Frank Grasso on boredom

Nice post over at an eChannel search by CEO Frank Grasso on boredom and the open ended question.

11 New Yorker cartoons on being fondled by a TSA agent

In solidarity with the millions of Americans racing around the country eating Turkeys and recovering from their close encounters of the TSA kind I am posting a link to a New Yorker page with 11 New Yorker style Airport Security Cartoons.

Is the BOOT Recommended Read of the week

Thanks to Madame BOOT for sending through

Thanks to charlesfittinger via flickr for the dont touch icon

The Australian newspaper on Wotif, Webjet and other AU online success stories

Interesting read this week from James Dunn in the Australia called "Rising from the Ashes". Ten years on from the Dotcom boom he discusses some of Australia's high profile online success stories such as Wotif, Webjet, Seek (jobs site), Realestate.com.au and Carsales.

One of my favourite parts is where he points out that the combined market cap of Seek, Releastate.com.au and Carsales is more than Fairfax (one of Australia's largest media companies and one that suffered the most in losing classifieds business to the online companies).

The article is also worth a read for some of the commentary on Wotif and Webjet including this section

A lot of market share is advertising-driven, it's all about exposure: if you start to see a lot of marketing spend from competitors like Zuji, it could [affect] both Webjet and Wotif. Hotels.com is another new entrant . . . It's a sign that the high margins that Wotif and Webjet have been used to experiencing, there are now other people after their lunch."

Hopkins says Wotif is a different business model from the other four web-based stocks, in that what goes online is distressed inventory and short-term bookings. "Wotif is suffering from, one, a quite strong rebound in hotel accommodations, which means the hotels aren't putting as much inventory on Wotif; and, two, it is not strong on the international side of things, so the strong Australian dollar, with a lot of people going offshore for holidays, has hurt them quite a bit.
"The short-term earnings outlook is pretty flat, but in the long term we think Wotif is still a strong business; it's still very dominant in its sector."

Rising from the ashes is the BOOT recommended read of the week.

PS - congrats to the Australian for spelling Webjet correctly :)

EveryYou: Wharton on Mobile Networks and E-Commerce getting personal

Madame BOOT is a long time consumer of the Knowledge@Wharton series. She has pointed me to this short but interesting post titled "In the Age of Mobile Networks, E-Commerce Gets Personal". The piece talks to how mobile networks will be an enabler or micro targeting. How the next generation of services such as 4square will be key to retailers be able to target consumers with individuated deals and "transform how people shop". Is the BOOT's recommended read of the week.

For more background on this - my concept of EveryYou can be quickly described as "micro-targeting at scale". The detailed definition is

“The development of a specific and targeted recommendation of one based on the unique combination of desires, needs and interests of each individual at any moment in time”

This theory I am working on says that we have reached a state of computational power, data collection levels and social trend in favour of interaction and information sharing that retailers will be able to target offers not only at individuals but at the different versions of each individal that appears at a particular point in time.

Recommended Read: Role of social networking in Chinese online travel market

I am on a business trip to China so have been reading up on research on general and online specific travel trends. There is a lot of information out on the Intertubes but much of it is buried deep on disparate sites- and is often contradictory. Thanks to a tweet from Chloe Lim I came across and economist article collecting a selection of the better research links. The story is an Economnist piece called “Travelling with a little help from friends “. It is the BOOT recommended read of the week.

Summary from the story is that more than any other market, the online China is turning to social networking to drive retail purchasing behaviour including travel.

It quotes from:

• Travelport’s China Online Travel Survey;
• Nielsen and PATA’s China Outbound Travel Monitor 2009 (pdf);
• PhoCusWrights “The Emerging Online Travel Marketplace in China” (ehotelier extract here); and
• CNNIC stats collected on BizReport.

Full Economist story here.

If you want to round out the China story with some inbound information, thanks to Roy Graff for pointing me to the CNTO’s page with inbound travel statistics.

Economist: Data, too much information and the Yottabyte

I have been saying for three years now that the biggest challenge we have to face in the online travel industry is "too much information". Now, thanks to the Economist, we can actually start to see how much is too much.

Once or twice a month the Economist publishes a special report on a country or subject. A few weeks back they published Data, data everywhere, a supplement devoted to the amount of information and data swirling around us. Let me jump straight to an extract from the punchline to the article

"According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still."

Not all of this is online but according to Cisco, by 2013 667 exabytes of data will be flowing over the internet.

To put an exabyte into context, to store 1 exabyte of data would take 15.6million top of the range 64GB iPads. I struggle to think how we can capture, digest, store, manage, secure, use and more that amount of data.

The Economist gave three interesting snapshots of companies trying to deal with this amount of data:

• Facebook: currently storing more than 40 billion photos;
• Wal-Mart: processing 1 million transactions per hour; and
  
• Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP: have spent more than $156billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics.

The official definition of information is data processed in timely, relevant and accurate form. An IBM survey reported by the Economist found that half of the managers quizzed did not trust the information they had to base decisions on. We have more data than we know what to do with but don't trust it to help us come to the right outcome. The data flood's first consequence is to stifle our ability to turn data into information.

From all this it is clear that we need to learn some new words. Screw the giga, tera, peta and even exabyte. Time to introduce you to the Zettabyte (2 to the 70 bytes or a 1000 exabytes) and the Yottabyte (2 to the 80 bytes or 1000 Zettabyte). Though you will not need to worry about the Yotta just yet. Even the Economist admits that the Yotta is currently not just too much information but "too big to imagine".

The Data special report is a great read - check it out.

PS if you want to read more about what exciting things I think we should be doing with data, check out my series of posts on my concept of EveryYou.

thanks to J.Kleyn for the photo via flickr

Ctrip CFO Jane Jie Sun presentation notes

BOOT recommended read of the week - Tom Botts of Hudson Crossing's summary of Ctrip CFO Jane Jie Sun presentation at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. Post is called "Ctrip and Home Inn: How Different China Really is". Includes notes like "Only 2% of travel in China is booked online today - and Ctrip has 50% of that market". Worth a read. Always worth remembering that online travel in China has a different meaning that elsewhere.

SEO rules - why have a top 7 or top 10 when you can have 59 things to do to improve your SEO

As a blogger I know that nothing drives retweets and inbound links like a good top x list of reasons why something is something. For example my post on the three lies that the travel industry keeps telling consumers was my top trafficked post for August 2009. Normally the list is kept at less than ten because the aim of the post is part informing the reader and part driving traffic. I came across a article last week that broke the rules on keeping the list at less than 10 - therefore hurting their chances at retweeting and inbound links but compensates by being a genuinely informative read and well worth being a recommended read of the week.

The post is "59 SEO Ranking Factors" from Joe's AdBlog. It contains what it says it contains - a list of the 59 factors that influence your site's organic search ratings. There is nothing flowery or engaging about the writing in this post but this lack of wordsmithyness (how's that for a made up word) does not detract from the value of this content. This is a great info source and worth you taking a look.

Thanks to Danard Vincente for the fantastic image (via flickr)

BusinessWeek on Augmented Reality - "GPS technology is not yet good enough for AR to be useful"

My first post for Tnooz was on Augmented reality and mobile. In it I have a couple of videos of some great looking AR travel apps. However since I am trapped in the Blackberry world (my company uses blackberry) I have not had a chance to try out any of these for myself. That has left open the question as to whether or not the hype of Augmented Reality matches...well.. the reality of Augmented Reality.

Steve Wildstorm (personal tech columnist at BusinessWeek) believes that AR is "Not that Real Yet". There is an interesting podcast interview with him here (part of his regularly weekly series) where he says that the GPS technology that is critical for AR to work is simply not accurate enough. At its best GPS provides accuracy to 20 meters. Wildstorm argues that a 20 meter radius error margin is not good enough to give the accuracy you need for AR to work. It is worth noting that "at its best" means all the satellites are in the right place and there are no buildings in the way. In other words it is likely that accuracy will be worse than 20 meters. Also thinks that the apps that are out there are "just modified browsers" and need to be better thought through - sometimes the apps are giving too much information or a level of GPS accuracy that is not available.

If you are interested in AR for online travel then I recommend listening to the podcast (here). BOOT recommended read/listen of the week.

Adding Dennis Schaal to my Blog Roll

Travel industry journalist Dennis Schaal launched a blog (called the Dennis Schaal Blog - online riffs and notes) back in March this year. Since then he as been prolific (149 posts) and very insightful. With Kevin May leaving Travolution (and yet to announce where he has landed) Dennis has rocketed to the top of my best industry blogger list. He has been part of my feedreader for a while and is now added to my Blog Roll. I suggest you add him to the sites you review also.

While you will not hear/read me talking/writing about global OTA Orbitz or online hotel only specialist HotelClub, there are a couple of recent posts by Dennis on those companies that will give you a good introduction to his writing style and insight.

Where in the World is the Orbitz Hotel Business Model?

Does Orbitz Ratestogo.com Mean Merchant Model To Go.com?

Kayak is not that flattered by Bing imitation (Wired Mag)

Quick post for the BOOT recommended read of the week. Wired is reporting that Kayak sent Microsoft a "legal letter" along the lines of accusing Microsoft's Bing Travel of copying Kayak's look and feel and therefore misleading Kayak customers. No more details than that. Anyone out there is the Michael Jackson obsessed InterWebs know any more?

Full Article "Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us!"

hat tip to whodeani where I saw the story first

Tips on online audience and usage in Indonesia

BOOT recommended read of the week is a blog post from Peter Goldsworthy of Admax Network from the iMedia Connection community site. Called "Insights into Indonesia's online audience" the post has seven insights into the market that may be of interest to you.

The Dung Bettle, Funk Music and nothing at all to do with Travel

I love NPR podcasts - especially Terry Gross' interview series Fresh Air and the comedy news quiz program Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

I have just finished listening to one of the best Fresh Air podcasts ever. The great thing about Fresh Air is that you have no idea what you are going to get. It could an interview with a former White House Press Secretary on how they came the realisation that torture was wrong, it could be a straight actor on the preparations they went through before kissing another man in a movie or it could be an interview with an evangelical preacher trying to convince you that Hurricane Katrina was the wrath of God against sinners.

Last Tuesday there were two stories that had nothing in common but showed off the best of Fresh Air and its approach to the esoteric yet fascinating and entertaining. Story one - "the Fascinating World of the Dung Beetle". Story two - "Westbound Records: The Sounds of Detriot". Madame BOOT described the Westbound records story as the perfect podcast for me. This is the album lable the first brough Funkadelic (ie George Clinton) out on vinal. In other words the orginators of Funk.

The first story - the Dung Beetle one - is unambigously this years winner of the "story that is least likely to keep you entertained but you will not be able to turn off or stop yourself smiling about" award for 2009. I had no plans in my life to find out anything about dung beetles but here I am telling you that I am glad that I did.

These stories have nothing to do with travel (unless you can somehow link the OTA fee cut war with a Dung Beetle and a man with a long afro and high heel shoes) but are this week's BOOT recommended listen.