Going for the goat

By Jenny Slafkosky for the Mercury News

Posted: 12/30/2008 05:00:00 PM PST

Goat cheese, sure. Goat meat — that's a harder sell in the American mainstream. Despite its popularity in a wide range of global cuisines, from Latin American to Southeast Asian to Middle Eastern, in the United States goat rarely shows up outside small, ethnic markets and restaurants.

But the American perception of goats as lovably quirky, tin-can-chewing dairy animals is beginning to change. Goat is gaining popularity in high-end restaurants across the Bay Area, including Palo Alto's Evvia Estiatorio, San Francisco's Aziza and Oakland's Oliveto. As the Bay Area's diverse food culture continues to grow and residents seek out locally produced food, goat is being brought to the forefront of culinary consciousness by farmers, chefs and home cooks.

"Goat is delicious," said Jim Wimborough, chef at Evvia and enthusiastic advocate of goat meat. "We're known for our lamb dishes here at Evvia, and I tell people I like the goat better. It's got a sweeter and, I think, a less gamy flavor than lamb."

At Evvia, which specializes in high-end Greek cuisine, Wimborough serves goat braised with pearl onions and artichokes or, his favorite way, roasted very simply on a rotisserie with olive oil, oregano and lemon juice.

Wimborough said goat outsells pork at his restaurant and credited Silicon Valley's diverse and adventurous eaters for the meat's popularity. While Evvia may be one of the few upscale restaurants in the area that serves goat,

it certainly isn't the only place in the Silicon Valley where goat has gained an audience.

At Birrieria Jalisco restaurant on San Jose's 13th Street, goat is featured so prominently that the establishment's sign sports a cheerful cartoon goat to beckon customers inside. Enedina Reyes has been cooking birria, a popular chile-spiked goat stew, at the restaurant for five years and has gained an enthusiastic following. The dish's rich, dark broth and tender meat are delicious with just a spoon, but birria aficionados wrap the succulent pieces of meat in house-made tortillas, garnish them with chopped onion, cilantro and lime, then dunk each bite into the bowl of flavorful broth.

Reyes said she uses the whole animal to make her birria, first steaming the meat "like tamales" for four to five hours over a low flame until it's extremely tender. While very young goat, or kid, can be cooked quickly with good results, low, slow cooking is the best bet for tender meat and maximum flavor development.

Sanjeeta Mishra, a Newark resident and avid home cook experienced with using goat in the kitchen, prefers a pressure cooker for the job.

"Goat meat takes time to cook, so we always pressure-cook it," she said. "It's easy to do and it will take less time. Goat requires elaborate preparation, so I plan ahead. We have to be careful when cooking this kind of meat because if you don't cook it well the smell can be strong, or the meat can be tough."

Mishra prefers fresh goat meat to frozen and likes to get her goat at Newark's Faisal Market, which sells goat, chicken, beef and lamb that is halal, adhering to Islamic dietary standards. While a variety of South Bay carnicerias, halal meat markets and Asian grocery stores sell goat meat, much of it is frozen and imported from Australia or New Zealand.

Faisal Market's owner Abdul Ghaffar Durrani says he also prefers fresh, local goat meat to the less expensive imported meat, but he sells both at his store. Durrani said he gets his fresh goat meat from Stockton-based Islamic Meat and Poultry Co., which buys from farms in and near the Bay Area.

At Evvia, Jim Wimborough's biggest frustration is trying to find enough high-quality, locally raised goat meat to feed his hungry clientele. His supplier, Napa Valley Lamb Co., can only provide so many goats, primarily because, Wimborough said, it's difficult to find a processing facility approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that wants to deal with goats. For many of them, it's not worth it to deal with the small amounts of livestock they get from goat farmers.

"I can get a cheaper lower-quality frozen goat from Australia, but it's not what we're trying to do," he said.

Linda Adams of Watsonville's Star Creek Ranch feels Wimborough's pain. A small producer of grass-fed lambs and goats, Adams struggled to find a USDA processing plant she felt good about that was also close enough to be economically feasible. The closest place she could find was Islamic Meat and Poultry, the distributor that supplies Faisal Market as well as a variety of restaurants across the Bay Area.

"I really want to sell it as locally as possible," Adams said of her meat. "I just think that's so important."

Star Creek Ranch didn't start raising goats for meat, but originally acquired them for a land improvement project. Ravenous, but picky, eaters, goats prefer diversity in their diet and can quickly clear an area of overgrown brush and invasive plants. Since the goats have lived at Star Creek, Adams said, there has been an increase in the growth of native perennial grasses and in the overall biological diversity of the land.

"Our whole intent of having animals was to improve the health of the land," she said. "Then we started realizing that the meat was really, really good and that people really enjoyed it, and now we have enough to share on a larger scale."

Beyond being pleasantly palatable, another major benefit Adams sees with her grass-fed goats and lambs is their nutritional value. According to the USDA, goat meat has 50 to 65 percent less fat than beef when the meats are prepared in a similar manner, and both have comparable protein content. Goats are ruminants, a class of mammals that can naturally digest a broad range of plants and grasses, and Adams believes their grazing habits may help improve their nutritional value to us.

"They get to eat a lot of perennial plants that have deep roots, so they get a lot of minerals that they wouldn't get if they were eating an annual crop like alfalfa that's cut all the time," she said.

Adams said that grass-fed goats also have a higher percentage of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids in their meat than grain-fed goats do. "I think that's one of the biggest arguments for grass-fed, besides that it's sustainable," she said.

Contact Jenny Slafkosky at jenny.slafkosky@gmail.com.

...

Sprayed Aerosols Could Ease Climate Woes Irene Klotz, Discovery News

 

 

Dec. 29, 2008

It won't solve global warming, but a group of scientists are calling for a focused research program to investigate ways to seed the atmosphere with chemicals that would let the heat out -- literally.

Geoengineering is not a new concept. Governments have changed how and where water flows, filled in lakes and other wetlands for construction, even attempted to control the weather. A project to counter climate change, however, would take geoengineering to an entirely new level.

Leaving aside what may be insurmountable political, cultural and ethical issues, scientists meeting at the American Geophysical Conference in San Francisco earlier this month focused on the practical aspects of releasing gases into the stratosphere that could open Earth's greenhouse.

Scientists are concerned that Earth is growing increasingly warm due to "greenhouse gases," such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere that inhibit the planet's ability to radiation heat into space.

Human-related activities, such as burning fossil fuels, are believed to be accelerating the planet's accumulation of greenhouse gases, even though naturally occurring phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and fires account for 97 percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"Even if we stopped emissions instantly today...we still have enough CO2 in the atmosphere that it is possible we would have unacceptable levels of climate risk," said David Keith, with the University of Calgary's Energy and Environmental Systems Group.

"While we may be lucky and find climate only warms by a degree or so, we may be unlucky and find it's more like five or six (degrees)," he added. "We're not going to know until we've put enough CO2 to make an irreversible decision.

Keith and colleagues want to investigate putting aerosols, such as sulfur, into the atmosphere to chemically unlock the greenhouse effect and allow more of the sun's reflected heat to radiate back into space.

"This brings up the question of who would make that decision," said Alan Robock of Rutgers University. And what temperature the world should be.

"A ski slope operator and someone running a shipping company in the Arctic might have different opinions about what's the ideal temperature for the planet," NASA's administrator Michael Griffin told Discovery News in an interview last year.

From an engineering standpoint, scientists have looked at a variety of systems to deliver the goods, including high-altitude aircraft, such the military's KC135 tankers used to refuel fighter jets, balloons, artillery, even a space elevator.

Other options include lacing commercial airlines' jet fuel with sulfur-containing particles, though this likely would give rise to a host of new problems, including engine contamination and safety concerns.

"No one has actually looked at what would happen if you tried to put these materials into the stratosphere," said Richard Turco, with the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Scientists disagreed on whether atmospheric seeding to change the climate could be successful on a regional level, or if any initiatives must be globally based to be effective. They were united, however, in calling for a focused research effort.

"There's very little funded research (about) managing the risks of climate change," Keith said.

Knocking on doors

Finally, A Google Earth Browser Plugin For Mac OS X

Posted at Techcrunch: 04 Dec 2008 05:34 AM PST

The long-anticipated release of the Google Earth browser plugin for Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC) has arrived, about half a year after the plugin for Windows was announced and about 5 weeks after the introduction of the GE iPhone application. Linux users will still have to wait a bit for a compatible version.

You can download by visiting any Google Earth Plugin app or visiting the GE API web site. Attention: the file is 47MB in size, because of the combined Intel and PowerPC compatibility. Go to EarthSwoop or 360Cities to see it in action.

It will be interesting to see if this release will result in more widespread support of the plugin, and I'm curious to see what developers will come up with for their applications.

Thanks to Jeffrey Martin from 360Cities for the tip.

Perks

Should Newspapers Become Online Ad Brokers for Local Businesses?

by Mark Glaser, November 20, 2008

Tagged: business models, google adwords, local search, newspaper next

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that's where the newspaper business is right now. With profits slashed, unending layoffs, and online ad growth slowing, newspapers have to be open to new ideas that will help them deal with a media shift like no other. Last week I looked at the concept of crowdfunding, with people paying journalists directly for stories. This week, I heard another out-of-the-box idea: having newspapers help local businesses buy key words for Google AdWords or place Facebook ads -- acting as a local ad agency.

That idea came from Stephen Gray, the managing director of Newspaper Next, a project of the American Press Institute with one goal: to help newspapers come up with a profitable business model. Gray is a former managing publisher of the Christian Science Monitor, and was president of Monroe Publishing Co., which ran his family's newspaper in Monroe, Mich. Since 2005, he has been tasked with helping American newspapers save themselves -- a tall task, to say the least.

After a year of study in 2006, Newspaper Next released its first report, Blueprint for Transformation (a 98-page PDF file), and in early 2008 followed up with Making the Leap Beyond Newspaper Companies (a 110-page PDF with case studies). Gray has helped run more than 40 public training sessions and 30 private talks with newspapers based on his findings. While he is encouraged that newspapers are finally breaking out of their fixation on mass audiences and launching niche websites (such as mom sites and young adults sites), he feels they still don't understand how to serve local businesses.

Stephen Gray

"The difficult part is helping newspapers understand that if they want new business they need to get a new job done for businesses that they're not serving," Gray told me. "You can't just sell them the newspaper because you haven't been able to do that for 50 years. You need to have an offering to get that done."

So what kind of offering should newspapers have? Gray says they need to help local businesses connect to customers right at the point of interest in a product or service. The problem is that most newspapers are not focused on any kind of local search offering, and cede that ground to search engines such as Google or Yahoo. But Gray thinks the search engine offerings for local businesses aren't very good, and that presents an opening for newspapers.

"[Newspapers] should become the leading local Internet ad agency, which goes against ancient newspaper instinct of not ever helping anyone who is your competitor," he said. "But the fact is that audiences have split in a million directions, so here we are in a local market and our job is to help businesses in our local market succeed. If that means we are placing ads on Google and Facebook for local businesses, so what? That's what it takes to succeed and ad agencies have been making a living off doing that for some time."

I talked in-depth to Gray about what Newspaper Next has tried to accomplish, and he talked about the group's findings and its struggles in getting newspapers to change quickly enough. The following is an edited transcript of our phone conversation.

What was the mission of Newspaper Next?

Stephen Gray: It was to provide newspaper companies with a pragmatic set of tools, concepts and processes to expand and diversify their declining business model. The business model was declining three years ago when we were starting out and it's only accelerated since then. So we wanted to give them an understanding of what was happening from a very different perspective and a set of practical processes they could adopt and use at newspapers big and small to create new solutions, new revenues for new audiences.

So there was a research element of your work first and then you did training and action items?

Gray: The research element was the first year. We started in the fall of 2005 and engaged Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his consulting firm Innosite for a year. We looked at the industry, looked at what was happening, looked at initiatives people were undertaking. A fundamental part of it was the Christensen approach, he studied more than 60 disrupted industries to see what the patterns were. We took his work and adapted it to the newspaper industry and saw how they were living out the usual scenario when an established industry gets disrupted.

In the first year we were like a think tank, and recruited seven newspaper sites to become demonstration sites and worked with each of them, teaching them the materials we were developing so they could develop new products for niche audiences. That was in year one, and in September '06, I took that on the road. For the newer 2.0 report, I went back to a number of companies that had the training early and asked what they had been doing. Their projects became the case-book section of the new report, with 24 new products -- print products, websites, combination products, even a consignment store. A variety of things that were generated using the Newspaper Next approach were used as examples in the 2.0 report.

What has worked with your approach?

Gray: What has really taken hold is the concept that while newspapers are mass-market products, and many of them think in that vein about large audiences, the most dramatic success is in getting hundreds of newspapers to develop products aimed at niches. They are generating new revenue streams and have added to the mass audience they have with news. And they can sell advertising to businesses that want to reach those niches.

Recently, I've been calling publishers at newspapers of various sizes and I'm finding that to be a pattern everywhere I call. They can list three to five new products that they've created in the last year that target audiences that they weren't reaching effectively before. [These include] a publication for farmers in the agricultural community for a newspaper that is a general interest publication; websites for moms, who are usually too busy to read newspapers; sites for young adults; Spanish-language sites.

And where have you struggled?

Gray: The hardest thing is on the other side of the business. It's a business that has two customer groups: there's the consumer side and the business customer. For a business, the newspaper allows them to communicate with a customer or potential customer. In that area, it's the hardest going. People in newsrooms, reporters, editors, are quite good at visualizing a consumer's life and creating a package of content that gets at what those people need. That's being done well in a lot of places in the industry.

What's not being done is realizing that in your community -- say, a 50,000 person community, you have 1,500 or 2,000 active advertisers but there are 8,000 businesses that serve consumers in your market. So three-quarters of them are not your customer. The difficult part is helping newspapers understand that if they want new business they need to get a new job done for businesses that they're not serving.

Yellow Pages have hit hard times

It's not that we don't know what that is. Some of what they want is: a one-to-one relationship with customers; a way to respond to what's going on in customers' lives; make sure they hear about me when they make a choice. The traditional product built on that job is the Yellow Pages, but I just read an article saying the Yellow Pages are expected to lose 39% of revenues in the next four years. Increasingly if we want to find something, we don't go to the Yellow Pages, we go online, and Google doesn't always work well.

Google isn't doing it all that well yet, and the Yellow Pages aren't doing it that well, so we're saying, 'Look this is where you [newspapers] should be.' It's very hard for ad staffs and management at newspapers to get their minds around the fact that not everyone wants mass reach, and once you understand the needs, you take the technology available today and use them to get the job done.

You talked about a change of mindset for reporters and editors to do editorial for niche audiences. Is it the same problem for ad sales and business staff who have to rethink making big sales for print ads vs. doing things on a smaller scale?

Gray: It's not necessarily smaller. The Newspaper Association of America lately has been preaching that we have to stop selling products and start selling audiences. I think that's about one-third of the steps we need to be making. We have been selling products -- selling the newspaper or a three-column print ad. But a local business isn't looking to buy an ad; they are looking to attract a certain kind of customer. NAA started preaching that you should sell audiences, meaning you have the newspaper, the mom site, the young adult site, etc. So you go to an advertiser and say 'here are all the audiences I can reach for you.'

That's an improvement, but the business doesn't want to buy an audience, they want to get their potential customers to know that they exist. Newspapers need to find out what businesses want to do, and then pull out of our bag of tricks (which so far doesn't have much in it), ideally you'd have 10 different things you could offer, whether it's a niche website to a text message and on and on. You find out what the business is trying to do, and pull something together from your toolkit to help them do it.

When I talk to newspaper publishers and ad directors I get a very clear picture that newspapers have been slow to understand the value of the Internet to local businesses, but local businesses have been even slower to get that. There are a few who get it, and they have a great website, but mostly it's 'we have a website that my nephew did three years ago and it doesn't do much.'

That's another piece we should be offering, it's not just 'buy banner ads on my news website.' It's 'we can make your business effective on the Internet.' And that might include doing your website or buying the keywords you should have on Google AdWords for our market. It might involve the newspaper buying ads on Facebook for a pizza place so that college students in Dayton, Ohio, see your ad. Or help set up a widget so the college kid can order pizza off their desktop.

Have you looked at how editorial should shift their thinking, too?

Gray: We made a conscious decision to leave that to others, as there are enough people working on that already. But the methodology that we teach has been applied in newsrooms with fascinating results. In the 2.0 report, there is a case study about the Pocono (Pa.) Record. In the first step of our process, we tell people to go out and talk to people in their communities who you hope would be your customers.

Pocono Record's coupon section

The Pocono Record sent out 13 people from the newsroom who did 200 interviews with readers of the newspaper. They talked to all these people and came up with a list of eight or nine subject areas that people had difficulty finding in their community. People weren't getting the kind of education information they wanted, they wanted more on infrustructure, golf, traffic, [and more]. So they figured out ways to beef up coverage of these things in the newspaper and changed some sections, which rolled over into the website, where they had more topic areas.

They did this in 2007 and by the end of the year, their print circulation was up, their web traffic was up 50% and their web revenues were up about 50%. What happened was that the website became known in the community as the place you would find out about everything, so they were able to raise their web ad rates. I think that could be repeated at every newspaper in America.

What about web video? I've written about companies helping small businesses do mini-informercials online for their business, and many newspapers also do videos with pre-roll ads. The content of most newspaper videos varies a lot, but what have you found to be best practices for monetizing video?

Gray: For the 2008 report, we partnered with Borrell Associates...and their conclusion was that at most newspapers the photo staff is shooting video and doing news video and posting it on their sites. This is typical of what Christensen found out about how people react in disrupted industries: 'Uh-oh, there's a new technology so we better get ahead on that technology.' But all you're doing with news video is giving your current customers something else to look at. There's not a lot of effective sales that use the true potential of advertising on video.

Where Borrell sees the big growth is with the mini-documentaries, the short video that shows what the business looks like, the people who you should trust at that business. And that video sits there as an ad, and you click it because you are interested in what that business does. It's unlike a pre-roll, it isn't forced on you. Overlays, pre-rolls and other video ads might work nationally, but locally businesses have a story to tell and they'd like to use video and it's an opportunity for newspapers to come in at a lower price point than television.

What do you think about crowdfunding, having people pay directly for stories they want to see, with sites like Spot.us?

Gray: I haven't looked at that as part of this project. My core belief is that it will be really hard to generate sufficient revenue to do any meaningful quantity of journalism on a philanthropic basis. The NY Times had an interesting story about VoiceofSanDiego and other non-profit news sites. VoiceofSanDiego has angel funding and they are soliciting funding from people on their website. I was at the Christian Science Monitor and it could be a poster child for this problem. It was never able to generate enough income to sustain its editorial work, and has always been subsidized by the church.

When I was there, we had a "make a donation" button and put it wherever we could on the site. It turned out a small revenue stream but it was insignificant compared to the cost. The bottom line is: I wish [crowdfunding efforts] the best, and I hope they succeed, but I really doubt there's going to be much robust journalism done on that basis.

A lot of people think there will be some kind of magic answer for a new business model for newspapers online. It seems more likely that there will be a lot of small revenue streams that add up. What do you think?

Gray: We've been saying for three years that there's no silver bullet and I've been looking for three years and there's still no silver bullet. I was at a meeting of newspaper CEOs and publishers last week, and people there were saying 'there's no silver bullet.' Everyone realizes that. They wish there was something, but there's really nothing there.

The massive shift for newspaper companies to make is to stop thinking everything is news. They need to start realizing that in this watershed moment, when people stop getting information from a dropper -- once a day I get a drop from a newspaper -- we now live on the ocean and can dip in at any time and get whatever we want. So we will spend a lot less time with things that are designed for everyone like news and spend a lot more time proportionately finding solutions for me and what will help me in my life today. That is a massive change in local markets happening right now. I am preaching in the field that newspapers need to visualize themselves becoming the local information utlity.

What was the mood like at the meeting of CEOs and publishers? Was it like the economic crisis meeting recently held by President Bush? Was there anybody with positive outlooks?

Gray: I've talked to a variety of newspaper publishers, and what I'm seeing is there's a tremendous amount of focus on what we've always done and how that's shrinking. Managing that shrinkage itself is a huge and difficult proposition in itself. You cannot go from black ink to red ink and keep going. So we are seeing the industry go through this horrible round of cost-cutting and job-cutting which is unavoidable. But at the same time the requirement to create new and different offerings that bring new money in -- when is the hardest time to do that? When you're whacking your existing organization.

So everyone has two very incompatible assignments. One simple piece of advice we're hearing is that if you have to make cuts, make sure you use that cut as a tool to get you where you need to be in the future -- not just as a way to lop off costs you'll never see again. You can't cut your way to profitability.

How do you respond from the criticism of Newspaper Next from Poynter's Rick Edmonds: "I have had a reservation about Newspaper Next from the get-go that continues this round. I am not persuaded that newspaper people can simply be repurposed into 'disruptive' entrepreneurs."

Gray: Nobody said it would be easy. It's definitely true that some people cannot get out of the mindsets of the core business. And it's true that being a disruptive entrepreneur is difficult within an organization that is focused almost exclusively on carrying out its traditional functions with traditional structures, processes and products. But we've got to try! What's the alternative if we don't -- ever-smaller revenues from the existing products, and ever-smaller staffs?

Photo of Yellow Pages by Heather Powazek Champ via Flickr.

UPDATE: Jack Shafer of Slate points out to me that Gray's idea about newspapers acting as local ad agencies is far from new. In fact, entrepreneur Mark Cuban (now under an SECcomplain for insider trading) brought up the same idea two years ago on his blog:

From the outside looking in, I think newspapers and any local media organizations have to make a stand and go where you are strong and that is in face-to-face selling and knowing your market better than anyone. You have a local salesforce, they won't. However, you can create self service publishing and ad buying comparable to theirs that is geared towards your market, and complements your face-to-face selling. You might not be as efficient in monetization as Google, but most of your customers will never know the difference. All they will know is that you have earned their trust as the company that handles all their advertising and website ad publishing needs so that they can focus on selling pizzas, laser surgery and cars. That is huge for any small business.

Just like Google Search created the foundation of traffic that led to their algorithms and AdSense network, your newspaper or TV station can create the foundation that led to the creation of your marketwide salesforce. Why not?

Online Travel Booking: What influences Consumers?

Source: Webcredible, 4 October 2008 

Submitted by Alexander Baxevanis

For today's time-poor consumers, booking a holiday can be a tough process. The age old question always fired at a new band, 'What are your influences?' is just as important when it comes to online travel customers.

RESEARCH ASSISTANCE
Most people begin the holiday research process by searching for destination guides (typically through Google). Often, these in-depth guides either don't exist, or consumers don't realise that they exist, on major travel booking sites. By not offering this extra level of information, travel sites risk people leaving and finding this information elsewhere. Researching and booking a holiday is a very time-consuming process and competes with other work and household activities. People have limited time during lunch break and evenings, meaning they're likely to get frustrated if it takes to long too find the information that they require.

WORD OF MOUTH AND REVIEWS
Recommendations from friends and family are an important source of information, as almost all consumers take these into account when booking. Travel providers could facilitate these types of recommendations by offering 'email a friend' buttons. This will make it easier for users to recommend and communicate the details of their holiday. Inevitably, user-generated content is also an important factor when it comes to online research and booking. Allow negative reviews and provide assurances that the reviews are written by actual holiday bookers.

SPECIFIC CONSUMER CHALLENGES
Groups of friends holidaying together often disagree on destinations, and communication within the group can be poor. Travel websites could potentially link travel planning with social networking websites to enable these groups to better communicate. In contrast to this, the main concern of those travelling with children is making sure the holiday is child-friendly. Travel sites should make sure that information about child-friendly holidays and activities is easily accessible.

SELL, SELL, SELL
There is a large, currently untapped, opportunity for travel sites to follow the lead of ecommerce sites and cross-sell travel-related products and services as part of the booking process. This could include clothes, accessories, cosmetics and weight loss products and services. 

OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS
It's important for travel companies to do as much as they can to help users choose their holiday. Other ideas that could be implemented to this end include:
* Letting users create shortlists with different flight and hotel options, that can be accessed when visiting the site at a later time 
* Providing 'a real breakdown' of prices to include all extras 
* Allowing those booking group holidays to pay for their share of the booking directly to the booking site 
* Aggregating and organising all trip information before and after booking (Tripit and Traveldk partly do this) 
* Cross-selling relevant products and services after users have booked a holiday 
* Integrating destination guides with booking sites so people can complete most of their research and booking tasks on the same site 

What's ultimately at stake here is providing sufficient information to help influence travel decision. Whether this is an objective online destination guide or a suggested excursion complete with a review from a previous customer, the smallest gestures can make a huge difference.

Case study: The importance of the Google mindset

Expedia's got no reservations on hotel analytics

Tags: business analytics, sas

   

By Jo Best

Published: 31 October 2008 13:04 GMT

Show related
articles

When it comes to online hotel shopping, there can be such a thing as too much choice, web travel company Expedia has found.

Given a choice between slicing and dicing search results to find the perfect hotel or just trusting the judgement of an online travel agent, most consumers will pick the latter, according to Dan Lynn, Expedia's director of strategy and customer insights.

Despite offering consumers the choice to narrow down potential hotel picks by price, star rating, distance and a number of other factors, most consumers are likely to pick a hotel from the first five results Expedia returns for their stay - a trend Lynn attributes to consumers reliance on search engines.

"One of our key challenges is inventory selection optimisation… The vast majority of consumers don't use functions [like sorting hotels by price or star rating] - they use the search results. It's critically important we put the best hotels for any query in the first few places," Lynn said, speaking at the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series event in Las Vegas.

The company has been using analytics to work out what attributes can turn a search into a sale.

"By looking at the data, running it through SAS and giving it to some great statisticians… we can figure out what the most important characteristics of a hotel or piece of inventory can increase the likelihood of that piece of inventory converting," he said.

"We can't get everything - we can't work out how the human brain works but…we can predict with 70 per cent accuracy what a consumer is going to select from a choice of hotels based on certain attributes.

"By taking each of these attributes and using SAS to build a choice model, we can score every hotel room we have and show which is most likely to sell to consumers," Lynn added.

But it's not just a question of tailoring those crucial first few search results to suit the customers needs, Expedia is also looking at optimising its site for a better effect on its bottom line - potentially by promoting hotels offering the best margin or simply better quality establishments to avoid a bad holiday for the consumer and encourage them to make a return visit to the site.

Another potential addition to the Expedia analytics armoury is behavioural analysis based on a customer's life stage - but the company says for travel, past purchases aren't always a good guide to future shopping.

Instead, Expedia is planning to work around clustering.

"What we want to do next is cluster modelling - cluster consumers into certain segments and then weight the importance of different attributes differently," Lynn said.

Well wishing and time off

Google Rallies Embattled Travel Marketers

by Mark Walsh, Wednesday, Oct 8, 2008 2:28 PM ET

With the travel industry already feeling the pain of the economic downturn, Google on Wednesday convened more than a hundred travel marketing executives at TravelThink 2008 to offer strategies for boosting business, as well as to get feedback. As one of the industries to embrace search early on, travel has become a key business category for Google, and the search giant plays a big role in driving business to travel companies large and small. Penry Price, vice president for advertising sales, North America for Google, described how search is a core consumer behavior in the travel industry, and how new technologies can create new ways to reach customers. In survey findings presented by JupiterResearch at Google's TravelThink event in New York, 94% of travel executives said online advertising would provide the strongest return on investment compared to other media in the next 12 months. Some 20% of travel advertisers will spend more than $10 million in online marketing this year, and more than half will spend $1 million or more. Search engine optimization was the top marketing tactic along with e-mail, according to the study commissioned by Google. "Search is like your Yellow Pages, billboard--everything all wrapped up in one," said Emily Riley, a senior analyst at Jupiter. But it can't necessarily turn around a weakening economy. By a show of hands, travel executives gathered at the Google event indicated that business was already getting worse and would likely get continue to downtrend in the next six to 12 months as a result of the weakening economy reducing consumer spending. A New York Times article earlier this week reported sharp declines in airline passenger traffic and increasing cancellations at hotels in just the last few weeks. In terms of ad spending, the Interactive Advertising Bureau report released Tuesday showed that leisure travel-related ad dollars during the first six months were essentially flat, dropping from $687 million to $667 million, or from 7% to 6% of total spending. To cope with the harsher economic climate, Riley and Google ad executives discussed ways to improve online marketing efforts, including--not surprisingly--using Google tools to better snag travel customers via search. One theme was to encourage the use of behavioral targeting to reach customers. "I do see behavioral targeting becoming extremely important in the next two years," said Riley. She pointed to companies such as BlueKai, which partners with data sellers to aggregate anonymous shopping and research behaviors, and auctions that data to drive monetization. While Google hasn't yet ventured into behavioral targeting, the company may start to explore a limited form of BT in the next six months that would allow targeting of different audience segments, according to Tim Armstrong, president of the Americas for Google. "It may not be full-blown behavior targeting," he said. He added that Google in the next year would also work to more tightly integrate search and display advertising and demonstrate the value of using both together. Through its acquisition of DoubleClick last year, Google made clear its intention to become a bigger player in display advertising. "(DoubleClick) understands conversions through display and we know about conversions through search," he said. Asked about Google's paid search deal with Yahoo--which the company last week put on hold while the Justice Department completes its investigation--Armstrong said Google expected to have some resolution of the issue by year's end. Among the software that Google is rolling out to help travel advertisers is a tool that suggests appropriate keywords based on spikes in certain search terms. By spotting a rising search term early such as "staycation," a travel company can develop marketing programs suited to emerging industry trends. "For the travel industry this would be a perfect term for them to use," said Google's Price. The tool could also be used to detect upticks in more specific searches like "four-star hotels with glass bathroom doors," he added. Even if keywords tied to such terms yield only a few extra conversions a month, that's valuable, said Price. Another new Google tool that could benefit travel marketers seeks to cross-match surges around certain search terms with terms used on a company's site to come up with new keywords. The technology could yield 50 to 100 new keywords may not have recognized before to generate conversions, said Price. Price and other speakers also highlighted the benefits of cross-media marketing. To that end, he pointed to a United Airlines television campaign promoting its business-class service during the summer Olympics that led to a 54% jump in search terms on Google around "United Business Class." "You very rarely today see even a TV spot that doesn't have some call to action," said Price, noting the blurring lines between brand and direct-response advertising. And with Google pushing into other media including TV, radio and print, such distinctions may become even less pronounced.

Branding Directions

September 29, 2008 5:59 PM PDT

Microsoft updates Live Hotmail and Maps

On Monday, Microsoft updated two of its Live services: Windows Live Hotmail and Live Maps. Of the two, the changes to Hotmail are not yet available to everyone. The company began rolling it out to some of its users this weekend, with everyone else getting their hands on it in the next few weeks. It's the newer, faster version of the service that brings in gains of up to 70 percent compared with older versions of Hotmail. (Read more about that here.)

Meanwhile, Live Search Maps, Microsoft's online mapping tool has a really neat new way to get directions using local landmarks and local businesses. If the service picks up on one of these landmarks as part of your route, it will use it in addition to the street name. Oftentimes this comes in handy where a business has better signage than the city, which in the case of car dealerships and fast food restaurants is almost always true.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Chris Pendleton, Microsoft Virtual Earth's Tech Evangelist, says these landmarks are currently limited to these six categories:

• Gas Stations
• Major National Chains of Hotels
• Restaurants
• Convenience Stores
• Grocery Stores
• Car Dealerships

To help get you there, there's a new multistop trip planner--a feature Google Maps has had since late 2006. This means you can add other addresses between the point A and point B of your trip, then print it out to stick in your car.

The service is also now instantly indexing community maps. Maps that users have created will now be able to be searched by everyone immediately. The user-created items will also be mixed in with business results, which means you or someone else could enter in a business' address and phone number before it's been officially added and have it show up in regular searches. Neat.

iPhone location-based social networks

The State of Location-Based Social Networking On The iPhone

Posted at Techcrunch: 28 Sep 2008 10:18 AM PDT

We've been bullish about location-based social networks for quite awhile now, especially since Apple announced that it would open up the iPhone to developers. And with two significant developments in this space just this week (more on that below), we thought it would be a good time to take a step back and look at the options currently available through the Apple App Store.

What makes a "location-based" social network different than a normal one? At least as things stand today, location-based social networks run primarily on smartphones that have the ability to determine a user's current location, usually by leveraging GPS or cellular tower triangulation. The social network then uses your location to reveal nearby friends and places of interest. See our Location Technologies Primer for additional information.

Currently there are six major location-based social networks available for the iPhone (click on the comparison chart to the right). All of them tell you how far away other members are from you, with most focused on helping you find your friends but some designed primarily for discovering strangers. A few of them chart the location of your friends' on an interactive map (something I actually think all of them should do). They provide a wide range of privacy settings, but all will stop reporting your location when you simply close the application (Apple has yet to release its push notification system that will let these apps constantly report your location in the background). They also vary widely in how precisely they identify the locations of other members, although all but one of them work anywhere in the United States.

After testing this entire batch, I've come to the conclusion that none of them is quite ready to achieve mainstream usage. I believe most, if not all, of the following things must happen before location-based social networking becomes the new "killer app":

• They need powerful notification systems that actively inform you when someone of interest is nearby. Such a system could be set up manually by individually indicating which friends are "of interest". But it would be even better for the system to learn from your interactions (messages, pokes, wall posts, etc) and affiliations (profile information, common friends, groups) and automatically identify certain people you'd like to meet up with.
• These applications absolutely need to update your location while the phone is sitting in your pocket. Right now it demands too much from users to open the application whenever they want to inform friends where they are. Serendipitous encounters would be far more common with a fully foolproof and automated location-updating system.
• When inviting friends to a service, you need the ability to determine which of your friends actually have a supported phone. Otherwise you're just spamming a large number of people who matter to you and with very little yield.
• These apps need to get more stable; they crash way too much.
• We need more hooks into web applications so we can share our location and location-based activities not only with other mobile users but with the web at large.
• Those apps that let you see and meet strangers nearby need to highlight both friends of friends and those who share common interests and affiliations.

These are weaknesses shared by all of the current iPhone location-based social networking apps, each of which we cover briefly below.

The Veteran - Loopt

Perhaps the most well-known of these companies, Loopt has been working for years to get its technology on a variety of phones (the iPhone being just the latest and most functional of them). It is also perhaps the most developed of the batch, and the most generic. Use it primarily to see on a map where your friends are located nearby. Restaurant and other local reviews are secondary, having been brought into the app through a partnership with Yelp. Get directions to other users, view their latest status updates (which are often accommodated with photos taken on-location), and ping them when they haven't updated their location for awhile.

The Mountain View-based company has ventured into the matchmaking business this week by adding a new feature called "Mix" that shows you, for the first time on Loopt, strangers in your vicinity. You can see all of the people nearby who have turned on the Mix feature, and you can filter by types (age, gender, tags, dating status, community) as well. This is Loopt's attempt to help people hook up at bars (an idea that gets thrown around by many entrepreneurs and has always puzzled me). But if it takes off, it may have even greater sociological effects than Loopt's core friend-finding capabilities.

The New Kid On The Block - Moximity

Launching into private beta just this week, Moximity is a new location-based social network out of Austin, Texas that wants to help you find both your friends and local establishments. Taking Paul Bragiel's marketing advice, Moximity is rolling out one geographical region at a time, starting with Austin itself. Everything is local - the restaurant listings, the users, and even the advertisements (yes, this is the only one of these networks actually monetizing on the iPhone right now).

One major quality that sets Moximity apart is the way it handles user accounts. When you join and start configuring, you don't make "Moximity friends". Rather, the service pulls in your contacts from Facebook (and later, other sites as well) and lets you track those of your existing friends who also use Moximity. When you post a status message, it also gets pushed out to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Moximity would benefit from an interactive map that uses pins to show where your friends are located. However, unlike Loopt, which gives you the precise street address of your friends, Moximity always matches you with particular places (restaurants, stores, etc) so individual pins for users might not be appropriate. Co-founder Bryan Jones says some breed of mapping functionality will be included in the next release.

If you live in Austin, you can get into the service immediately by emailing your name and zip code here.

The Bezos, T-Mobile and iFund-Backed Contender - Whrrl

The best-funded of the bunch is a Seattle startup named Pelago with an app called Whrrl that centers around identifying and reviewing nearby establishments of all types. Locating friends takes a bit of a back seat to the idea that you should share Yelp-like reviews with the people you know.

The information about places is comprehensive. You can find cuisine types, prices, hours, phone numbers, websites, street addresses, ratings and reviews. While you can view the (5-star) ratings and reviews from every member, you're encouraged to focus on those of your friends. When you view a friend's profile, for example, their reviews are displayed prominently. That said, you can "fan" strangers if you like their tastes (although apparently only through Whrrl's thoroughly developed web app).

Whrrl also identifies events that are going on in your area. The combination of event and place information is great but I get the feeling that this app will have to depart a bit from its "reviews" roots to become a widely embraced service. More generic social features (such as walls and notifications) are needed to get me to use Whrll when not looking to share or gather opinions.

Pelago has raised its funds from the iFund, Jeff Bezos, and T-Mobile (among others).

The Schmorgesborg - uLocate's "Where"

Where is an iPhone app developed by a Boston-based startup called uLocate that has received a considerable amount of funding (at least $15.5 million) over the last several years. It has everything but the kitchen sink. Along the bottom of the app is a dock-like menu that shows a variety of sub-applications, each meant to help you find something in your area:

• Buddy Beacon: find nearby friends
• GasBuddy: find nearby gas stations with low prices
• Starbucks: find nearby Starbucks franchises
• Quibblo: see location-based poll results in your area
• HeyWhatsThat: identify mountain peaks in your vicinity
• The Skymap: learn about the stars and constellations in the sky above you
• Zipcar: find pickup points for Zipcar rentals
• Yelp: find nearby places listed and reviewed on Yelp
• Eventful: learn about nearby events and their venues

The UI needs a bit of work (too many popups) but regardless, this app is handy for quickly finding the nearest of some particular thing on an interactive map (coffee, friendship, wheels, etc).