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I thought I’d chime in on the current industry focus regarding total access fees and the renegotiation of GDS contracts. I tend to look at this issue in a very black and white fashion: Financial incentives for travel agents (and TMCs) are going away. Whether this is the first step (e.g. Sabre, Galileo) or a complete elimination (Worldspan) of these […]

Yesterday HP announced a new “inexpensive, wireless, battery-free microchip that can store documents, audio files or video clips. The memory spots are similar in some ways to the more simplistic radio-frequency identification tags. But they are far smarter and more secure: They can store more than 250 times as much data as RFID, transmit data more than 20 times faster […]

The travel press have been playing up ITA Software’s recent announcement with Air Canada as a sign that the GNEs have been unsuccessful in their quest to replace the GDS. Again I must reiterate a theme from my prior blog entries: this shift in distribution is not about us verses them (GNE verses GDS) but about the ever increasing likelihood […]

Last week I was again interviewed by Kyle Peterson of Reuters. The article entitled : “Internet Travel Agencies Losing Some Luster” talked about the drop in stock price of the leading OTAs (Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity). My comments were primarily directed at the underlying technology and UI of these large players and the fact that there has been little innovation […]

JetBlue pioneered Direct satellite TV services and now seems poised to offer Internet and new phone services on board with the successful winning bid on Air-Ground wireless license announced on Saturday. For some time I and others have been talking about U-Commerce (ubiquitous connectivity). The idea of the always connected consumer is quickly becoming the reality and it is nice […]

I am very lucky to have part of my family (my cousin) Marc A. Smith who is a research sociologist with Microsoft. Now rather than going off on the implications of Microsoft employing a sociologist, I instead wanted to share with you part of our conversation we had last week. Marc has been very accurate with predictions over the last […]