...

Ex-Googlers Try To Create A Better Travel Guide With Nextstop Posted: 08 May 2009 01:10 PM PDT Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide. The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn't gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham's. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. "It is difficult to discover something new when you don't know what to look for," says Sjogreen. Everything on nextstop is geared towards getting people to recommend their favorite places and organize those recommendations into guides. There are various ways to explore the site, including a search box, by city, a guide view, or a map view (see screen shots below). The recommendations can be collected together into guides (like this one for an architecture tour), which can be explicitly "liked" by members. The guides can be sorted by most recent, most liked, or most viewed. You can save any place or guide in a wishlist for later viewing. But it is the social aspects which give the site an extra edge. Each recommendation acts as a vote (for any given place, you can see how many people recommend it) and you can also vote individual recommendations up and down. Every member gets areputation score. You get 2 points every time somebody else votes up one of your recommendations, and 15 points when they "like" one of your guides. To fight spam, your reputation score goes down every time somebody votes down one of your recommendations or flags one of your entries. Entries can also be edited wiki-style. Still, it would be fairly easy to game the system with a few friends. The members with the most points get recognized on a leaderboard. And you can follow any other member, which lets you see all of their entries and actions on the site in an activity stream (which you can export to other services as an RSS feed). In addition to the reputation points, members can also earn "badges" for accomplishing certain goals, such as being the first to recommend a place, for getting 100 views on a guide, or 10 likes. Any recommendation can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter (but sharing is not automatic, it has to be explicitly selected for each recommendation). Individual guides can also be shared as embeddable badges or widgets. The site makes very simple to create a recommendation. These are not meant to be in-depth reviews, rather curated suggestions of things to do. It uses a combination of search APis from Google (for local search, geo-location, image search, and maps) and Yahoo Boss (also for image search) to help you find and auto-complete many of the items that go into each recommendation. Once you create an account or sign in using Facebook Connect, you can type in the name of practically any bar, restaurant, tourist attraction, or business after clicking "add a recommendation." It will suggest places it recognizes along with their addresses, and if one of them is what you are trying to recommend, you click on it and nextstop will place it on a Google map and find pictures. You pick an image, add a short Twitter-length recommendation no more than 160 characters, and categorize it as a place to eat/drink, stay/sleep, or do/explore along with an approximate price range (free, inexpensive, mid-range, high-end). Then the recommendation is created and other people can find it on the site. I did this for a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bar Tabac, and it found it immediately, along with a great picture. There is plenty of competition for online travel guides and social recommendations, starting with TripAdvisor and Yelp down to a bevy of startups including Dopplr, Offbeat Guides and TripSay. But nextstep manages to do things a little bit different. It is not trying to be comprehensive, it is just trying to provide travelers a highly selective and vetted list of things to do and places to visit.

Sustainability's last public gasp

The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism

Thank God for Tech Moguls Who Redistribute VC Wealth So We Can Cybersocialize Freely. For Now, That Is.

by Simon Dumenco 

Published: May 04, 2009

Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone should thank God it was just a cardinal, and not the pope.

Last week, according to the Times of London, Cardinal Sean Brady of Ireland told the country's Catholics to "Make someone the gift of a prayer through text, Twitter or e-mail every day. Such a sea of prayer is sure to strengthen our sense of solidarity with one another."

LET US PRAY: Cardinal Sean Brady wants you to tweet for Jesus.

Photo Credit: Niall Carson

Oh, my. That's a nice sentiment, but Twitter really doesn't need more users around the world tweeting in ways that can never be monetized. Ireland's got just 4 million Catholics, but the Vatican counts more than a billion baptized Catholics worldwide. If the pope endorsed tweeting prayer, Twitter could be out of business by the end of the year! The 3-year-old company, remember, still lacks a revenue model and just burns through more venture capital every time a new user signs up. (Fortunately, given how retro-conservative Pope Benedict is, he seems more likely to issue a papal encyclical condemning Twitter. We all know it's more likely to enable sin -- pride! sloth! -- than piety.)

It's telling that Cardinal Brady grouped Twitter with texting and e-mail. The former, of course, is a paid service and a massive profit center for cellular carriers around the world, and the latter you also pay for, albeit indirectly, as a service bundled with your monthly internet access or by allowing yourself to be subjected to advertising. (As a Gmail user, I decided to see what would come up when I e-mailed myself the Lord's Prayer. The ads Google served included ones for BeliefNet and Don Helin's paperback pulp thriller "Thy Kingdom Come." Ka-ching!) But when it comes to Twitter, we not only don't pay, but we all take it for granted that somebody's going to keep footing the bill for the rapidly expanding server farms needed to process and store zillions of tweets per minute.

It's sweet, really, that venture capitalists have ponied up millions so that we can all keep tweeting. It's also more than a bit scary. Because more and more of us are increasingly addicted not only to Twitter, but to other services that lack workable business models. What happens if the "dealers" who feed our habits disappear? (It's been known to happen. Last week, for instance, Yahoo announced it was shutting down last century's hot social-networking-esque service, GeoCities, for which it paid $3.5 billion in 1999.)

I've been thinking about all this a lot since I wrote, a few weeks ago, about how Susan Boyle has been on what I called the "Google Dole" -- her fame fueled in a nonsensically nonprofit manner by Google's YouTube unit, which hemorrhages cash serving up too much video with nowhere near enough advertising support. (I'll again refer you to Benjamin Wayne's Silicon Alley Insider piece, "YouTube is Doomed,"which deconstructed the recent Credit Suisse report that puts YouTube's estimated 2009 losses at nearly half a billion dollars.) You'd think a clip of Boyle singing a song from "Les Misérables," one of the most popular musicals of all time, on one of the most popular TV shows in the world would be semi-monetizable. (I mean, geez, at the very least stick a pop-up overlay on that video with a link to the "Les Miz" soundtrack on iTunes.) But no. Adam Ostrow at Mashable further proved my point with his piece, "Susan Boyle Video Profits: $0," which explained that disagreement between "Britain's Got Talent" owner ITV and YouTube over pre-roll vs. overlays prevented ad placements in Boyle's YouTube streams.

And then last week The New York Times reported about the hazards of international expansion for the likes of Facebook. Getting million of new users in the Third World, it turns out, really sucks, because Facebook will never really be able to meaningfully monetize those eyeballs. It's tons of cash out (bandwidth, data storage, personnel) with little hope of cash in.

Weirdly, some of the management at these companies don't even seem to be trying that hard to make money -- a consequence, perhaps, of still being awash in millions of dollars of VC money ("venture charity," as I like to call it). In fact, Abbey Klassen, Ad Age's digital editor, tells me that she once heard a Facebook exec joke to an agency exec, "Didn't you know we're a nonprofit?"

I'll go one step further: They're socialists! OK, yes, I'm using the dumbed-down definition of socialism championed by numbskulls like Sarah Palin, but regardless of the finer points of economic theory, you've got to admit that at some level the boys at Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are actively choosing to redistribute the wealth. They're taking money from venture capitalists and deploying it so that millions of people far beyond Silicon Valley can get something for nothing. Entertainment, information, and self-marketing opportunities, mostly.

And, oh yeah, a sense of "connectedness" -- cyber companionship -- which makes this particular era of VC-wealth distribution all the more ... touching. (Let's all be friends -- on someone else's dime! Let's all be perpetually jacked into the hyper-insta-now global hivemind of human consciousness -- for free!)

I am so appreciative. Seriously. I love YouTube, I've made some interesting connections through Facebook, and I enjoy Twittering. (Last week, for instance, I tweeted about an astonishing bit of information I came across in Britain's Daily Telegraph: YouTube "reportedly uses as much bandwidth as the entire internet took up in 2000.")

But I also know it can't go on like this. The digital Robin Hoods can't keep redistributing the wealth forever, because eventually the wealth runs out. Investors get sick of propping up private ventures that don't have viable business models, and shareholders of public companies, like Google, get cranky about flushing cash down the drain.

So what can we do? Not much, I suppose, other than enjoy it while it lasts -- and maybe twitter a prayer for VCs everywhere.

~ ~ ~
Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco

Getting to the point

Have Kindle, Will Travel — And Stay Up-To-Date Thanks To Offbeat Guides

Posted: 26 Apr 2009 10:00 PM PDT

I used to think the Kindle was stupid. Then I bought one and realized I was wrong. It's still way too expensive, but it's great at what it does. And what it does keeps on expanding. Now, it takes a step into the up-to-date travel guide market, with a partnership with the customizable travel guide service, Offbeat Guides.

Starting tomorrow, you'll be able to find 500 of the company's newest guides in the Kindle store at prices ranging from $3.99 for smaller cities to $7.99 for larger ones. Here's why these are great. Just like the Offbeat Guides regular guidebook products, its Kindle-ready guidebooks are way more up-to-date than traditional guidebooks. While there have been some guidebooks available on the Kindle in the past, most are only updated once a year. Offbeat Guides are updated every month.

This means they can include information such as real-time events for specific cities, like concerts or festivals. It also means the guides can have a Kindle menu option to find out something going on in the city you are visiting that night. For tourists who don't know anyone in a particular city, that's a great feature.

There are a couple downsides. Naturally, because the Kindle only handles grayscale images, you won't get the full color pictures you usually find in other tour guides. And because the Kindle's screen isn't ideal for displaying maps, tailored, local maps that are a part of Offbeat Guides regular guides aren't included here.

But, at 10.2 ounces (for the latest version), the Kindle is likely lighter than regular tour guides. And, if you're planning a multiple city trip, you can obviously load up a bunch of these guides on one Kindle. One thing that particularly excites me is the fact that you can also view these on your iPhone if you go somewhere and don't feel like carrying around a Kindle. Because the Kindle app on the iPhone stays in sync with the Kindle content, you can bookmark pages and look at them later on your phone.

Offbeat Guides has been working on these Kindle-tailored guides for 6 months now, CEO Dave Sifry tells me. He also notes that there are 5 times as many cities available as compared to other guides. Right now, if you plan on traveling to a city often and want the most up-to-date guide, you'll have to buy a new one each time. But Sifry says they will explore the possibility of having subscriptions for certain cities if customers demand that. Such a feature may even be useful to locals of a particular city to know what is going on. But the focus right now remains on leisure and business travelers, he says.

Find a full list of the Offbeat Guides Kindle options here.

 

Holy dumb name

April 8, 2009 10:01 AM PDT CNET

Hotelicopter is real, though simply a travel search engine

Hotelicopter the travel search engine is not nearly as exciting a concept as a converted Soviet chopper-turned-air hotel, but it does an admirable job at scouring the Web to find you deals on hotel bookings. It searches and aggregates the results from more than 30 different hotel deals sites like Priceline, Hotels.com, and Booking.com, and jumps you straight to each provider's purchase page.

One of its nice features is the option to narrow down the area of a town for which you want it to search for results either through a drop down list of neighborhoods or by drawing a fence within the results map. It will then refresh with results only from that area, right down to a half-block radius. This can be handy if you know the place you're visiting.

Included is the option to log in and link it up with your Facebook account using Facebook Connect, which for now is simply a way to bypass registering with the site, and promote that you're using it on your profile every time you book a trip. What would be far more interesting though, is if it pulled a Dopplr and would let you know a friend who lived in each place where you were planning to travel. That way you could ask if you could couch surf and save some money. Of course, that's not how Hotelicopter makes its money, which is in referrals to all these booking sites and on-page Google ads, but I think it would make for a far more compelling product.

Hotelicopter lets you narrow down the results you want to see by simply drawing a fence around an area of the map. You can also filter by neighborhoods.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

A Microcosms influence

Mayor proclaims economic recovery

By Ian Holroyd

News

Mar 26, 2009

ayor Rob Burton proclaimed the beginning of economic recovery to Oakville's business community in an act of defiance against what some have called a self-imposed recession.

Burton made the announcement at the presentation of the Town's new economic development strategy to the Chamber of Commerce last Friday morning at the Holiday Inn on Argus Road.

"Here and there, the signs of recovery are appearing and they're interesting," said Burton. "As a matter of fact, some people say that we declared ourselves into this recession so maybe what I should do is declare the beginning of recovery here this morning."

In order to perpetuate the economic rebound, Council's economic development strategy focuses on maintaining and further developing established businesses, forging new business relationships beyond the town's borders and building on Oakville's strengths.

The Mayor said in his speech that Town Hall has pledged to open the lines of communication between its Councillors and the business community in order to aid businesses in navigating government regulations to encourage further development.

Also, Council's creation of the economic development department last year has unlocked a user-friendly access to information at Town Hall for Oakville's business community.

On the international stage, a delegation from Neyagawa, Japan, Oakville's sister city, will be coming to ring in the 25th anniversary of the union this July.

Burton said that Oakville should build on this relationship in order to open up Asian markets to Oakville businesses.

The Mayor didn't come right out and say he was actively pursuing another sister city, but he did say that Neyagawa had set a good example by solidifying another alliance with a city just outside of Shanghai, China.

"Fifteen years ago, they created a sister city relationship with a place called Lu Wan," said Burton. "You can see Lu Wan is in relation to Shanghai, the worlds largest city, as Oakville is to the GTA."

He went on to say that over the next 20 years, China will be embarking on a number of extensive projects including skyscrapers, mass transit systems and road building.

"We have business knowhow that they want and value," said Burton, "so I ask the business community today, who wants to be next? And I ask who wants to be left behind?"

Oakville's position in the centre of a life sciences corridor that stretches between two research hubs in Toronto and Hamilton is an advantage that is being explored.

"If we can get a piece of the life sciences development action in Ontario by providing a location for mid-sized companies to set up their facilities," said Burton. "By identifying this goal now we can assure the land is developed appropriately."

To further attract the life sciences industry, the town is developing a district energy plan for a life sciences centre located around the new hospital being built at Third Line and Dundas.

Another strength that Oakville is hoping to cash in on is Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

They have rightfully earned an international reputation in the digital media and animation industry.
"It makes sense for the town to explore how this expertise can be leveraged with a view to building related business opportunities here in Oakville," said Burton.

The Town will consider in its plan the creation of an international hub for digital media and animation.

A significant component of the Town's strategy is its 770 hectares of vacant employment lands. The goal of the Town is to lure the most valuable development possible.

"Office development attracts an average of $85,000 per hectare of taxes to the town as opposed to only $33,000 per hectare for industrial warehousing," said Burton. "Office development also offers better jobs than warehousing; they pay more. This type of development may take longer to attract but this council is prepared to wait because the end result better reflects the need of our community for well-paid jobs.

"We are finding that there's a good market for office development in Oakville. In 2008 there was approximately 275,000 square feet of office space leased in Oakville and 90 per cent of that activity can be attributed to new head leases versus renewals."

Burton said the draft of Oakville's economic strategy will go to Council in April and he invited input from the business community.

He concluded, "I believe that if we work together and apply our imagination and our creativity, there is no direction ahead of us except onward and upward."

***

Positive Market News

The facts and figures are showing a steady improvement in Canada's economy with retail sales and auto sales on the rise.

Statistics Canada reported an 1.9 per cent increase in retail sales in January. In addition to this, the auto sector saw a rise of 5.5 per cent in the sale of new motor vehicles in January.

Specifically, the sales of North American-built cars was up 3.5 per cent.

Source: Statistics Canada

Why go?

VisitBritain to lure more travellers through virtual link-up

Virtual walking tours of key UK cities are to be made available on the internet through a tie-up between VisitBritain and Google. The new Google Street View technology will feature 25 cities and towns in Britain and Northern Ireland.  Users of Google maps can use the Street View mapping to get an idea of the sights they can see when visiting Britain. They will be able to take a virtual walking tour of destinations such as London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh, and from Southampton to Aberdeen, Bristol to Norwich. VisitBritain has worked with Google to create a visual guide - called a maplet - directly in Street View which features sights in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birmingham, Cambridge, Leeds and Oxford. This maplet then links to VisitBritain's global website, visitbritain.com, where users can access some of its 1,000 destination guides. Each guide further helps them plan their trip with information about where to stay, shop and eat out, as well as the attractions, events and experiences. This year an extra five million people may consider a holiday in their own country, according to VisitBritain ahead of British Tourism Week next week. Meanwhile, international visitors can taken advantage of improved exchange rates on their trips. VisitBritain head of online marketing Justin Reid said: "We're very excited to be working with Google on the launch of Street View in the UK. The internet is an incredibly rich resource for raising awareness of destinations, driving travel to and around Britain. Street View is a real opportunity for us to showcase our destinations to millions worldwide. "Seeing some of our globally-renowned attractions – a mix of old and new – up close, could inspire many more people to visit our shores. "Our partnership with Google will also mean Street View explorers can find information about the different destinations and attractions, as well as value for money experiences, onwww.visitbritain.com." Google's geospatial technologist Ed Parsons said: "Street View has been hugely popular with our users in Europe and worldwide and we're thrilled it's now available in UK for so many great cities, enabling users to see street-level panoramas of major city roads and look up and print out useful driving directions."

Overzealous positioning

"Psychographic, attitudinal and lifestyle data is beginning to be incorporated" - CRM and Loyalty Special

Home » EyeforTravel News » Marketing » "Psychographic, attitudinal and lifestyle data is beginning to be incorporated" - CRM and Loyalty Special

Published: 23 Feb 2009

Investing in technology and research that explains when/where/why a particular consumer is likely to purchase is where the hospitality industry should go next.

This was recommended by a senior CRM executive from Starwood Hotels during one of EyeforTravel's conferences a couple of years ago. It was recommended as a way to go forward considering that as an industry hotels have a long way to go in talking to guests about the product, its attributes, locale, etc. in a way that each individual guest wishes to receive that information.

As a collaborative effort by industry participants it could be a valuable exercise, saysSandeep Govil, Director of Revenue Management and Science Analytics, Wyndham Hotel Group.

"Funding and governance of such an industry initiative will not be easy. As travel markets evolve and events shape local destination attractiveness this research has to be ongoing and industry databases would have to be created to maintain such information. Further, user guidelines have to be defined. Participants have to understand how to leverage such information in value creation. This information could aid the participants in development, database marketing, product and travel package development etc," elaborated Govil.

Govil highlighted that various views of such information are available in data warehouses maintained by individual players in the industry. Package sales across the providers' offerings also provide valuable information today to each player including suppliers and distribution networks. Some of these have reasonably large databases with millions of customers and transactions and can already provide a wealth of information based on fairly large and representative sample sizes.

"The key questions to be asked in trying to initiate an industry wide collaborative effort are to define how this information will be used to create value. We should answer that question first and assess what incremental benefit it will create for suppliers, distribution players and customers," Govil told EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta.

In the past the travel industry has worked hard to collect data on each guest that can be acted upon. For example, targeting messages to a specific guest type based on a set of factors. Do these segments reach beyond fairly common demographics and behaviour data?

Commenting on this, Govil said, "There has been significant progress made in leveraging these insights to execute marketing campaigns both direct/e-mail and traditional media based. Psychographic and attitudinal and lifestyle data is beginning to be incorporated at least on pilot basis to assess lift from these insights. Purpose of travel as well as the composition of the travel party is also being assessed and used. Destination preferences and season preferences are also being used."

"Also, a lot of convincing still needs to be done and hard returns documented so that such additional spend in information sourcing and execution can be justified," he added.

Execution of CRM and measuring loyalty

Experts feel there is a great opportunity in hotel programmes to increase customer loyalty. The missing links are less about the technology and more about their data capture capabilities, and their ability to provide a differentiated and relevant customer experience in a franchised network.

"Loyalty in the travel and hospitality industry is hard to measure and share of wallet type information is not readily available," says Govil.

Most customers determine suppliers and booking channels based on many factors contingent upon the circumstances around the specific travel.

"Data has shown that most of the valuable customers for one supplier are also valuable customers for other suppliers," shared Govil.

When it comes to executing CRM effectively, Natasa Christodoulidou, Ph.D. California State University – Dominguez Hills says the biggest challenge in the same is to indulge into the luxury market as much as possible. "For example, research shows us, that if you offer a customer $100 off a vacation package or $100 in gas money they would not be as thrilled, had you offered them a suite upgrade or a luxury dinner for two in an exclusive restaurant when they arrive at their destination."

Suppliers are discovering that there is a world of marketing potential in the rich store of redemption information that can be leveraged from a loyalty programme. This does not require access to information at the individual customer level, but does open up the ability to develop full customer profiles from aggregated data. This is an under-leveraged tool in retail to understand who is buying their product, and to market cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

At the same, the biggest initiative taken by suppliers in CRM have been related to guest recognition.

Companies need to create value for the customer when asking for personal data. Allowing guests special access to services and/or functionality is one way to create value in exchange for information.

According to Natasa, the key to working on CRM data gathering approaches in a manner that engages the customer as little as possible while obtaining the information that makes the biggest impact on the goals as a service provider is simply personalisation.

"Many customer will gladly share some data if they feel that it will help the company to personalise the travel promotions to their needs," she says.