Lonely Planet first travel brand to have a proper go at Google Wave

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Google Wave may not be setting the world on fire as much as Google hoped given that its current lack of integration into Gmail is an annoying stumbling block and invites are taking a while to filter through.



But this hasn’t stopped some inquisitive types playing around with it during its closed beta phase and integrating existing functionality and tools into the system.



Lonely Planet is one such travel brand which has given it a serious look and has come up with quite an interesting proposition.

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Day Five of Ten – Using online video to market travel

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It has taken a while but the idea that TV and the web are fundamentally different channels is narrowing.



With this in mind it is imperative that travel brands using TV for advertising create their own presence on portals such as YouTube – as indicated on Day Three.



These branded Channels should then be used to aggregate the adspots shown on TV – simple, right?

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Could Orbitz Worldwide be someone’s stocking stuffer?

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Eric Savitz of Baron’s, citing a Credit Suisse research note, wonders whether Orbitz Worldwide could be a takeover target.

I’ve speculated about this before, and the possibility that someone might buy Orbitz still makes sense to me.

The company weathered the booking-fee storm, seems to have found its bearings, and its stock price is still relatively low and trending upwards.

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Expedia woos Choice Hotels franchisees with letter

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As the Expedia-Choice Hotels contract battle enters the next phase, their strategies are emerging as Expedia sought to woo franchisees and Choice accused Expedia of evolving from supplier to revenue manager.

In a sort of disintermediation move, Expedia Inc. went directly to Choice franchisees, attempting to woo them in a communique, obtained by Tnooz. It states: “Choice inaccurately lays the blame for failure to reach acceptable terms for working together squarely on Expedia’s shoulders.”

Expedia adds: “While we no longer are offering Choice hotels on our websites, we are hopeful that we will be able to work with you and Choice in a mutually advantageous manner in the future.”

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Will Nokia pull the Dopplr app from the iPhone?

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Unseasonably hot news from Finland today as it emerges that mobile handset giant Nokia is busy in the Federal District Court in Delaware, US, with plans to sue Apple over patent infringement.



Nokia is taking Apple to task because the company “infringes Nokia patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) standards” – in other words, critical elements of Nokia’s technology for handling wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption.



At a corporate level this could be quite a scrap, given the enormity of what is a stake (the action relates to every iPhone shipped since 2007!) and the size of the companies involved.

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Forrester: OTAs need to spice-up their blandness

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A new Forrester Research study confirms what we’ve known for some time: Online travel agencies struggle to differentiate themselves.

The study, “The Online Travel Brands that Win with U.S. Leisure Travelers,” did conclude that U.S. online leisure travelers find that Expedia.com offers the widest array of destinations and the best customer service, Priceline stands out for its pricing and value, and hotels.com gets the highest marks for its hotel content.

But these three OTAs, which bested Travelocity, Orbitz, Kayak and Hotwire in the survey, shouldn’t clear space for these honors in their trophy cases because almost half of the survey respondents had no opinion about the respective brands, and the differences, even among the winners, weren’t all that dramatic.

Where the report gets interesting is where the authors, Henry Harteveldt and Elizabeth Stark, suggest solutions for what they say consumers view as “a homogenous beige mass” of travel intermediaries.

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Day Four of Ten: Using online video to market travel

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Taking the professional route to produce online video can be daunting – not least because it is naturally going to more expensive compared to some of the examples from Day One.



Crews are needed, locations sourced, permission required (often from government agencies), meaning the whole process feels less webby than that used to produce the supposedly edgy clips found on YouTube.

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Twitter, Google and Bing – The Perfect Storm of travel search

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Travel companies that dismissed micro-blogging service Twitter (“Why do I want to know if someone is eating a bagel or not?”) may well be rethinking their strategy this morning.



News initially from Microsoft’s Bing and a few hours later from Google confirmed that tweets from Twitter will be included in the search duo’s organic results.



Bing has a rudimentary service up and running already. Google’s integration is expected to begin over the coming weeks. Facebook status updates are likely, too. So what?

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Verizon generates more baseball power with mobile cell sites

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It’s heartening to learn that Verizon Wireless has been dispatching generator-powered mobile sites to Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Calif., where Thursday’s New York Yankees-Anaheim Angels baseball playoff game will be held.

Although, as of this writing, the home-team Angels have lacked for energy, the COLTs (Cells on Light Trucks) units are designed to boost “rapid and short-term network response,” says Verizon Wireless, for calls, and text and pic messages transmitted by fans at the stadium or just regular folks in its environs.

We hear that AT&T, beset with complaints about lack of adequate 3G network coverage for its Apple iPhones, likely could use some COLTs, too.

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US Travel Site Crunch – Data Week End October 17 2009

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Most popular travel websites in the US for the week ending October 17 2009.



Data includes Top Ten travel search terms and the Top Ten Agency, Airline and Destination/Accommodation sites.

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