Traveler ID

Interactive Travel Group announced an expansion of its controlled beta launch of Traveler ID, a new, web-based service that enables travelers to receive personalized service no matter where they book their travel. The company will open up Traveler ID to an additional 25,000 travelers. The service has been in private beta since early May.

"We've just added some great new features travelers are going to love," said a company spokesperson. "We're excited to invite more travelers to use our service and begin simplifying their travel experience."

Traveler ID's professional, easy-to-use website allows travelers to create comprehensive travel profiles, including air, hotel, car rental and vacation preferences - in less than three minutes - and provides each user with a unique identification number, a Traveler ID. The users themselves decide how much information they feel comfortable sharing.

Thereafter, whenever a user books travel at a travel website within the Traveler ID network, the user simply provides his or her Traveler ID number and passcode, and the user's travel profile and preferences are instantly transmitted to the website, speeding up the booking process. The user is in full control over when and with whom the user's profile is shared.

Traveler ID is completely free for travelers and charges travel websites a nominal fee for access to travelers' profiles.

"We're just about ready to open up to the general public," said a company spokesperson. "We expect to go live for all travelers by the end of the year. Users who don't make it into the beta program at this time will be invited to create an account before we open to everyone else."

Related Link: Traveler ID

Here's a $14 Billion Print Business That's Loving the Digital Revolution

Yellow Pages' Web-Based References Jump 20%; Book Form Still Relevant

By Abbey Klaassen

Published: August 28, 2006

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- As major media companies fret about how to keep the internet from cannibalizing their core business models, one print-based industry is finding traditional plus digital equals a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

For Yellow Pages, print and web aren't mutually exclusive, but complementary.

Yellow Pages Association, the nonprofit trade group for the industry, conducted its annual usage survey and found references to the print books were down 100 million from last year (most surprising, that represents a decline of only 0.5%). But online references were up 300 million, or 20%.

Why print still works
"A lot of people would have predicted the death of this business a long time ago," said Neal Polachek, senior VP-research and consulting at Kelsey Group. "But what you can't do online yet is quickly and easily compare one plumber to another and make a couple calls. And that's the beauty of the book today."

It also perhaps points to the limitations of search and why, despite its promise, local-search ad spending is expected to reach $6 billion by 2010, while the yellow-pages industry is already a $14 billion business.

According to the YPA's usage study, the print and internet yellow pages aren't mutually exclusive, but complementary. In an average week, 49% of all U.S. adults refer to the print yellow pages and 6% refer to the internet yellow pages. In the course of a year, those numbers rise to 89% and 20%, respectively.

"We're not seeing any real product substitution going on," said Neg Norton, president of the YPA. "For our users, what they use depends on where they might be at the moment -- at work they're more inclined to use internet, at home they're more inclined to use paper."

Delicate balance
It's a delicate balance that the yellow-pages industry strikes with the internet, though, especially when companies like Google and Yahoo are both competitors and partners -- "our competition," Mr. Norton said.

Yellowpages.com, for example, distributes listings within a network that includes Google, Yahoo Local, Switchboard and AOL. The network is flexible, and yellowpages.com essentially acts as a reseller of that space.

"We recognize there are other players on the web, and although [yellowpages.com] is sizeable, all traffic doesn't come to yellowpages.com," said Matt Crowley, VP-marketing at yellowpages.com, a joint venture of AT&T and BellSouth. "The more we can provide access to others on the web the better for our clients."

Ultimately, the yellow-pages industry's deeply experienced and entrenched local sales team -- one that covers a lot of geographic ground and understands the needs of local businesses -- is one of its biggest assets and will likely remain unique to it, despite whatever number of new positions Google fills each week.

High-margin business
But like all traditional media, the yellow pages must also adapt. Right now it's a high-margin business -- on average running about 50% -- but it won't be that way forever, warns Mr. Polachek, who said there's an opportunity waiting to be tapped that would marry yellow-pages listings, opinion and user reviews, Angie's List-type reports and editorial content that might be in a newspaper.

Yellowpages.com has publicly surmised it may have a role to play in IPTV, a technology AT&T is using to deploy its nascent video service. Other applications for yellow-pages players might include in-car navigational systems.

In the meantime, internet yellow pages have been working to make their sites stickier and add features to give the online product the convenience of print. Yellowpages.com is offering click-to-see print ads and has added personalization tools that let users bookmark searches and make notes alongside listings, along with click-to-play audio ads. It's also contracting with MSN to use its virtual earth platform.

"We realize our core asset is our site, our brand," Mr. Crowley said.

Read More About: Mapping

Social Atlas Sites Let You Map Your Life

New sites let you share memories, info with friends, family, or the entire internet.

Dennis O'Reilly

Friday, August 25, 2006 04:00 PM PDT

No plain-vanilla mapping site knows your favorite haunts as well as you do. New online services tap that information by enabling you to share your knowledge and memories of your most beloved locales--in your hometown or on the other side of the globe--with the rest of the world. I looked at five of these services: Flagr, 43 Places, Platial, Plazes, and Wayfaring.

Built on conventional mapping data from services such as Google Maps, these sites let you add digital pushpins that link to personal descriptions of the locations. While any visitor can peruse the contributions of others on these sites, typically you must register in order to add content. But don't worry about having to provide credit card info: All five sites are free, requiring only that you submit a valid e\0x2011mail address. (Note, however, that Plazes is still in beta form, and that 43 Places may eventually charge a fee.)

Looking for New York City's best street art? Want to follow the virtual footsteps of Jack Bauer, protagonist of the TV show 24? Wayfaring Media's Wayfaring has directions for both. Users can also post comments on other users' maps.

Though most contributors offer a lighthearted look at their locations, some at Platial tell dark tales, such as those tied to locations of recent shark attacks. The site, which calls itself "The People's Atlas," recently added a feature that links its maps to RSS feeds, so you can receive alerts about new annotations for places that interest you, or by other users whom you specify--giving the site a timeliness that the others I looked at lacked. Several of the sites I visited allow you to add images to your text posts, but Platial is the only one that supports video uploads.

Traveler Wish Lists

Anyone who has ever used Yahoo's popular Flickr photo-sharing service recognizes how tags work: Users assign keywords to categorize images. The same approach is taken by the Robot Co-op's 43 Places, which--despite its name--has descriptions of thousands of locales around the world. Along with the usual place names, you'll find tags such as "Hogwarts" and "Pirates of the Caribbean," illustrating that travel is sometimes a state of mind. The site even posts user-assigned "wanderlust ratings" for each mapped location, though it's difficult to find any spot with a rating under 80 percent (100 percent is the highest possible mark).

Plazes ties user-supplied data to network router locations (called Plazes), as automatically identified by free, downloadable desktop software that also lets people (all users or, at your discretion, invited friends) see where you are. You can use the service without the downloaded app to find other Plazes and users--but unless you use the software, you can't add a Plaze to the service's database, and others won't be able to see your precise location.

The least developed of the five services is Flagr, self-described as a "Sharewhere" site. It has relatively few annotated locations, and the descriptions I checked lacked detail. Flagr demonstrates that, like all sites that rely on community-created content, personal-mapping services depend on attracting a critical mass of participants.

Privacy Issues

One key caveat: These and other personal-mapping sites have built-in privacy risks. Though all five of the services I tested offer some ability to control who can see your data, you are entrusting personal information to a Web server. In general, it's a bad idea to post any data you wouldn't feel comfortable writing on a postcard sent via U.S. mail.

Time will tell whether any of these ambitious services will ever become the mapping equivalent of such community powerhouses as MySpace or YouTube. But if you're going to check out just one, head to Platial, which seems to have more--and more-detailed--posts than its competitors.

-- Dennis O'Reilly

Web Fuels Yellow Pages Growth, Medium Deemed Too 'Uncluttered'

IN WHAT IS PERHAPS ONE of the clearest examples of the Internet's impact on a traditional medium, the Yellow Pages industry is poised to release findings of its annual usage study, which will show that while overall usage of directories is rising, the growth is coming entirely from online.

Americans used Yellow Pages to look up 16.3 billion references during 2005--up from 16.1 billion in 2004, according to an advance look at the national results of the annual study conducted for the Yellow Pages Association by Knowledge Networks/Statistical Research Inc. While that's a healthy gain, the number of times American consumers referred to printed Yellow Pages actually declined to 14.5 billion in 2005, down from 14.6 billion in 2004.

That's the bad news, Neg Norton, president of the YPA acknowledges--but the good news is that online directories are making up the slack--growing to 1.8 billion references in 2005, up from 1.1 billion in 2002, the first year that KN/SRI began tracking online directories. That's good news, says Norton, because some cynics might have expected usage of print directories to erode even faster.

"Overall, they're flat," he says, adding that the two Yellow Pages platforms are actually complementing rather than cannibalizing each other. Among other things, the data reveals that different consumers utilize print and online directories differently and at different times. The findings reveal that online Yellow Pages usage is greater in so-called A counties where broadband access may be more plentiful, whereas the print directories' index is higher in B and C counties. The report also offers ample data showing the demographic skew of online vs. print directories.

Heavy users of the print Yellow Pages, for example, tend to be 25- to-49-year-olds, who are college-educated, reside in upper-income households, have large families, travel frequently, and have recently moved. The profile for Internet Yellow Pages users skews to more toward the 18- to-49-year-old crowd.

But the most surprising finding in the new report is the attitude Yellow Pages users have toward advertising. Unlike most media where advertising is deemed "clutter," most Yellow Pages consumers consider it "content." In fact, 18 percent of the 9,078 consumers surveyed by KN/SRI said they wanted more ads in their Yellow Pages directories.

"Most media are sellers looking for buyers," Norton quips, adding that Yellow Pages users are "buyers looking for sellers."

And according to the new report, they are mostly in the market to buy something to eat. "Restaurants" was the No. 1 Yellow Pages heading in both print and online directories during 2005. Beyond that, print and online have little in common in terms of the categories consumers use Yellow Pages to search for. "Physicians & Surgeons" ranked No. 2 in print, while "Hotels" ranked second online.

Despite the obvious relevance of Yellow Pages to many major product categories, the medium has had a difficult time attracting major brand advertisers in most big consumer categories, largely because they see directories as a local medium and don't necessarily believe in its ability to promote brands. In recent years, the industry has tried to convince marketers such as Procter & Gamble to advertise Crest toothpaste under headings for dentists--but except for a few experiments, Yellow Pages are still relegated largely to retail, and local mom-and-pop establishments.

But in what was perhaps one of the most creative uses of the medium ever, Starcom placed ads around the Las Vegas Yellow Pages for client Kellogg's Special K brand. The ad pointed out that the same number of pounds that the directory weighed would be what consumers would lose if they stuck with a Special K diet.

Annual Yellow Pages References

                Print          Online            Total 
2005:    14.5 billion     1.8 billion     16.3 billion 
2004:    14.6 billion     1.5 billion     16.1 billion 
2003:    14.9 billion     1.2 billion     16.1 billion 
2002:    15.1 billion     1.1 billion     16.2 billion 
2001:    15.1 billion              NA     15.1 billion 
2000:    14.9 billion              NA     14.9 billion 

Source: Knowledge Networks/SRI for the Yellow Pages Association.

A day of snapshots of all the radar/radio contact air traffic in US airspace

Via Craigslist LA

Reply to: job-194429968@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-08-15, 9:12AM PDT

I am producing a new series for The Travel Channel, a part of Discovery Networks. It is based on VCC, or Viewer Contributed Content. If you have a video camera at home and editing software, I will pay you up to $1000 for 3-5 minute videos stories about you and your travels. Just about any kind of story will do, so long as it is travel related and compelling to watch. I am looking for creativity, originality, new voices and new ideas. There was a time when television production was in the hands of a select few. Now, your voice and your creative and filmmaking abilities can be seen and heard. If you have what it takes to break out of old ways of thinking and uses of video, this could be your big break.

* Job location is WORLDWIDE

Growth in number of travel websites soars

According to research by Internet Security Systems over the past twelve months, the growth in the number of travel websites has soared by 25 percent.

Further evidence of this online travel boom comes from a recently published paper by Forrester Research which found that one in three of the euros, pounds, or kronor that European consumers spend online goes towards leisure trip bookings. The report also estimated that online travel spending will grow by 133 percent to almost euro 77 billion in 2011.

Interestingly, the research conducted by ISS has found that over half of the world's travel websites are located in the USA - 60.4 percent. Germany follows in second place with 12.9 percent and Great Britain in third with only 5% of all travel websites hosted there.

Top 5 countries worldwide that host travel websites:

1. USA (60.4 %)

2. Germany (12.9 %)

3. Great Britain (5.0 %)

4. Austria (4.2 %)

5. Canada (2.9 %)

6. Other (14.5 %)

Top 5 European countries that host travel websites (measured according to the share of travel websites hosted worldwide):

1. Germany (12.9 %)

2. Great Britain (5.0 %)

3. Austria (4.2 %)

4. The Netherlands (1.3 %)

5. France (1.2 %)