Frank Grasso on boredom

Nice post over at an eChannel search by CEO Frank Grasso on boredom and the open ended question.

11 New Yorker cartoons on being fondled by a TSA agent

In solidarity with the millions of Americans racing around the country eating Turkeys and recovering from their close encounters of the TSA kind I am posting a link to a New Yorker page with 11 New Yorker style Airport Security Cartoons.

Is the BOOT Recommended Read of the week

Thanks to Madame BOOT for sending through

Thanks to charlesfittinger via flickr for the dont touch icon

The Australian newspaper on Wotif, Webjet and other AU online success stories

Interesting read this week from James Dunn in the Australia called "Rising from the Ashes". Ten years on from the Dotcom boom he discusses some of Australia's high profile online success stories such as Wotif, Webjet, Seek (jobs site), Realestate.com.au and Carsales.

One of my favourite parts is where he points out that the combined market cap of Seek, Releastate.com.au and Carsales is more than Fairfax (one of Australia's largest media companies and one that suffered the most in losing classifieds business to the online companies).

The article is also worth a read for some of the commentary on Wotif and Webjet including this section

A lot of market share is advertising-driven, it's all about exposure: if you start to see a lot of marketing spend from competitors like Zuji, it could [affect] both Webjet and Wotif. Hotels.com is another new entrant . . . It's a sign that the high margins that Wotif and Webjet have been used to experiencing, there are now other people after their lunch."

Hopkins says Wotif is a different business model from the other four web-based stocks, in that what goes online is distressed inventory and short-term bookings. "Wotif is suffering from, one, a quite strong rebound in hotel accommodations, which means the hotels aren't putting as much inventory on Wotif; and, two, it is not strong on the international side of things, so the strong Australian dollar, with a lot of people going offshore for holidays, has hurt them quite a bit.
"The short-term earnings outlook is pretty flat, but in the long term we think Wotif is still a strong business; it's still very dominant in its sector."

Rising from the ashes is the BOOT recommended read of the week.

PS - congrats to the Australian for spelling Webjet correctly :)

EveryYou: Wharton on Mobile Networks and E-Commerce getting personal

Madame BOOT is a long time consumer of the Knowledge@Wharton series. She has pointed me to this short but interesting post titled "In the Age of Mobile Networks, E-Commerce Gets Personal". The piece talks to how mobile networks will be an enabler or micro targeting. How the next generation of services such as 4square will be key to retailers be able to target consumers with individuated deals and "transform how people shop". Is the BOOT's recommended read of the week.

For more background on this - my concept of EveryYou can be quickly described as "micro-targeting at scale". The detailed definition is

“The development of a specific and targeted recommendation of one based on the unique combination of desires, needs and interests of each individual at any moment in time”

This theory I am working on says that we have reached a state of computational power, data collection levels and social trend in favour of interaction and information sharing that retailers will be able to target offers not only at individuals but at the different versions of each individal that appears at a particular point in time.

Recommended Read: Role of social networking in Chinese online travel market

I am on a business trip to China so have been reading up on research on general and online specific travel trends. There is a lot of information out on the Intertubes but much of it is buried deep on disparate sites- and is often contradictory. Thanks to a tweet from Chloe Lim I came across and economist article collecting a selection of the better research links. The story is an Economnist piece called “Travelling with a little help from friends “. It is the BOOT recommended read of the week.

Summary from the story is that more than any other market, the online China is turning to social networking to drive retail purchasing behaviour including travel.

It quotes from:

• Travelport’s China Online Travel Survey;
• Nielsen and PATA’s China Outbound Travel Monitor 2009 (pdf);
• PhoCusWrights “The Emerging Online Travel Marketplace in China” (ehotelier extract here); and
• CNNIC stats collected on BizReport.

Full Economist story here.

If you want to round out the China story with some inbound information, thanks to Roy Graff for pointing me to the CNTO’s page with inbound travel statistics.

Economist: Data, too much information and the Yottabyte

I have been saying for three years now that the biggest challenge we have to face in the online travel industry is "too much information". Now, thanks to the Economist, we can actually start to see how much is too much.

Once or twice a month the Economist publishes a special report on a country or subject. A few weeks back they published Data, data everywhere, a supplement devoted to the amount of information and data swirling around us. Let me jump straight to an extract from the punchline to the article

"According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still."

Not all of this is online but according to Cisco, by 2013 667 exabytes of data will be flowing over the internet.

To put an exabyte into context, to store 1 exabyte of data would take 15.6million top of the range 64GB iPads. I struggle to think how we can capture, digest, store, manage, secure, use and more that amount of data.

The Economist gave three interesting snapshots of companies trying to deal with this amount of data:

• Facebook: currently storing more than 40 billion photos;
• Wal-Mart: processing 1 million transactions per hour; and
  
• Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP: have spent more than $156billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics.

The official definition of information is data processed in timely, relevant and accurate form. An IBM survey reported by the Economist found that half of the managers quizzed did not trust the information they had to base decisions on. We have more data than we know what to do with but don't trust it to help us come to the right outcome. The data flood's first consequence is to stifle our ability to turn data into information.

From all this it is clear that we need to learn some new words. Screw the giga, tera, peta and even exabyte. Time to introduce you to the Zettabyte (2 to the 70 bytes or a 1000 exabytes) and the Yottabyte (2 to the 80 bytes or 1000 Zettabyte). Though you will not need to worry about the Yotta just yet. Even the Economist admits that the Yotta is currently not just too much information but "too big to imagine".

The Data special report is a great read - check it out.

PS if you want to read more about what exciting things I think we should be doing with data, check out my series of posts on my concept of EveryYou.

thanks to J.Kleyn for the photo via flickr