We all have our little pleasures, I guess. Some people eat ice cream, some curl up with a good book. Me? I read The Economist. In many ways, it's like trying to get drunk on Guinness: it tastes great, but man is it heavy after awhile. I subscribed at one point, but mostly ended up feeling guilty about not reading it most weeks. So now, it's an occasional purchase before a trip or what have you. But I still love it.

So will you pardon me tooting my horn by mentioning how neat it feels (yes, geeky lame-o neat, I admit) that I am the lead in a story in this week's edition? Turns out that this blog post about watching the World Cup on the train via WiFi caught the eye of a writer working on a story on that very topic, and it went from there.

The story is here.

Tags: wifi, the economist

It's funny that the English language doesn't have a single word for what the Germans call schadenfreude, which wikipedia defines as: "pleasure taken from someone else's misfortune." The Dutch have a similar word ("leedvermaak") which they use in a proverb that goes Geen schoner vermaak dan leedvermaak: No better joy than joy about someone else's sorrow. I used to live in The Netherlands. Got to love those kids. Anyhoo...

In a completely unrelated vein, I note with interest that Steve McArthur is leaving as President of Expedia.com. I am sure that I join a massive chorus of countless others who wish him nothing but the best in his future endeavours.

Tags: Expedia

As some know, I haven't really been on the whole "podcast" bandwagon. I sort of listened to some while online, but the whole subscribe-via-itunes-and-listen-later thing wasn't really something I had bought into.

Until now.

I decided to try to get a few podcasts and listen to them during my commute. So here I sit on the subway listening to "Bill Maher" and laughing out loud. Yesterday, I listened to CBC Radio One's global perspective show "Dispatches" in the car.

I have to say I am really enjoying doing it. In both cases, they are either shows I can't get (Maher is on HBO in the US which I at least don't get on cable here in Toronto) or usually have to miss (the CBC show is on around kids' bedtime).

They are both great, and I have to say that this place-shifting plus fresh-content thing might be handy after all.

(Posted via blackberry)

Tags: podcast, Bill Maher, Dispatches

  As Chair of the Nominating Committee, I've been remiss in not mentioning that the CIRA Board Elections are happening now. If you own a .ca domain, this is your chance to influence the direction of the Internet in Canada, and I would encourage you to check out who is running, what they think, and to vote!

Tags: CIRA

 

Cool to see that RIM is going public with the much- blogged-about-already Pearl, their new multi-tasking (music, camera, expansion slot etc.) device. As a devoted 'berry-man (skip the Chris DeBurgh jokes please ;-)) and having FINALLY recently upgraded to the 8700 (more on that whole story later) I am really pleased to see them getting with the multipurpose program.

But why, oh why are they sticking with the awful phone-not-QWERTY keyboard? Unfortunately, that call means that I, for one, won't be buying. That dinky thing is a nasty way to write an email.

Shame.

Tags: blackberry, rim, pearl

I sampled the new service at a downtown location yesterday. It was easy to get online by getting a userid and password via SMS to my 'berry, though I couldn't figure out how to change either after the fact (e.g. am I stuck with the wacky randomly assigned thing in the future or can I change it?). The service was also a wee bit slow - not the connection, which was both broad and "excellent" for the time I was connected, but the speed whereby pages were being served up was very slow. Not sure what might be behind that.

All in all, it was handy and since it's free for the next 6 months, great value too :-).

Update: Sitting here at my Second Office (the *$ at the northeast corner of Yonge and King here in the Tdot :-)) back online with the Hydro service. Around me, people are having problems getting passwords and userids: upon entering their mobile numbers and hitting enter, the next page deosn't load, so they are getting nowhere. This also happened to a friend yesterday. For me, since I already have login info, I got in right away.

The signal is strong, and I am loaded and viewed a couple of YouTube videos just for the heck of it, and the Slingbox is streaming well to boot. Although, I did turn it off since there's only so much "Backyardigans" an adult should have to watch in one morning, and I had my fill at home ;-)

And as a final note, just as I went to publish this, my connection died.

So, my overall rating? Early days, so I am going to give them some slack and assume that they will work these niggles out. This is "beta" so it is not necessarily indicative of where this system will end up.

Tags: toronto, wifi

After five weeks away, I am back in Toronto and getting ready for the Back to School madness.

We had a great family trip to the Maritimes after our run to Europe, and now I am just starting to get back up to speed with things. Expect more blog posts again from now on (and thanks to those of you who emailed wondering if I had stopped posting ;-)).

In the meantime, if you happen to be near a radio or a computer, I am going to be on CBC Radio One this morning at 10am local time across Canada, as part of a panel discussing The Long Tail.

Hope you are all having a great summer.

Surrounded by a sea of red as the Schu-fosi revel in the local boy's win. There might be a few Ferrari fans in there, but make no mistake that here it is all about Michael. And the local kids are happy.

Not the most exciting race ever - Kimi lost it pretty much right off the bat with an early pit stop, and Jacques New Town did his (sigh) standard "I'm out" move about halfway through.

But watching the Schumi Army - thousands of them, with flags from dozens of countries in view - party hearty is surely a sight to see.

The boys are at it, aiming for position in tomorrow's race. Hot here in Hockenheim, but cooler than yesterday.

The session has already been red flagged with the American Scott Speed wiping out quite nicely. Second time in as many races - he lost it in France last time, and hurt his back.

Should have aimed for Nascar, maybe. Bud and ribs, all 'round!

;-)

That Wife of mine is one smooth operator. Not only did she pull one over on me with a surprise party that lasted an entire weekend with guests from across the Country, but she *also* managed to pull off arranging a trip to Europe without me knowing.

We are sitting in a breakfast spot in Prague (posting via 'berry on the T-Mobile CZ lightning fast Edge network), after visiting the gorgeous spa town of Karlovy Vary and before spending the weekend at the German F1 Grand Prix in Hockenheim. All a complete surprise to Yours Truly.

Maybe being 40 doesn't suck after all!

Oh, wait. It still does.

Sorry for the uber-lame post, but I turn 40 in a week and my wife and best friend managed to completely pull one over on me and I'm am sitting at a cottage on Georgian Bay with a bunch of guys from all over the continent who mean a lot to me, drinking beer and single malt and enjoying the best sunset of the year.

This is - without doubt - the best present I could imagine.

Okay, so I know that the to-do over Rocketboom is frankly silly and tiny, but I still find it remarkable that, with all the interest in this story and where Andrew is taking it next, they are a day late putting their next show up there.

As they say, "enquiring minds want to know" (extremely apt saying on this occasion, as that's about the level of importance this thing has) and from a business perspective, I'd say missing the hugely-anticipated re-launch is likely not a good call, no?

Update: Rocketboom 2.0 beta ;-) is up, and I have to say I found it quite entertaining. And the interim host, Joanne Colan, is pretty strong too. Congrats!

Tags: rocketboom, goatrodeo

Those wacky kids at travel meta-search site Kayak.com look to be all set to burn through a pile of VC money trying to build awareness and reach with what I think will be their first TV creative. Apparently set to run on cable in the US, these spots feel more like an attempt at a viral web thing than a serious TV campaign, yet apparently they are really set to air them.

I could spend a whack of time outlining why they are far off the mark, or why they are clearly more about the agency O.D.-ing on their own self-declared brilliance, or how they seem to have zero relationship to anything close to a meaningful consumer insight, but you know what? I won't. Heck, given that these spots make the frickin' Travel'O'City gnome look like a stroke of brilliance I'm not going to waste the keystrokes.

Next.

Tags: kayak

Why?

Why would he do that? Why would someone with such a stellar career have *that* as the final punctuation? I mean, the Italian guy said something offensive, but c'mon. "Your Coq ain't really all that Sportif" or "Ta mere wears army boots" or ANYTHING can't possibly justify a nasty head butt and a frankly appropriate red card.

But with all that was on the line, with the strong likelihood of penalty kicks and Zizou's freakish skill in that regard...well, it's unfathomable that he would have done that.

Tags: zidane, fifaworldcup

At a backyard bbq for the FIFA final. Mey the best team win, and my that team be France.

I can't help but have this really sinking feeling that we are entering the twilight of the current online boom(let). The froth feels like it is hitting a rolling boil, and I fear the end is nigh. Why? Well, there are a bunch of examples:

~ Lots of the glitterati of the current boom(let) are punching out to "do their own things".

~ The enormous row over the whole "Web 2.0 TM" thing.

~ The seeming gobs of new VC money looking for a home, any home, in the absence of any really compelling exit opportunities and atop crappy track records to boot.

~ Gawker laying off staff to get out ahead what they fear as a coming crash.

~ Conferences, conferences, conferences!!!

~ The current Rocketboom firestorm.

~ And, most definitely the growing hum that "it's different this time."

Well, you know what? It ain't different this time. Like it wasn't different last time. It's just smaller.

I fear it's time to roll up the tent and await Web 3.0. This party is smelling like it's winding down.

(photo credit: http://www.lightbox5.com/likeitmatters/50100138_76bd65c296-2.jpg)

Tags: web20, jumptheshark

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