ... think that's GREAT!

I remember the early days Doug describes ... I was one of the Micros guys. Doug would sit us down and insist that this HTNG thing would work and that it was all about the interop. We'd argue that it was probably just a waste of time, but agreed to play along. He (sternly) pointed over yonder, and we techies would go huddle up in the virtual corner and hammer out a spec. This was the early days of web services, and the vendors could barely agree what approach to use to wrap content, much less what content to share.

A bunch of years later, most of that initial group have moved on from our vendors to other things, but Doug has been at the helm of HTNG, growing it into an organization that's relevant and matters to what hoteliers and technologists do every day.

I'd say that's worthy of a trip to the HOF! Congratulations Doug!

x-posted: https://www.facebook.com/AtriLeo/posts/319164808168230

It's the little things in life

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 16:13:55 GMT

It's the little things in life I like. Like new business cards, fresh from the postman ... who delivered them a day late, but hey ... not going to complain too loudly.

Boy, did somebody get conned - Brad's an "Official" blogger?

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 21:01:00 GMT

You heard that right. I'm a HFTP "Official" Guest Blogger for HITEC 2012. You can follow my exploits, pre, post, and during HITEC over at the HFTP Connect blog, which in all seriousness is turning out to be a pretty good source of information about what's going on at HITEC and in HFTP in general. Highly recommended.

Oh, and my first post is up TODAY!

This naming stuff - Not as easy as it used to be.

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:57:00 GMT

This naming a new company thing is hard! When I started my last company, Theodatus, 5 or 6 (jeez, maybe 7+) years ago it was easy. If you found a marginally clever name (like Theodatus, the patron saint of inn keepers), odds were good that the domain name would be available. Twitter hadn't been invented and Facebook was nascent; Nobody knew or cared what a "handle" was, or how to secure a "page username". I also don't think the domain squatters had gotten fired up as much as they are now.

We went through hundreds of ideas, but somebody with a silly landing page and a bank account always wanted a bunch of money for 'em .. that and good look getting twitter handle. After much (much much) time, gnashing of teeth, and hours and hours on Google translate, Atri Leo was found. Loosely, it translates to The Black Lion, which has at least a hint of family significance for me and mine. A few checks later to make sure @atrileo and the Facebook page AtriLeo ... on, and nearly forgot a company page at LinkedIn.com were all available, and the naming was done.

All that being said ... the name I still secretly like, long after family, friends, and even my partner just hated, is blueskyrangers.com! Can I be Ranger One?