Innovation Summit: the BOOT picks two out of four

A new BOOT post on Tnooz is live discussing the finalists and runners up in the PhoCusWright Innovation Summit.

Last night I tweeted my top four picks. Two of them made the final four. My picks were all transportation search companies. I chose air search companies Everbread and Vayant, meta-search innovator Hipmunk and online rail company SilverRail. The two runners up I chose were Facebook trip planner Gogobot and social media monitoring company Revinate (competitor to finalist TrustYou). Democracy at PhoCusWright had a different view and the attendees have chosen 2010 innovation finalists up SilverRail, Hipmunk, Goby Technologies and Kony Solutions as the finalists for the 2010 Travel Innovation Summit. Runners up were TrustYou, Cruiselabs and Groundlink.

Full post on Tnooz with my thoughts here.

For more background check out my posts from yesterday on Revinate and TrustYou, Everbread and SilverRail.

Packing for PhoCusWright, organising meetings and reading up on Innovators

Two weeks to go until the PhoCusWright Conference in Arizona. This year's theme is "Chaos Calls - Navigating the New". Promo video here. The BOOT will be there from Sunday night, tweeting, blogging, networking and working away. Follow me via @hughestim or track #phocuswright.

First up at the conference is the Travel Innovation Summit. The full list of companies presenting is here. A couple have already caught my eye including:

• SilverRail - rail is long overdue for online innovation and Cameron Jones has recently joined them as their VP Commercial;
• Everbread - I have seen a demo of this product already and the buzz behind them is super strong;
• Vayant - though they have stood me up for interviews a few times they are also trying to change the way air searches are conducted;
• Hipmunk - best name in online travel ever (maybe 2nd best to Appolicious). Can the product live up to the hype? Will consumers adapt to new ways to search?; and
  
• Gekko.com - trying to turn review writers into affiliate businesses.
  

One of my favourite parts of PhoCusWright is the "PhoCusWright Surprise" which occurs when I meet an online travel start up(s) at PhoCusWright that I have never heard of but is (are) number one in their category by some reasonable measure. See stories on last year's surprises Localyte and geckogo.

If you are going to be there and are interested in setting up a meeting or an interview please email me.

If you are interested in attending you can register here but hurry. Ram Bandrinathan of PhoCusWright tells me that already the primary and secondary hotels are sold out and there are only a very limited number of conference tickets left.