More later, but this is great news for Cendant and bad news for Blackstone. Online 3rd party sites and associated plumbing aren't coming back any time soon.

Update: The potential for Cendant in the travel space had always been that the synergies of having a vertically integrated entity - like a European style tour operator - would pay off. By combining a host of suppliers (Avis, Budget, Wyndham, Ramada, Super 8, Travelodge) and the plumbing to distribute them (the Apollo CRS, Orbitz, CheapTickets.com and even trip.com before them) costs would be reduced and margins fattened up and down the chain. Sadly, that just never happened.

With this breakup and the creation of a pure distribution arm, any hope of that seems out the window. Of course, CRSs and online resellers aren't going away anytime soon, but there sure is every indication that they are struggling to stave off declines in growth and margins.

I guess the good people at Blackstone can see something I don't, or they have other plans. Or perhaps just wringing more cost out means that this can spin out a nice enough ongoing income annuity through the decline that they are fine with it.

But it sure isn't a growth play.


Tags: orbitz, travelport, blackstone, cendant

My friend Mark has a post up riffing on the whole "we don't need your bloody marketing" thing that web 2.0 types tend to wax poetic on. And the post sorta makes me want to scream and shove sharp objects in my eyes.

Why? Because Marketing is, and near as I can tell always has been, the basis upon which virtually any good business has been built, and it misses the point completely. For the record, a-gain: Promotion is only a part of Marketing. An important part to be sure, but jeez louise people, it ain't the whole thing.

When I read things out there in the big world like "to be successful you have to have a product that meets a need, regardless of the marketing" or "the marketing was good, but they didn't get the distribution they needed" or "they had great marketing, but it was too expensive" it drives me batty. Marketing is all of those things. Anybody who thinks that somehow you can create something and then foist it on an unsuspecting public with enough ads and it will work must have a penchant for making their lives a living hell.

Marketing is, at its' core, recognizing a problem and then doing everything to profitably solve it. The best businesses stay completely focused on solving that problem in a way that resonates with their market. So for you webby startups out there, that's the thing to remember. It's not whether or not you can avoid spending money on advertising, it's how well you are making your customers' lives better.

Fact is, if you are doing real Marketing well, everything will be easier.

Tags: marketing

Congrats to the Farecast gang for moving out of private to public beta today. Though, with mentions on TechCrunch and BoingBoing, among others, it's not like my little heads-up here matters. That's some serious b-sphere coverage. Nicely done Mike and team.

Now their challenge is to prove that the whiz-bang, P.R.-friendly airfare predictor feature is more than the flavour-of-the-month, and to continue to build on the solid start of their metasearch tool. Oh, and to move into hotels because that's where the cash is. No small task.

Tags: farecast

 

As I mentioned here, TripHub is a new Seattle-based online travel startup which includes some former Expedia colleagues of mine, and at least one Expedia + msn Travel Channel veteran. Off the top, I offer kudos to all of them for tackling something new, and extra kudos for taking on the very difficult task of helping people manage the tremendously ungainly world of group travel.

As you might take from the last sentence, I went into my tire kick of the site with fairly low expectations. Not because these aren't bright folks, but because group travel is really hard to do. As it turns out, my expectations were probably well placed - at least partially.  This is a pretty good invitations-and-central-repository-like-Evite meets private-label-Hotels.com site, but as a real group travel management tool, they still fall short.

Now, the Evite-esque invitation and central trip record thing is a cool tool. If you have ever used Evite to invite people to a party or event, you can probably imagine applying that concept to multi-person trip planning. Pretty handy. And, they have a private label deal with the Hotels.com/TravelNow crew (all part of the Expedia group of companies) and Viator for activities, which from a revenue perspective should drive affiliate revenue for them. But, from a user perspective, beyond the Evite-esque thing, they don't seem to offer much in terms of true group travel planning assistance.

What do I mean by that? Well, "group travel" is really about people going as a group of more than X people (depending on the supplier) and saving money. Fact is, this functionality is very, very hard to offer online. There are a lot of reasons for that which I won't go into, but more to the point, it does not seem that TripHub has pushed that envelope any further.

To their credit, they do link to group request pages on various supplier sites, as well as promoting "featured links" to these types of pages, so and it looks like they are likely getting some kind of payment for the referral and ad revenue for the features, which is good for them in terms of revenue. But short of aggregating the links, there's little user value there.

The flight search is nothing special - it's a straight-up pass through to the TravelNow IAN platform, and only searches for a maximum of 6 passengers (there's one of those hard group travel planning problems - this is a limitation imposed by the CRS). For true "group" deals, you have to go to the airline's own group booking sites, and then input the details back into TripHub manually. Likewise for the hotel portion: there is certainly no new ground being broken in terms of the search functionality itself (eg: there is no meta search or breakthrough-anything here; it's just vanilla private label Hotels.com). In fact, TripHub offers nothing which makes hotel seeking "groups" easier to book or price multiple rooms at once.

Net/net: while the Evite-esque feature is pretty neat-o, as a real travel planning service and aid to group travel, TripHub doesn't get the job done.

Update: I had a chat with Michael McGinn, TripHub's CFO and Operations guy this afternoon. Michael also happens to be a former colleague, a former Expedia Strategic Planning VP and long time air industry guy. He's also one smart cookie to boot. Michael talked with me about their desire to use solving the problem of people travelling together as a way to get people to keep coming back and build an ongoing audience for advertisers. He stressed that the traditional travel industry idea of "group travel" being about deals is not at the core of what they are offering, and I have to agree that making the prospect of "going together" easier is a good good one. As I said above.

All that said, and with great respect to Michael and the team, I still can't imagine that what they have today is where they are going to end up. It just shouldn't be. Group travel is a big business, and making it truly better in a big way is a nice, chewy, defensible objective. My hope is that, regardless of what they are saying at this point, they do have cracking that big problem as the ultimate goal. Now *that* would be cool.

Tags: triphub

Man, living in a formerly heavily Ukrainian neighborhood has never meant anything until now. Today, it's wall to wall cars-with-flags and honking horns.

Little Italy eat your heart out! Too cool.

Update: It hit me that unless you are following the tournement, you are likely scratching your head as to why this celebration was happening. The reason is that Ukraine beat Switzerland 1-0 in todays's FIFA World Cup match.

Here are a few pics of the spectacle - literally at the end of the street. Yep, this is Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Jeff has a tremendous post here. Long, but worth it.

Lines up with my view of the world, big time - as anyone who has been listening to me for the past, oh, two years, and has been playing any sort of follow-the-money already knows.

 

Today might just be my best sporting event day ever.

England over Ecuador, now five cars out of the Montreal GP in the first 13 laps.

Yee-haw.

 

Reuters is reporting that Boeing is considering selling or even shutting down Conexxion by Boeing, their inflight internet service. Certainly, after spending a reported US$1billion for an asset which is being estimated at having a $150m value, you can sort of understand why.

But...what's with these people? As I mentioned here, the bandwidth to make this possible in the US was just made available by the FCC, and the US is arguably the biggest potential market. Walking now seems tantamount to throwing out the baby before the bathwater is even poured.

Now, I suppose it could be that Boeing has already heard that airlines have zero intention of equipping their aircraft with the necessary gear anytime prior to the freezing over of a very warm place.

But man, if you have come this far, only to see the door to potential mega-adoption open in front of you, doesn't giving up seem just a little silly?

Tags: fccauction65, fcc, boeing, airborneinternet

 

The good people at the Globe and Mail have taken it upon themselves to do a feature on me in this Thursday's edition of their new Report on [small] Business Magazine. It's the second time they are putting it out, and in keeping with their main and respected Report on Business Magazine, they are devoting the last page to something called "Exit Strategy". The people they featured last time were Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr, who sold to Yahoo! This time? It's me.

Now, I don't know what they are going to say (Simon Avery is the author, and a photog followed me around for 3 hours a few weeks back) so I guess we will all learn together on Thursday. All that I will say is that if it is good, it's true. And if it is not, it's clearly all out of context :-)

UPDATE: I am yet to see the paper version since I was travelling, but here is the link. For clarity, contrary to the facts layed out in the piece, I didn't calculate airline yield as a child - I was older than that. And, I didn't move to Seattle to work for USA Networks, but for Expedia, Inc., although Diller had bought us by that point. Also that was in 2003 not 2004. And, I didn't actually bring Signature Vacations online - I was about 6 months into that project when I moved on to Expedia.

Tags: globeandmail, reportonbusiness

Heading to Ottawa for a CIRA meeting, watching Argentina vs. Netherlands on the 'puter via wifi and a slingbox. 24:13 in. Both teams playing well.

Feed sorta dodgy, but on the whole...man, this ROCKS.

ps: If you applied for a spot on the CIRA Board, we are meeting to discuss who we will put forward tomorrow.

GO HOLLAND!

Update: here's a sample of the quality of the picture. Not bad, for wifi on a moving train.

Update 2: Ended in a 0-0 tie. Caught the last bit here in the Ottawa train station. Is this the future of media? Well, something like this sure feels likely...

Tags: slingbox, worldcup, train

...these things, which I will dive into more later.

1. Is it the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end? With all the people jumping off to "do their own things" (Tara, Scoble, Om) it sure feels like one of those.

2. Some other former Expedia folks are a part of a team which has launched a group travel site called TripHub. I am going to check it out and report back.

3. A good friend and the former President of Expedia Corporate Travel, Matt Hulett, is now doing a shopping start-up called Mpire. Another one to check out and report on.

4. There are a lot of Canadian online travel sites starting to advertise. I was driving along and heard 3 radio jingles in a row. Great that they are promoting themselves. But too bad they still suck.

Tags: tara, om, scoble, triphub, mpire

I wish my berry had a camera, since I am standing here on King Street across from the TSX, marvelling that there are *hundreds* of people standing on the sidewalk watching the France-Switzerland match on the Reuters jumbotron in front of their building.

This sure is an event beyond compare, isn't it? This is Toronto for heaven's sake. Pretty cool. Really something to see.

Tara Hunt, one of the keynotes at mesh, announced that she is leaving Riya, her employer, to do her own thing to grow her Pinko Marketing brand.

While I certainly wish her well and think she's tremendous, I have to wonder about the wisdom in leaving a hot pre-IPO start-up where she has been instrumental in pulling in boatloads of users and heading off on her own, child in tow and TN-1 visa in hand (yikes).

She says that she and Riya have grown apart, and that sure does happen, but I hope she knows what she's doing.

Break a leg, Tara.

Tags: tarahunt, riya, mesh06, web2.0

Sorry, but with due respect to the folks behind this now-defunct AJAX homepage (uhh...and the world needed another one of those, why, exactly?): When you chose that name, um, what did you expect?

See also Mark Evans.

Tags: fold, goatrodeo

I know it's hardly in keeping with what I write about here, but if you haven't seen this video, you simply have to. According to the email that was forwarded to me with the link, here is the story:

This tunnel in Russia is the longest in-city tunnel of Europe. There is a river running over it and water leaks at some points. When the temperature reaches -38 degrees like it did this winter, the road freezes and the result is the attached video taken during a single day with the tunnel camera.

Keep an eye out about thirty seconds in. After you've seen it, you might want to reconsider public transit...

Tags: Lefortovo tunnel

Seems that's what a bunch of the studios are saying. Their US$150m investment in Movielink, the jointly owned movie download site, hasn't gone anywhere and they are looking to get out. Business Week reports that they have been shopping it, to little avail, and that they have one year of cash left.

It all sounds a little like what happens when you get competitors trying to figure out how to work together and keep a Genie in a bottle, all at the same time. Goat rodeo. And who loses? The potential customer, and category adoption overall.

Now, I get that infighting and arrogance on the part of the studios may well be a big part of the problem here (as Carlo at Techdirt says), and their seeming inability to move beyond just allowing people to watch on their computer screens is a biggee. But - and maybe it's just me - given this brave new broadband planet we are living on, where convergence is just really starting to start and new forms of media are only now starting to pay their own way as money follows the audience, could it be that now might not be the best time to be getting out of the movie download business?

Maybe, say, fixing it might be an idea?

See also Tim Lee's blog.

Tags: movielink

I am really surprised that what is potentially the biggest breakthrough in inflight customer-facing technology since the overhead light - and a new revenue source, to boot - has been met with abject silence in the traditional and online media. Although kudos to Matt Lake at CNet for attempting to surface it.

FCC Auction 65, or the sale of bandwidth in the 800MHz radio telephone range, has the potential to change everything about the travel experience and make a bunch of people a lot of money, and yet nobody's talking about it. Why does it matter? Because this spectrum sale will pave the way to airborne WiFi in the USA.

Inflight internet isn't new. Lufthansa has led the way with what I believe is the biggest install of the Conexxion by Boeing service of airborne WiFi. Many other carriers offer it to a limited extent as well. In the past, I've even used Verizon's inflight dial-up in the US to access limited internet services. But did you know that no airline or provider can offer WiFi in the US because the bandwidth to operate it has not been made available by the FCC?

That's what this auction is about. And as opposed to the last go-round when those poor sucker cellphone providers spent jillions to put lonely little phones in the backs of people's seats, this time the winner seems likely to get some serious spoils. So far, the bids are up to US$38 million.

I can tell you having used the Lufthansa / Boeing service, it's pretty sweet. I watched streaming video, IM-ed, could have VOIP-ed if I wanted to, know people who have used Slingbox to watch their home TV channels over the Atlantic and in fact I even SMS-ed my wife when I learned that we would be landing in Newfoundland to deplane a sick passenger on board. Will the impact on flying in the US be immediate? No. Airlines - especially US airlines - are cheap and service additions aren't at the top of the To Do list. But massive change starts somewhere, and in my estimation a massive change in flying is starting with FCC Auction 65.

Thanks Phil for alerting me to this.

Tags: fccauction65, fcc, boeing, lufthansa, airborneinternet

So the Vonage IPO is tanking we are supposed to be surprised? Jumpin's. One look at their marketing spend / efficiency numbers (marketing as a percentage of gross profit) together with the increasing competitiveness in the consumer VOIP space and anyone with half a brain would have questioned the viability of the thing. What's worse, though, is that because they set aside up-to 15% of the IPO for their customers, it is many of Vonage's very expensively-acquired customers who are now left holding the bag. And - gasp! - some of them are ticked.

The New York Times is reporting that there is so much backlash from their customers that Vonage is offering to protect  the brokers who handled the sale in the event that their customers don't pay for the shares. They were issued at US$17 but have already fallen to US$12.50 as of yesterday. As Mark says, this is a nice goodwill gesture, but it says more about the validity of the IPO itself than anything else. Michael Urlocker has a good round-up of the history of this IPO itself. Henry Blodget does his normal yeoman's job here.

You know, this reminds me a lot of when Canada 3000 went public. At the time, there were heavy rumors that they had shopped the company around to all-and-sundry and couldn't get a taker. So, what to do? Is it possible that somebody thought "Hey, let's hoist it on the public, they'll buy anything"? You bet. And buy they did, no doubt many customers and employees among the purchasers.

They were gone in less than 2 years.

Vonage, and investors, take note. Oh, and yes, the ad below *is* ironic.

Tags: vonage, vonageipo, goatrodeo

Amazing how abuzz the mainstream media is today with the WestJet apology story. There's lots, lots more out there if you care to look. All the usual suspects are in with their $0.02. Heck, I don't know if I should feel badly or happy for poor Jacques Kavafian. He just can't seem to shake being the go-to Quote Boy for all things aviation, no matter where he goes. Which means, his services are less in demand of late, so this flurry must feel like old times. And that leads to the key message for me in all this coverage:

The business media really, really misses the  bad-old-days of Canadian aviation.

I mean, there was so much material! First there was AC privatization, then there were the years of AC/CP dogfights, charter airline collapses, the CP acquisition - with it's headline-friendly Quebec-vs.-The West overtones - then more charter airline collapses, some start-ups, some shut-downs, the odd bankruptcy, more start-ups, a little spying, more collapses, a few labour crises...

Phew! What a journalistic buffet! Pages and pages of copy, jillions and jillions of pixels. High fives all round the newsroom, the industry is a complete mess. Yippee!

Not to mention all of the personality stuff. Beddoes vs. Milton to be sure, but there have been plenty of other odd ducks along the way. Anyone remember LeBlanc at Intair and Royal? Obadia at Nationair? Deluce at Air Ontario and Canada 3000 (still in the picture with *yet another* start-up to-be. Sigh)? Kinnear at Canada 3000? What is it about aviation that attracts these folks? And of course there's the general sexiness of the business and the romance of travel that adds an allure. Let's face it: for years, the airline biz was the news story gift that kept on giving.

But now? How sad. Biz is relatively stable. AC is stronger than they have been in a long while, Uncle Miltie is about to ride off into the sunset (complete with Reguly's "gosh, I'm sorry I called you a knob all those years, I really think you're a great guy, now you take care" story ($) a while back), WS continues to do it's golly-we're-nice thing, and we haven't had a major failure in, well, months. In fact, there hasn't been much until this little redux of the already-told spying story fell from the sky to fill a whack of column inches. Call it a quick reminder of remember-when. Fuel prices are a pain of course and AC is still doing stuff to tick people off, but broadly things are pretty good.

Man, those reporters must be pissed.

Update: Further evidence of this in today's Globe and Mail, where reporter Brent Jang has a front page non-story about Clive Beddoes. Why non-story? Well, the premise is to discuss Beddoes' future plans, but given that he tried to exit his role as President in 1999 with the disastrous hiring of multi-former-AC-role-boy Steve Smith, the idea that Clive wants to move on is not exactly news. But hey, he was in town and it fills a nice news hole, so my call is that this week's spying-redux flurry has reminded them of that. Maybe airline news is going to be the New Black. Again.

Tags: aircanada, westjet, spying

It turns out that WestJet was in fact spying on Air Canada, has now admitted to it and formally apologized.

To refresh your memory, the claim was that a co-founder of WS an analyst who used to work at AC, Jeffrey Lafond, took advantage of the fact that AC never turned off his access to the AC online staff booking system, and that he used it to check flight loads. This information was used to help WS adjust pricing in response to how AC was doing on a given route. He The co-founder who used this analyst's access to get the information, Mark Hill, left the company, and Beddoes apologized at the time. AC subsequently filed a $220m lawsuit against WS.

This has now been settled. The whole release is here.

The really good news? Rather than WS paying something in retribution to AC, they will be making a $10m donation to children's charities across the country in the name of both carriers. So rather than AC potentially stirring up more negative PR about "pounds of flesh" or whatever, the kids of the country win. And hopefully the YYC cowboys have learned a lesson about playing by the rules.

Nice.

Tags: aircanada, westjet

There's certainly enough been written on this, and by people far better informed than me (check out Rob's great post, or Mathew's, for more on that) but for the record, I certainly get why O'Reilly's management company would try to protect their mark and agree with the logic of Battelle's response.

Was the way it was handled silly? Yup, a PR disaster waiting to happen. And happen it did. Do they really have a right to these words as they relate to a conference? Heck, I don't know. Didn't we fight this battle years ago with "Xerox"? I mean, these types of things get fought about all the time. That's for the lawyers (and depending what they say, we will likely change how we describe mesh in future).

But in principle, I'm with the theory of protecting the mark, in the context given, if it's theirs. If not, why ever invest in creating something that develops meaning, which is in and of itself valuable?

Tags: web20, oreilly, trademark, bunfight

Farecast, a Seattle-based travel start-up, is in private beta. I was invited to try it out, and I did. On the whole, it's pretty good - but I am fearful that beyond the relatively small amount of whiz-bang buzz their "hook" adds, they are really just another meta-search site. Albeit a clean and well-designed one.

Their "hook" is that they claim to be able to predict what will happen with fares, thereby providing customer value by guiding when someone should buy to maximize their fare savings. Pretty cool on the face of it, and the visual presentation is also pretty neat. But does it really add a lot of value? I think it's a snappy feature and no doubt the algorithm is impressive, but will it pull them in and keep them? I'm unconvinced.

Beyond that, the site is clean, nice and ajax-y and the search display is easy to interpret. But I can't say that it is orders of magnitude better than any other meta-sites, or say Orbitz's grid for instance.

Another unfortunate negative (mentioned by Michael Arrington in his post) is that, despite pulling schedule info from Southwest and JetBlue, they don't pull pricing info into the initial fare display. This is a pity, as it pushes those options to the bottom of the display and potentially skews the prices listed. Said another way, if one of those carriers offered the lowest price, you'd never know it and the prices shown as lowest might be wrong simply because they aren't shown. But Southwest has a longstanding history of not allowing their fares to show in an aggregated display (possibly because head-to-head they frequently don't compare as well as people might expect) so Farecast getting this access would be quite a coup - and one they haven't managed as yet.

Net/net: The predictor is a nice little whiz-bang feature that has some PR value, but essentially Farecast is just another meta-search entry in what is becoming a crowded market.

Update: TechDirt says that if it casts light on airline pricing, it will have value. Maybe at the highest or industry level, but adding stress to travellers lives by telling them to wait before they buy won't necessarily make their lives better. And how are the carriers going to feel about a site that drives them to lower yields?

Update 2: The folks at Farecast gave me 25 invites to share with others who might like to kick the tires, too. If you'd like one, let me know here or at stuart [at] stuartmacdonald [dot] ca.

Thanks Mike - another Expedia alum - for the invite.

Tags: farecast, travel, metasearch

Given that I was born in 1966, I don't really have memories of 1968. But something tells me that if I did, Michael Ignatieff would be bringing those early days of Pierre Elliott Trudeau-mania back to mind.

I was fortunate enough to attend a fundraiser for Michael last night here in Toronto, and then have a brief chat with him and his lovely wife Susanna immediately following. I was connected in to the campaign via Brad Davis, who is running policy and web stuff for Michael and spoke on the political panel at mesh last week. I am really interested in how the web is going to influence politics in Canada, and so I may have provided the odd suggestion to Brad ;-) I should also say that I am not political per se - in fact, I'm not member of any party, and in the past I've voted for everybody from the NDP to the PCs (I don't think I could ever support the nouveau-Reformistas in power today, but anyway...). And, I think that the Liberal Party still faces some serious challenges to overcome the faults of a few in the whole Sponsor-gate thing. But enough about that. That's the past. I went to hear about the future.

So, let me talk about Michael. This is one smokin' smart and passionate dude. He was at the end of a long day, and he still managed to illicit a depth of thoughtfulness, clarity and emotional connection with the topics and the audience that was truly impressive. And what a breath of fresh air from a potential political leader. There were none of the traditional platitudes, the canned delivery of soundbites, or the trying to stay "on message". I mean, here was a guy that actually *knows* this stuff. He can comment on Darfur because he just bloody *knows* it. He can talk about investing in education because he just bloody *knows* it. He can speak to needing to do right by the environment for our families and futures because he just bloody *knows* it.

When is the last time you can remember a serious contender for high political office in this country who was so clearly smart *and* compassionate? Right. It's been awhile, hasn't it.

In fact it last started in 1968, by my estimation.

Go get 'em, Michael.

Tags: michaelignatieff

I have a readership? Who knew! From the emails I'm getting, it looks like some folks are wondering where I went.

No, I haven't stopped writing, no I'm not pulling a "Coyne" (there's a line for you - CC attribution, please :-))

It's just that since mesh I've been freakishly busy with all manner of stuff and barely online - call it all 'berry, all the time - and I've let things slip.

So, consider this a quick "I'm back" post via 'berry, with more regular posts to come starting tomorrow.

Lots of cool stuff going on.

I'm on with Leo and Amber doing "Inside the Net" tonight. It was great. Thanks, you two.

Tags: mesh06

I'm still both tired and buzzed from mesh, but I wanted to put some cogent thoughts out there, while they're still fresh, before coming with a bigger, deeper thing.

I think that the key take away for me is in those four words inside the logo up there. When we sat down and came up with the idea for this thing, and then went through the whole process of deciding what we wanted to "be," those four words best summed it up: mesh, connect, share and inspire. Help shine a light towards the future, and begin to create a platform to showcase the best ideas.And here in Canada, Toronto specifically.

Take a look at that logo and let the words rattle around inside you a bit. Then,  imagine what an event represented by that would look like. Got that picture?

Well, I think if you were there on Monday and Tuesday of this week, you'd say that's what we did. It feels damn good.

Tags: mesh06

Via 'berry from the room again. This morning, if I do say so myself, has been tremendous. Rubel was just great - we talked business, if you will, since that's my thing, and he really locked in. There was an, um, interesting discussion around character blogs, but let's leave that alone :-)

Kedrosky is a rock star. 'Nuff said.

Posting via 'berry, but just had a Queen's student, Alexandra Skey, say "thanks" for the fact that we did a student deal. She is having a wonderful time and getting a lot out of it.

That really means a lot.

Maybe next time, we can offer more student tix (heyyyyy, sponsors :-)).

It's today. Rock 'n' roll :-)

Thanks for your continued interest in snagging a ducat, but we are really, really done. No spots remain, no tickets at the door, no, uh, nothing.

Thanks to all for your incredible support. See those of you who are registered tomorrow.

Tags: mesh06tags, web2.0, conference, toronto

Congrats to Jay, David and Tara for a great BarCampTDot event today. I wish I could have been there longer and participated more, but last minute mesh-prep tied we mesh-ies up all afternoon.

I got there at the end of dinner and there was still a great turn out. There were apparently 130 Camp-ers at the peak - and a beer keg to boot :-). It is so great to see the Toronto tech community really coming together in lots of ways these days, and I am pleased to have been able to support it. Rob, Mike and mesh did, too.

I got there late, what with that last minute mesh stuff, which likely broke the un-rules, but I hope they will forgive me. Nice work, folks.

Tags: barcamp, barcamptdot

We are done, as of a few minutes ago. Thanks to all - sponsors, speakers, suppliers and participants.

Profit fell by 51% and the stock tumbled after hours.

What to say? Well...

1. Not a shocker. Anybody looking at public reach numbers on the US business could tell they did not pull in their typical Q1 "pop". If people don't come, they can't buy.

2. They appear to be spending like drunken sailors.

3. Their recent ad campaign appears to have failed miserably (to wit: their Price Guarantee, which they can't really offer because they don't control the price, and worse yet customers neither believe nor care about). Or they cut spend dramatically, or both.

4. I've heard that something like 50% of Expedia Bellevue employees are new in the past 18 months. Virtually all of the senior team are new.

5. They continue to look at international growth for their future, but suppliers getting smarter and the rise of paid search must be making it harder to stake a claim.

6. Margins must be under serious pressure, as suppliers try to reduce distribution costs and reliance on third parties.

That said, my call is that the Canadian business is likely still doing okay, and I feel good about that.

The rest? Ouch.

Tags: expedia, q1

I just posted a whack of niggly details about mesh, this coming Monday and Tuesday at MaRS in Toronto. Check it out, and if you haven't done so, register now.

The old "book early to avoid disappointment" adage actually applies here. It's selling very quickly, with just a handful of spots remaining - don't miss out.

Tags: mesh06tags, web2.0, conference, toronto

Find out more or apply here, and feel free to ping me with more questions.

Tags: CIRA

I hesitate to write this up given the support Rogers is showing for mesh (and I truly am thankful for that), but given how frustrating this has been and how many people I've told already, I figure I might as well. It's become a bloody dinner party topic already.

What a service disaster I've had with these people. It's especially silly given that I've been ready to pay them for new hardware for about a month, and they have been seemingly unable to take my money. Yes, really. Here's the whole sordid tale of woe:

It started back before Christmas. I received a lovely, expensive direct mail piece from them - well, Rogers "Office of the Chief Marketing Officer" actually. All embossed and lovely, with a stamp and everything. Having spent the odd dollar on marketing (or several hundred million in fact) in past lives, I thought "Hmmm that's an expensive piece...I'm going to open that." Which I do, to read that I am being invited to buy a BlackBerry at a discounted price.

This is great!

Except, of course, for the fact that I have had a BlackBerry, from Rogers, for several years, and had been spending upwards of several hundred dollars a month with them for some time. "Hmmm" I say to myself. "This doesn't feel like a good use of Rogers' scarce ad dollars". So, being the good guy I am - and a little ticked off with the silliness, frankly - *and* given that their CMO has put his name and phone number on the lovely letter, I decide to call him (sidebar: in case you don't know, these things are done by ad agencies - usually ones that specialize in direct mail. In fairness, it is quite possible that the CMO had not even seen the piece). I leave him a voicemail,  including my Rogers phone number, alerting him to the fact that it could be that his agency has messed something up ("I'd expect that 'BlackBerry? Yes/No' would be a basic filter on your data run"). And I get on with my day.

Now, imagine my surprise - and tremendous impressed-ness - when I get an SMS from him later that day, acknowledging my voicemail and thanking me for my call. I respond, thinking "nicely done" and figure that is that.

But no. Several weeks later, what falls through my mailbox? Another lovely letter. From Rogers' CMO guy. Letter goes along the lines of "We recently sent you a letter inviting you to buy a discounted BlackBerry in error - we know you have one already - what we meant to send you was this offer of a new high-speed BlackBerry at a great price." And I think "good on them - they made a mistake, they recognized that they looked silly to a big batch of customers, likely valuable ones, and either they or their agency is making good." I mention it to a few people, decide not to to take them up on it, and move on.

Fast forward to about a month ago. Now, all the cool kids have the new 8700 and I figure "okay, time for me to get one too." So I trundle on down to my local Rogers store (Bloor West Village, Toronto) to buy one. No expectations of  the previous great deal, though I expected that they could see that I spent a bit and might cut me a deal, as tends to happen with these sorts of things. I walk in. Say "Hi. I want to buy a new 8700." Lady goes to the computer and says "it looks like you have a pending hardware upgrade. Yes?" I say "No" and she says "they just upgraded the system and it's acting kind of weird sometimes. I can't do anything else. I need to call and things are so bad right now because of this change that it takes a long time to get through. Can I call you later?" And I'm thinking "this is nuts, but hey, things happen" and say "Sure." Needless to say, she never calls. And when I call her, "the store is busy" and she can't talk. Well. Isn't that super.

Fast forward to yesterday. *Again* I walk to my local Rogers store, this time with my 5 year old in tow. Guess what? Same deal. It's now been *a month*. System is still busted. Still can't take my money. Same question about "pending upgrade". Same "can I call you?" To their credit, this time, she (a different person) does call, to say that whoever in the service department will do whatever and that in 48 hours or so they should - finally - be able to take my money.

Somehow I think we all know how this is going to turn out, don't we? How embarrassing.

Man, if it wasn't for the GSM international coverage thing, I would certainly be taking my business elsewhere.

What a goat rodeo.

UPDATE: Well, ride 'em cowboy, the goat rodeo continues. To their credit, the same woman who called me yesterday called me back late today, and was very pleasant. Sadly, that and apparently no amount of money will get me my new 'Berry. She spoke with their IT people who are apparently quite familiar with my "stuck in a pending upgrade" problem, and have *no way to solve it*. Seriously. They had hoped that whatever fix they have been working on would be in place by now, but gosh no luck. So the option presented to me? Call Rogers Customer Relations (a.k.a. in most companies as The Complaints Department) to have *them* help me figure out how I can give them my money.

Yippee-ki-yay! Goat rodeo, ho!

So parking the whole "this is silly, why should I be stuck fighting to get this done?" question, I have to wonder about a more basic business issue. I mean, I'm just one guy and the 'Berry I have will work just fine so, beyond what is now the humour of this, I'm not busted up about it. But more importantly, I can't possibly be the only person stuck in this holding pattern, can I? How many customers must there be like me, unable to upgrade to a new whatever, because of this unsolvable glitch? What kind of ripples might that be having back into hardware manufacturers, Rogers handset revenue etc.? I sure hope I am wrong, but this is making me go hmmmm...

Goat rodeo indeed.

Tags: rogers, goatrodeo

All great that Google is set to make a bunch of big announcements at their Press Day next week, and there is certainly much chatter about a big Health play. Though in fairness, some like mesh Keynoter Kedrosky are calling for a ban on new Google products until they get the ones they already have in prime-time shape.

But nobody is talking about Travel. I don't get it. Huge category, big dollars, obvious play, and yet zero discussion.

Odd, no?

Tags: google, travel, troogle

For the past 50 or more years, advertising has been based on one basic concept: yelling at people via the television, works. You could get enough of them in one place, nice and passive, and if you delivered the right message enough times you could create awareness. From that (and I simplify) awareness led to trial, trial led to preference, preference led to loyalty. At the heart of this process were the assumptions that (a) you could get enough people in one place to allow for scale and (b) the message was for the marketer to control.

Fast forward to 2006, and that past starts to feel like a trip to Never-never Land. Companies are spending 50% or more of their ad dollars on things like paid search, the money that's left is being cast across extremely fragmented markets, PVRs and Tivo are at long last making commercial-skipping "Me TV" a reality in a way that VCRs never really did.

Clearly, for marketers with a job to do and agencies and networks who would like to keep their jobs, this is a challenge of the first order. So what is the answer?

As we sit here today, I don't think anybody knows. People talk about micro-tactics and multiple small efforts, but how does that work when you need to reach tens-of-millions of people? This is not clear. You hear about "conversations" being important, but how do you control your message in that environment? Feels to me that you just don't. And on top of that, you have an agency and broadcast community that seems to want to wish these changes away and keep doing what they have always done. I've seen *that* movie: travel industry in around 1998, anyone?

At mesh we are tackling these topics with some of the smartest people in the field, and today Mathew, Rob, Mark are joining the discussion, too. I have a bit of a different take on the mesh blog, and Mike has a good post about how we are putting these principles to work promoting the conference.

If you care about this topic, you can't afford not to be at mesh. Register today.

Tags: marketing, media, mesh06tags, web2.0

Sorry, had to post this snippet from a SideStep press release this afternoon:

"SideStep, Inc. (www.sidestep.com), the Web's leading travel search engine..."

Well, hey, adding activities - which they just did - might be super-dee-duper and all as Brian says, but, um, Rob, you better gimme a puff of that when you are done, and then go check your reach numbers. It's clearly making you kids light-headed.

Tags: sidestep, travel

I spent the afternoon with a few hundred other Canadian digi-types at the first-ever  Sympatico-msn Digital Ad Summit. First off, props to those mesh-sponsoring msn kids for pulling off a very strong event (nice work, Patrick - and thanks for the invite) and for attracting a very tech-savvy crowd. As a co-founder of mesh, and other big events in past lives, I have a deep appreciation of the, um, challenges of event production and this one came off very well.

Also kudos for presenting a very strong line-up, though I must say that Bob Garfield was a disappointment. I was actually really looking forward to hearing the whole Chaos Theory he espouses (and I subscribe to) regarding the implications of the turmoil in mass media, broadcasting and advertising. Unfortunately, he likely should have been stopped at the border. His talk, while rich in good stuff, was overshadowed by a condescending tone, out-of-touch Canada vs. US quips and punch lines which fell tortilla-flat. He seemed tremendously out of touch with the fact that his audience were among the most tech with-it folks in Canada. As opposed to those in, oh I don't know, North Korea, who might have been more likely to marvel at his digi-smart pronouncements. Shame.

That said, Steve Rubel kicked it (he's back in 2 weeks at mesh) as did Jeff Cole (whom my wife and I will have the pleasure of dining with tomorrow night. Oh boy, talking 'net future with the man presiding over all that data, while enjoying a nice bottle of Rioja? I'm like a kid with candy :-)). The gentleman from France who discussed mobile and media was fascinating, and while they are clearly miles ahead over there, I still can't get past thinking that we are at least three years away from it really taking off here.

Mark was there with me and shares his thoughts on Cole's talk. In all,  it was a great and thought-provoking event.

Tags: msn, sympatico, steverubel, jeffcole, bobgarfield, mesh06tags

One of the things we will be exploring at mesh is the impact that social media and the interaction that web 2.0 is enabling is having on politics and society.

In the US, for instance, political blogs have almost become mainstream, with some sporting weekly reach and unique visitors numbers which exceed all but a handful of major newspapers. The Huffington Post, Captain's Quarters...the list goes on and on, and the influence grows.

Not to mention the role that the web has played in political party politics Stateside. Dean for America, (now Democracy for America) Howard Dean's site during his last, ill-fated run for the Democratic nomination, has become viewed as the model for how to use the web efficiently for engagement and fund-raising. At it's peak, people were *paying*  to watch Dean eat a hotdog. Yup, really.

Canada is far away from that. In fact, you could say that there is huge evidence that Canadian political parties, steeped in senior back-room leadership who still might well have people print their emails for heaven's sake, are far out of that loop, despite superficial attempts to look like they aren't. Personally, I think unless that changes, they will have their communal butts handed to them online within two years.

In any event, politics and society is up for discussion at mesh. I have a post up on the mesh blog, and Rob Hyndman who is running that stream has some thoughts here. Mark and Mathew  also chime in. Mike just added a nice post about how his Dad is prime for taking his political thoughts online.

Hope to continue the conversation with you at mesh.

Tags: mesh06tags, politics, web2.0, blogging