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January 28, 2008

Circos debuts at Demo 2008 – a Kango competitor

Demo 2008 is the annual event where start-ups get to do a brief pitch to potential investors. Circos is a new qualitative search engine: According Tech Crunch: “Circos most like Kango, which has also taken on the task of categorizing hotels based on user reviews. VibeAgent also has a search engine for its own site that will search hotels based […]

January 23, 2008

What do the Expedia PPC agreement and the Kayak acquistion of Sidestep have in common?

Two stories from late 2007 and early 2008 signal a shift in the online travel model. In November 2007 at the PhoCusWright conference in Orlando, Expedia announced a new agreement with IHG that included a pay per click (PPC) compensation model. The acquisition of SideStep by Kayak this month is another significant development. How are these two announcements related? The […]

December 20, 2007

Conversation with Aircell Senior Management

For some time I have been talking about ubiquitous computing and the always connected traveler. I just received a briefing from the senior management of Aircell about their plans to implement Wi-Fi connectivity on commercial aircraft. Back in 2001 the buzz about this subject concerned the Boeing Connexion roll out with Lufthansa airlines. Last August Boeing announced that it would […]

November 28, 2007

Backlash from the Facebook Beacon advertising program

Facebook’s attempt to exploit its social network for advertising purposes has raised some major concerns from their users. The Beacon advertising platform is designed to broadcast purchases made by users to their social network. The issue has been taken up by the progressive political organization, MoveOn.org claiming the program violates privacy. Over 50,000 Facebook users have signed the MoveOn.org petition […]

November 28, 2007

Verizon tears down their walled garden

The announcement this week by Verizon that they are opening up their wireless network has significant importance for the development of new mobile travel applications here in the US. Unlike the rest of the word that operates using GSM technology, Verizon’s network is based on CDMA technology developed by Qualcomm. This makes cross networks application development problematic. Despite this limitation, […]

November 21, 2007

Mobile Technology

In his classic book, Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold described two possible futures for mobile technology. The first is a highly personalized smartphone that filters content based on personal preferences. In this vision the smartphone becomes an electronic personal assist that provides specific content that matches the user’s situation, preferences and location. The other vision is an advertising platform that delivers […]