Larry Smith of Thematix has previously written several excellent posts in Tnooz about semantic technologies in the travel industry.

In particular, their potential to create truly personalized offers by adding distinct value to travel offers based on customer data.

At OpenTravel, we’re turning the abstract into the concrete by building a semantic ontology for the car rental industry, including thinking through what it takes to actually plan for a semantically enhanced booking experience, what we call semantic offers.

So I thought we’d share some of the lessons we’ve learned by using a basic online transaction as an example.

I should note that this example is based on the supplier company not knowing who the customer is, so it is not able to present a “personalized” offer, that is, an offer to a known individual.

This example is based on non-personal but still actionable data passed from one trading or traffic-referral partner to another. For all the talk out there, personalized offers in the travel industry are a future phenomenon.

It’s much more common currently for partners to exchange information about a transaction, not about a person.

Semantic offer technology: a not-too-distant scenario

Although there are lots of ways to implement this technology, let’s look at a semantically enhanced web booking experience that shows how semantic offers might be integrated into availability processing on a travel supplier’s branded website.

In this example, an airline supplier has partnered with three car rental suppliers, but only one of them, ABC Car Rental, has implemented semantically enhanced services in their booking path.

Ted Smith needs to take a one-day business trip to California but has decided to extend the trip by a week and bring along his wife and children for a family vacation.

Ted starts his trip planning by going to the XYZ Airlines website and entering his dates and airports. Ted reviews flight availability options, makes a booking and selects four seats in proximity of each other.

Included with his online booking confirmation is the option to “add a rental car” to his trip.

Ted needs a rental car so after selecting the option, XYZ Airlines sends an availability request to three of their car rental supplier trading partners to request offers, which the airline will present in a single car rental offer page.

In addition to core information about Ted’s flight, the availability request contains other information that a semantically enhanced system can use during car rental offer processing.

The two car suppliers without semantic systems use the core information to determine availability of their inventory, and their availability results include three classes of vehicle with varying prices.

When ABC Car Rental receives the availability request, their semantic search engine takes charge and looks at all the data in Ted’s reservation request, including the number of tickets booked, the class of the tickets, loyalty program participation and the fact that there are two adults and two children.

An assumption is made that this is a family trip and accordingly their three car offers include an “Ultimate Family Vacation Vehicle”.

Ted looks at the nine rental car offers returned by the three rental car companies and immediately selects and books the “Ultimate Family Vacation Vehicle”, which is a minivan with a family entertainment package – even though this offer has the highest rate.

So how did ABC Car Rental, which basically has the same fleet inventory as the other two car suppliers, create the offer that most appealed to Ted?

Planning for semantic search technology: adapting your inventory to appeal to your customers

A diverse and complex collection of factors influence consumer trip planning and purchasing behavior, and while semantic technology can’t provide a crystal ball for each one of your customers, it can help you sell more product by categorizing and describing your inventory and services in a way that is aligned with your customer travel segments and scenarios.

The process of adapting your inventory to appeal to your customers does not mean that you’ll be making any physical changes to it; instead you’ll have to re-think the features and services associated with the inventory and how they pertain to what you know about your customer and their trip.

Keep in mind that a successful semantic technology implementation needs data – the more the better. For travel suppliers, this can be challenging for two reasons:

1. Your data is not neatly packaged in one central repository; bits and pieces of your data are spread throughout disparate data sources and systems
2. The majority of information you are storing and maintaining is in an unstructured (or unknown) form to a semantic engine.

To address the first challenge, travel suppliers may want to consider third-party companies that create centralized data warehouses.

The second challenge can be resolved by implementing an ontology, which is a structured way of specifying a variety of data elements (such as rental cars or hotel rooms), and identifying the abstract associations and relationships between them.

Step 1: Understand what you sell and how you sell it

This first step is a great example of why marketing and IT teams should collaborate from the onset of the project. You will need to know both the details about your inventory and the complexities of how the inventory is sold through different sales channels.

Considerations include:

• Corporate Purchasing Restrictions: You may be contractually obligated to offer specific types of inventory and services to your corporate clients due to negotiated rate agreements.
• Locality-Based Purchasing Restrictions: You may have limitations on what inventory and services can be sold locally versus internationally.
• Loyalty Program Promotions: You may have a loyalty program that your customers participate in that guarantees upgrades and/or preferred pricing based on program levels.
• Marketing Initiatives: You may have ongoing (time-sensitive) marketing initiatives that offer a specific type of inventory and services at a promotional rate.
• Trading Partner Agreements: Similar to corporate purchasing restrictions, you may be contractually bound to offer specific types of inventory and services to various trading partners.

So why is this exercise necessary? Your semantic engine will need to know about these types of restrictions so the appropriate rules can be applied before, during or after semantic offer processing.

ABC Car Rental IT and marketing teams collaborated to make an “inventory to sales channel model” that described specific data fields that could constrain offer processing by either including or excluding inventory, and in some cases, such as time-sensitive marketing initiatives (perhaps identified by a promotion code), bypassing semantic search processing entirely.

As part of this exercise, they determined a rules engine component capable of invoking semantic processing constraints was required and its basic functional elements should include:

• A GUI-interface to allow the marketing team to enter time-sensitive promotional information
• An automated feed from the sales and marketing system to manage rules associated with corporate accounts and trading partner agreements
• A real-time interface to their loyalty program system to determine benefits associated with various program levels

How did this step affect Ted?

He did not enter any information that would have triggered the rules engine component, such as a promotion ID, corporate ID or car rental loyalty program number, so he was eligible for a semantic offer.

Step 2: Determine what you know about your customers

This step is a two-part process that includes:

• Understanding what data you already have about your existing customers and where that data resides
• Understanding what data you can derive about unidentified customers and how you obtain that data.

Let’s assume your company already has some type of data about your existing customers – stored booking and itinerary data, customer profile data and/or loyalty program data, etc.

From a semantic technology perspective, this is known as explicit data because it is based on information that a customer has either given you or on their past purchase behavior.

Your semantic engine will want to know about explicit data for two reasons. The first is that past behavior and purchases can be a great indicator of future behavior and purchases.

The second is customer profiles that include travel preferences are a goldmine of information that can be used when processing a semantic offer.

For example, a customer’s past purchases may indicate they typically fly economy class, but their preferences may show they prefer business class and have opted-in to marketing offers from an airline supplier.

• From a semantic offer perspective, a quick check can reveal that when the customer has flown economy class there has been an associated corporate ID in the reservation, indicating their company has a negotiated rate and restrictive travel policy.
• From a semantic processing perspective in this example, if the customer has not included a corporate ID in an availability request, no constraints need to be applied to the processing and they would be eligible for a semantic offer.

For the second part of this process, the task at hand involves identifying all the methods your company uses to receive inventory availability requests and what data is contained in the request so you can determine what data may be significant for semantic engine processing.

If you’re using XML or another structured data format, you have a head start as each of your sales channels will be sending data in the same format. From a semantic technology perspective, this is known as implicit data because it is based on dynamic information (versus stored or factual) that an unidentified customer has provided.

Why is this exercise necessary? Your semantic engine will need to know how to weight or influence the information that it receives to create a semantic offer.

Explicit data typically has a higher weight on the semantic offer processing, but in cases where explicit data is not available, the semantic engine needs to rely solely on implicit data, and it is important to the engine to know if some portion of the implicit data is more significant than others.

For this step, the ABC Car Rental IT team:

Identified all sources of stored (explicit) customer data, including:

• Determining whether or not they had a pre-existing interface to the data or would need to create one
• Creating a consolidated map of all of the available data fields with assigned data field weights between 1 and 3, with 1 being the most significant because these contained the most relevant information that would influence semantic offer processing

They then identified all of their internal and external web services that dynamically request car rental availability, including:

• Creating a data map of each service’s XML data fields and assigning data field weights between 1 and 3.

As a part of this exercise, the ABC Car Rental IT team needed to create an ontology to help them formally represent each of the explicit and implicit data fields, weights and relationships between them if appropriate.

How did this step affect Ted?

He did not enter any information that would have triggered the semantic engine to look for and process explicit data, such as a car rental loyalty program number, so the offers were processed within the ontology using data fields in the availability request passed on from the partner airline.

Step 3: Rethink (and classify) your inventory and services

Now that you know what you sell, how you sell it, and what kinds of customer information you have access to, it’s time for some serious thinking about your inventory and services. This step involves creating “synthetic classes” for your inventory and services.

Although it sounds complicated, it’s basically an exercise to identify what may motivate your customers (or prospective customers) to buy a product, and then map and/or assign new categories (or classes) to your inventory.

Why is this exercise necessary? Your semantic engine wants to think out of the box and present offers based on an abstract collection of information.

For this step, the ABC Car Rental IT team:

• Created new synthetic classes for their inventory that would appeal to their customers personalities and trip goals, including “Power Car”, “Green (or eco-conscious) Car” and “Family Vehicle”
• Identified known inventory and service characteristics (data fields) that would pertain to their new synthetic car classes (such as transmission type, fuel type, mileage per gallon, horsepower, seatbelt quantity, luggage capacity and entertainment packages)
• Mapped these data fields to their existing inventory through their ontology

Step 4: Make the necessary changes to the descriptive information presented to your customers

The last major step is to review how you would describe your inventory and make adjustments to descriptive information to be consistent with your new synthetic classes.

For example, if you have created a synthetic class called “Family Vehicle”, you may want to adjust how you describe this vehicle by including an offer title such as “The Ultimate Family Vacation Vehicle” and include some description of the features that put it into a family vehicle class, such as seating capacity, car seats and other similar amenities, entertainment packages, etc.

Why is this exercise necessary? You created a great semantic engine, but your customer’s perception of and response to your semantic offers will ultimately determine the success of this initiative.

For this step, the ABC Car Rental marketing team created new offer titles and descriptions based on their new synthetic vehicle classes so the customer would see this alternate descriptive information if the semantic engine determined that one of these offers was appropriate to an availability request.

As a part of this exercise, the ABC Car Rental IT team needed to:

• Create a GUI-interface that allowed the marketing team to enter the alternate synthetic class descriptions for their inventory and services
• Update their application presentation (and availability results) logic to include the targeted semantic offers and ensure that they appeared in priority order in availability results

How did this step affect Ted?

He was offered three vehicles from ABC Car Rental, with the first vehicle titled “The Ultimate Family Vacation Vehicle”. The other synthetic classes defined by ABC Car Rental did not meet Ted’s criteria, so two standard vehicles were also included in the results.

Summing up

We’ve used a fairly basic scenario to illustrate these steps but the structure can be applied to almost any type of description and inventory in the travel industry.

• The benefits to the consumer are clear – his shopping experience is much better.
• The benefits to the travel company are clear – generating higher conversion AND incremental revenue – and customer loyalty.

NB: Additional analysis by Bonnie Lowell, specification manager at the OpenTravel Alliance.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

EasyCar founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou is joined by lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and PROfounders Capital on the Car Club venture.

The Car Club will run alongside easyCar’s existing car rental and brokerage business and provide cheaper, more convenient car-hire by hooking up consumers with car owners.

The concept follows a stream of similar start-ups, recently featured on Tlabs, including goCarShare and Carpooling.

Meanwhile, research points to consumers being driven to car-share schemes to combat the rising cost of owning a vehicle that might be parked on the street, unused, half the time.

The Car Club owners will be able to set a price and availability for their car with smartphone applications planned to enable consumers to book the vehicles.

Cars will be insured by the Car Club as well as fitted with automated car entry and a tracking system.

Hoberman is taking a seat on the easyCar board as is Rogan Angelini-Hurll, general partner from the venture capital fund.

EasyCar reported profit before tax of £822,000 for the year ended September 30, 2011 – a 64% increase year-on-year.

NB: Image via Shutterstock.

Now some smart former-MIT students in the US have taken a look at why previous ideas never quite worked and come up with their own solution.

The Transition project by Terrafugia is fascinating – achieved initially by flipping the problem on its head so that it becomes a plane that can drive, rather than the other way round.

In this TED clip, pilot and team Terrafugia member Anna Mracek Dietrich explains the thinking behind the engineering and construction, and how the US authorities have given it the thumbs-up to enter service in 2012.

Some interesting stuff in the presentation around use of airports and route patterns…

Google says the international roll out of Flight Search is “coming soon”, although it is expected to be a staggered launch in individual markets rather than a simultaneous unveiling across the rest of the world.

In his first media interview since Google announced its intention to buy ITA Software for $700 million in July 2010, former-CEO of Massachusetts-based ITA, Jeremy Wertheimer, now vice president for travel at ITA Software by Google, would not disclose an exact timeframe for the launches.

One option would be to begin with relatively limited functionality in terms of the cities and airlines covered by Flight Search, similar to how the US launch was introduced in September this year.

This would depend on any agreements Google is able to negotiate over the course of the next few months, Wertheimer says.

It is not known if the policy of only carrying search results from airlines will be used in other markets as it was in the US, once again excluding online travel agencies from participating in results.

But there are now also the first significant signs that other travel products are also being lined up for launch, with car hire appearing to be an obvious contender.

Nothing is off the table as yet, is the impression being given by Wertheimer, although in true Google fashion the emphasis is on “testing” and “experimenting” with ideas, rather than confirming one way or the other that a particular product line in the industry will be next on the list.

Other likely areas considered might be tours and activities or vacation rentals, for example, although Wertheimer declined to divulge precise plans.

How to address one of the most significant challenges with expanding Flight Search outside of the US, where the general perception is that ITA’s coverage is weaker, is still unclear.

Wertheimer says Google will secure partnerships with both airlines or “data providers” to introduce Flight Search in other markets, although he refuses to disclose any further details or if any of fare shopping providers or the GDSs (Travelport‘s ePricing or the MetaPricer product from Amadeus, are just two of a number of sources) will be involved.

“We will work with whoever we can in order to get the data,” he says.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Carpooling is a ride-sharing platform that connects people who want to share their rides. It is the largest carpooling network in Europe.

Stefan Weber, Matthias Siedler and Michael Reinicke are the three co-founders of carpooling.com. They met as MBA students at the University of Würzburg in Germany and established the site mitfahrgelegenheit.de in 2001 (the original carpooling platform for Germany).

What began as a simple student project, however, soon became incredibly popular. The founders had to quit their “real” jobs in 2008 to maintain the system. By 2010, they were ready to expand internationally and Carpooling was born in 2011.

The company is headquartered in Munich, Germany. The team is now comprised of 25 people who speak 12 different languages.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

Initially, we had no financial support and had to invest our own money and spare time in the project while we had to hold down regular fulltime jobs. As the popularity of our platform grew, however, we were able to grow the profitability of our business through key partnerships, premium service and advertising.

It wasn’t until 2009, when we were approached by a venture capital investment group called Earlybird, that we received any financial support.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Carpooling enables anyone with limited budget to go from A to B and provides a great transportation alternative in case of strikes or when trains or flights are full or cancelled.

Sharing cars is an ecological way to travel, as it reduces traffic and pollution. It also promotes solidarity and social link within communities.

Carpooling addresses the problems of rising transportation and petrol costs, traffic congestion and concerns about carbon emissions.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Carpooling is a platform available in seven languages, which enables you to travel in 5,000 cities and 45 countries in Europe.

With a few clicks, drivers can offer available seats in their car and passengers can book a ride. The concept is simple: sharing a car enables both passengers and drivers to save money. Fuller cars also mean emptier streets, less traffic and less CO2 so everybody wins.

Mobile applications (ie. iPhone and Android) give you access on the road so you never get stuck anywhere. You can also decide to access the service from a social network (through our Facebook app.).

You can ride the way you choose to: pick the driver or passenger you want to travel with (e.g. only top rated users, non smokers, women-only), how much space and comfort you need, where you want to meet and what you are willing to pay.

Rides can be booked and paid online and ratings are shown in the user’s profile to increase the security and reliability of rides.

We also offer selected rides in train, bus and planes.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

At first, German students were our key customers. Today carpooling is becoming a popular transportation alternative for both drivers and passengers and our users come from all countries, backgrounds and age groups.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Carpooling was not a new idea and was already popular in Germany. Local mitfahrzentrale agencies were matching drivers and passengers for a fee.
The internet enabled us to make the service free and accessible to all. The power of the word of mouth made it an instant success.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Our business model is based on paid advertising, premium service, value-added services such as online booking as well as revenue sharing deals with transportation and other corporate companies.

We also sell white label solutions for companies, cities and communities.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Already number one in Europe, performing and secure website, technically ready to go global, balanced business model, and highly motivated International team. Every employee at Carpooling is committed to offer a new, sustainable transport alternative to all.

Weaknesses:

• So many benefits to travel by carpooling, no significant weaknesses.

Opportunities:

• Further expansion. Carpooling provides answers to two great challenges of today’s life: ecological (carbon is saved each time you share a car) and economical (driver and passenger can both reduce transport budget in times of crisis).

Threats:

• Governments and local communities not promoting peer-to-peer ride sharing as an efficient public transportation.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

We started the site as a student project and no one told us that the idea was not going to be successful.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Our success metric is always our users and the number of rides available to travellers.

Are they happy, are they continuing to find the site useful, are they growing in number, are they booking rides, are they using our premium features and partner services? Twelve months from now, we hope to have even more users in even more countries.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

The set of regulations, if approved, will have a wide ranging effect across travel technology, meaning if companies should start preparing impact as soon as possible.

The web and self service technology are at the heart of air travel today. But this has created a series of obstacles for those with disabilities.

The American Disabilities Act (ADA) has been the basis for a wide range of rules that govern access for those with disabilities in order to give as much equal access to those who have some form of disability.

The original law was passed in 1990 and was a significant piece of legislation, one might argue, akin to the enactment of broad civil rights legislation such as de-segregation and the emancipation of women.

The law was updated in 2008, with the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) tackling issues of access to information and the concept of self service kiosks in transportation.

There are two specific titles which were updated and are relevant: Title II Public Entities (and public transportation) and Title IV Telecommunications. The Department of Transportation (DOT) is proposing air travel websites, as well as automated airport check-in kiosks, be made accessible to people with disabilities.

So it is seeking input on a wide variety of topics:

• What should be the standards for web and kiosk accessibility?
• Which websites and kiosks should be covered?
• How long should companies be given to make the necessary changes?
• What form should the regulation take?
• How long before regulations can be implemented?

Curiously, the regulations are focussing on one particular sector of the industry – aviation.

But why stop with just air. What about hotels and cars. As more self service technology is implemented, perhaps the entire industry should adopt wide-ranging overhauls to their websites. Indeed, standards for accessibility should be common for all services to quicken development and provide uniformity across the industry.

The subject of accessibility for reservation agents was significantly enhanced in the 1980s with the advent of the PC. The combination of a braille based tablet for reading and a keyboard for input opened up the possibility for visually impaired agents to work in airline call centres.

However the move to graphical interfaces from the character-based systems worked against those who were visually impaired. Now the combination of sound and touch as interfaces has massively improved in recent years and the visually impaired better access – enabling both the professional and consumer to work with the world of travel data.

But with the arrival of new forms of access and apps that are opening up mobile devices to so-called Big Data, perhaps it is time that the industry takes advantage of these developments to create better solutions for those with disabilities.

Developing systems that can access the same data and services, so there are no barriers to entry at a user level, is an admirable effort and the DoT should be applauded for this initiative.

We’ve heard a lot about the rise of collaborative consumption over the last few years and Rachel Botsman’s book What’s Mine is Yours is one of the best pieces on the subject.

While there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of initiatives in the space, the vertical that has received most of the attention – and clearly the widest adoption – is the accommodation sharing one.

Companies such as Airbnb and others including Couchsurfing, which recently raised $7.6 million of VC funding, have transformed the accommodation business with their novel peer-to-peer (p2p) model.

There is a good reason for the accommodation sharing vertical to be the most successful: it makes a lot of economic sense! If you think of it, your house or apartment is probably your largest cost centre, swallowing as much as a fifth of your income.

Interestingly, the second largest cost burden for most people is their car (and transport in general). Independent research commissioned by BlablaCar revealed that 89% of respondents feel that the overall running cost of their car has become increasingly difficult to manage, while two thirds are put off going on UK breaks away as a direct result of the high cost of travel.

With petrol prices having risen by 41% over the last four years, and transport costs constantly on the rise with rail fares due to increase by 8% next year in Britain, it is no surprise that carpooling sites are experiencing exponential growth in Europe.

BlablaCar recently announced that its 1.3 million strong community has shared over one billion kilometres and saved over £100 million by sharing car journeys. The company has a wide European network including Spain, France, Belgium and the UK, but it is not alone with lots of other sites across Europe typically focusing on their home market.

The concept around journey sharing is pretty similar to Airbnb’s paradigm, where drivers post details of their trip, the number of seats available and a suggested price.

Potential passengers searching for a specific trip then choose whether or not this fits with what they want to pay. Sites like BlablaCar allow drivers to earn extra income on journeys they would do anyway and make the pricing pretty transparent.

So, in many ways we are pretty far from the hitchhiking of the 1970s and moved to a well functioning and economically viable market place.

In countries like France, Belgium, Germany and Spain, it has now become a viable travel alternative with hundreds of thousands of people traveling this way and the UK is catching very quickly.

So, while leadership in disrupting the accommodation industry through p2p services clearly comes from the US, leadership in disrupting the transport industry is coming from Europe.

NB: This is a guest article by Nicolas Brusson, co-founder of car-sharing service Comuto.

So says the Europcar Transportation and Mobility Observatory, which is now in its fourth year and shows how driving habits are changing.

Technology is also playing an important role as self-service cars can to be booked online or via mobile apps and offer more flexibility in terms of using the car for only the required amount of time.

Streetcar and zipcar are two names that spring to mind which already operate in this market although zipcar bought its rival last year.

And, increasingly GPS technology is being used to help consumers find the nearest available car in their area.

The report reveals that self-service cars are an attractive option for more than 57% of European drivers, rising to 61% of drivers in urban areas.

When asked what transport alternatives they would use if they didn’t drive their car, 50% said car hire was their preferred option, 49% said car pooling and 35% said self-service.

The report refers to an ‘era of mobility on demand’ ushering in but it remains to be seen how quickly rental companies might introduce elements of the self-service idea or whether it will appeal more to the casual leisure user.

Europcar has already been quite forward thinking with its launch of a Microsoft Surface project last year which aims to revolutionise the car rental booking experience.

The study was carried out online by Ipsos and based on more than 6,000 adults across seven European countries including the UK, France and Germany.

Are you making money yet?

We’re generating revenue but not yet at break-even.

What has been the biggest problem – building the product/service or marketing it to consumers/travel industry?

When we launched the product a number of people gave us advice. They said “your product is great as it is, focus all your energy on marketing it”.

They were right – marketing and distribution are the biggest challenges. Despite the great traction we’ve had with SEO and the recent press attention we’ve received due to high gas prices.

Biggest assumption in the business plan that was wrong?

How long everything takes. It taken much longer to build traffic, revenue streams and partnerships than we had originally planned, 2-3X longer.

Is your current customer base as predicted?

Yes, although skewed more to the long-distance car traveller than we had originally thought.

In hindsight this seems obvious, but the average distance travelled (866 miles each way) still amazes me as it’s about 4X the distance of the average car trip, and we’re definitely attracting the vacationing audience as Orlando and Las Vegas consistently are the top destinations entered.

Did you achieve your 12 month goals? If not, why not?

Yes and no. I think given the failure rates of startups every entrepreneur should have a goal to just still be alive in 12 months.

I’m amazed that we’ve been around for over two years and continue to grow at an accelerating rate. Raising the seed funding round has taken longer than expected, but those discussions are underway so hopefully that will be the next news you read about us on Tnooz.

Has the problem you were trying to solve changed?

No. People still care about how much it costs to go places

Which startup that has launched in the past 12 months did you think “Ah, wish we had done that!”?

No startup immediately stands out, however Living Social’s entry into the travel space last November is really interesting.  We see some parallels to that business with their focus on the regional drive-in market.

If you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?

I only get one? I guess conserve cash for as long as possible.

NB: Tnooz launched TLabs in March 2010, a dedicated channel to give startups in the travel, tourism and hospitality sector an opportunity to explain their vision, company background and strategy to a wider audience.

As well as publishing an elevator pitch-type questionnaire for each business, Tnooz committed to following up with each startup after 12 months or so to see how well (or not) each performed.

NB2: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

GoScopia creates, aggregates and displays scheduled, unscheduled, public and private modes of transportation around any city, address, geographic coordinates or three-letter IATA codes worldwide.

Search results are weighted and grouped, allowing the user to quickly build customized intermodal itineraries. Current modes include all types of air, rail, bus, shuttles, taxis, limousines, car rentals, motor home (RV) rentals and ferries.

Other services currently included at airports are lounges, parking and Park & Fly hotel packages. We are also working to add cruises, yacht rentals, motorbike rentals, bicycle rentals, hiking trails, scooter rentals for the disabled and free hotel airport shuttles.

So much of online travel is geared toward airlines and rail, yet those are just two of many modes of transportation available to the average traveler.

Our goal is to be able to respond to any travel need, whether it is the type of trip or the type of traveler.

In the first phase of development, we are simply displaying data in a dynamic platform. In phase two, we will be focused on employing our proprietary algorithms to provide customized connections and booking capabilities for the individual traveler.

GoScopia is a product of Scopia Technologies LLC , a travel and transportation software company based in Milwaukee, USA.

Established in 2004, the company provides intermodal trip-planning solutions in the air and on the ground for travelers and other user-types, as well as an inexpensive, global, targeted marketing platform for transportation companies and other travel-related products.

Development of the GoScopia project started in March, 2010.

We have an international team, each with more than 20 years experience in their respective fields.  Those fields include travel, travel technology, software development, business development, marketing and advertising.

The ethnic and cultural diversity of the team brings unique perspectives, delivering a tool that works for a wide array of travelers across the globe.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

We are currently funding our operations through personal investments, a small business loan and a few small advertisers.

What problem are you trying to solve?

For most on-line travelers, booking any trip currently requires a time-consuming series of web sites, search engines, e-mails and phone calls.

There is no one site that puts it all together in an easy-to-understand search and booking tool. In addition, other intermodal booking tools are hard-coded while we believe such a system should be extremely dynamic and flexible during the planning and physical travel phases.

Although Scopia Technologies LLC developed the algorithms for one of the world’s first intermodal search engines during 2005-2007, we realized those algorithms would not work without the creation and aggregation of useful and relevant data sources. The team has dedicated much of its time to building the data foundation in order to offer the most comprehensive search capabilities to our customers.

In aggregating the data, we realized three important factors:

• That the display of the data provides a unique marketing opportunity for transportation providers, tourism attractions, accommodations and other travel and tourism services.
• That the data itself could be extremely useful to third parties as a tool to enhance revenues by integrating intermodal solutions and by displaying supplementary services which can be purchased by customers.
• That for many transportation providers who do not have software development staff, we can help them format and aggregate their data for display on GoScopia.com and many other global platforms.

With the data foundation in place, we are focused on creating the connection and booking tools required to truly offer a one-stop travel portal to a worldwide audience.

Describe the business, core products and services?

For travelers: We have created a website which can quickly and simply show users which modes of transportation are available nearby any point (as long as we have it in our data, which is updated continuously).

In a matter of seconds users can answer such questions as: “which airport is nearest to City X and which airlines fly there? How do I get from the airport or the rail station to my final destination? Which local bus company has a stop nearby and what routes are served by that stop?”

When searching the site, users see the transportation solutions displayed and color-coded on a map, as well as a listing below the map of the type of transportation, distance and direction and other information. Proprietary algorithms attempt to make the display as relevant as possible.

GoScopia “clusters” the modes around airports for greater ease of use. If until now users could only see the modes and nodes in a list below the map, now they can see whatever might be available around a particular airport or rail station.

Near an airport, for example, they can see the links for scheduled airlines that fly there, air taxi operators that serve that airport, public transportation, rentals, lounges available at the airport, transfers, parking and airport hotels.

Further, the user can see advertisements for products which may be relevant according to the user’s physical location and/or according to the destination searched. A user from the UK searching a destination in France will see advertisements for UK residents as well as products in France.

For transportation providers and other travel-related suppliers: We have created two very unique “products” for our partners. The first is a global, targeted and inexpensive marketing platform on which our partners can advertise. Partners can choose to advertise only in their respective market(s), only to specific markets or a combination of both.

As in the example above:

Showing a banner only to users in the UK who are searching for a destination in France. Further, since some advertisers wish to show their product in multiple locations worldwide, we have developed a system which helps to easily upload hundreds of location entries in just a few minutes.

The second product for our partners allows them to unify their data with other providers so that they can display their locations, routes and prices as part of our solutions as well as send it off to other trip planning platforms around the world.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

• Travelers (leisure and corporate)
• Travel agents
• Corporate travel managers
• Licensing customers such as transportation providers, airlines, tourism organizations, etc.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Although we had strong customer validation before talking to investors, we didn’t need to bring any of them to the presentations. That is because each and every presentation we made before investors was followed by a procession of investors who just had to tell us how they could have used our trip-planning tool on their last trip.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

The business is transportation geo-location and on-the-go purchasing of travel and tourism products. We hope to achieve revenue from advertising (we already have two paying advertisers), affiliate commissions and licensing fees for use of our API.

Our strategy for profitability is to continuously introduce new and better features, solutions and products. Our site is usable on smart phones and we hope to gain attention for that aspect of our product as well.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• GoScopia.com is the most comprehensive globally oriented tool out there. Our listing of secondary and tertiary services is a differentiator for GoScopia. The ability of GoScopia to weight search returns and cluster the data in a relevant manner. We further believe one of our greatest strengths is our deep understanding of the tourism and travel.

Weaknesses:

• Cash flow and speed to market. This is a rapidly changing environment and we are limited by our availability of resources.

Opportunities:

• The popularity and sustainability of smart phones and other mobile devices create a need for our tool. Travelers’ desire to go beyond major cities and destinations drives the need for intermodal connections to get from one adventure to the next.

Threats:

• As time goes on, our ideas may be implemented by competitors. We may miss the opportunity of being pioneers in certain areas due to lack of funding or ability to drive development.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Some people said we would never be able to compete with “the big guys” (even though we think “the big guys” might actually be interested in a product like ours).

Others said the plan was just too big. There were those who said we would never be able to collect all the data for all the places to show all the possible solutions.

We didn’t listen to them because that’s how great ideas die and because our experience in travel technology has taught us how to create and find the data we needed. In addition, we were confident in our research and knew those who couldn’t believe in the idea were not seeing the trends and opportunities our research had pointed out.

We also strongly believe our eventual products will surpass anything else out there.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

We would like to have at least $100K in revenues from licensing, advertising and commissions by the end of 2011, so that we may speed up development.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

Irish Times reported (Saturday 7 May) unspecified level of new investment piped into CarTrawler by UK private equity house ECI Partners.

Chief technology officer Bobby Healy and chief operations officer Mike McGearty are understood to have been behind the recent strategy to try and reinvigorate the business through some kind of liquidity event.

Both were locked in talks last Friday afternoon and unable to confirm rumours which surfaced last week that plans first triggered in February this year had finally reached a conclusion.

CarTrawler confirmed the deal on Sunday afternoon.

CEO Greg Turley will be moving aside to a non-executive directorship, paving the way for McGearty to take over leadership of the business.

Turley’s brother Niall will remain director of supply.

Chris Watt (ECI Partners) says:

“Greg and Niall Turley have created an exceptional business in CarTrawler.  We are delighted that Greg has agreed to continue as a non-executive director of the company and we have a great management team who we are confident will take the business on to a new level.

“ECI is a growth investor with a track record of supporting high growth online companies expanding internationally and we look forward to helping CarTrawler continue to grow across the globe.”

ORIGINAL (February 23 2011):

Ireland-based car hire distribution system CarTrawler has confirmed it is looking to offload a share of the company to help fund its next period of growth.

An official says the company is in talks with “a small number of potential partners” over offloading a part of the business.

The sale would give CarTrawler “access to additional capital to accelerate growth via potential acquisitions, geographic expansions and key hires”, the official says.

“CarTrawler has had fantastic success to date and has revolutionised the car rental sector globally. This is a positive development for the Irish company and all of its current employees, suppliers and partners.”

Rumours have circulated about the fate of the company ever since Priceline bought the UK-based TravelJigsaw car rental service in May 2010.

Although the two businesses are different in focus (Jigsaw being consumer-facing, CarTrawler providing the distribution network for suppliers), speculation centred on whether a global OTA similar to Priceline would come in for the Dublin company or whether one of the global distribution systems would be interested in adding to its portfolio.

CarTrawler says the talks are with “finance-related” organisations rather than “strategic” discussions with other travel companies.

Ford looks like being the first major car manufacturer to put automatic reversing technology into a mass-market vehicle – it’s Focus range.

All the driver needs to do is operate the pedals – steering carried out by the car (and a heap of sensor equipment).

Some of the more expensive, executive-type beasts on the road have had similar tools, but this is going into the type of cars that end end up on the forecourts of car hire firms the world over.

Here is Ford’s glossy video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg1MzVgqoZg

…but also a Focus being tested by gadget review site Tech Digest:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVDfY0Ir6Zg

The tool has not been officially unveiled by Google, but was introduced in recent weeks to run within the directions section of Google Maps.

Once a user enters destinations in the From and To fields to obtain a route and detailed directions, a small note at the foot of the list includes the estimated fuel cost.

Users can open the link to change the type of fuel (diesel or petrol) and vehicle (standard, compact or high consumption). The fuel price is streamed in from elsewhere, but users can edit the price per litre of fuel.

Although currently restricted to the UK, expect it to arrive in other territories in the coming weeks and months.

There is no indication as to whether the fuel calculator could be included in the Google Maps API at a later date so car hire companies can integrate the tool.

UPDATE: Cost2Go says the tool is also now available in some European countries.

NB: Hat-tip Search Engine Land.

The app uses maps and search system so visitors can find their way around the vast city using a combination of English, which is then translated into Arabic.

Phrases and directions are placed on large cards within the app, making it easier to show drivers where a visitor wants to head to in the city.

The company says:

“Taxi drivers don’t speak English, and you don’t know the local address for the restaurant you wanted to go to. Add on the fact that Cairo is constantly changing and you soon realize—you’re lost. That’s why we created the Taxi Guide series – directories filled with big, bold-faced addresses in Arabic that show the driver exactly where you want to go.”

Unfortunately as the iPhone application was being released by Apple into the appstore, the Egyptian capital was descending into increasing levels of violence and unrest, with many tourists fleeing the main cities for the beach town of Sharm-el-Shelk or simply flying home.

To its credit, HoodHot has dropped the download fee for the app for the foreseeable future, as it wants “to offer a bit of assistance to travelers, expats, and locals in this time of crisis”.

“Though Cairo is very chaotic right now and traditional transportation may not be an option, we hope that the app may be able to help users in other ways.”

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

goCarShare is a website that helps people share car journeys, it matches passengers and drivers creating a market place for empty car seats.

It’s built around Facebook, and as such maximises the power of people’s social networks. If you can see if you have friends in common with someone you are much more likely to trust them and consider sharing a journey with them than someone that you know nothing about.

There is a rating system that passengers and drivers can use to rate each other that also helps people establish who are trustworthy.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

I self financed the business to get it to its launch. I have done a small family financing round to help prove the concept.

What problem are you trying to solve?

The UK’s traffic problems are getting worse but there is effectively a huge amount of idle capacity. An interesting statistic I have is that there are 38 million empty car seats travelling around Britain every single day.

We would like to make a serious go at reducing this figure. Petrol price have increased over 16% over the last year, so motorists are being squeezed into actually doing something; there is also the green factor, with young people these days having a real pressing concern to make a difference

Describe the business, core products and services?

It’s a long distance operator. A more fun, sociable alternative than going to National Express or the Trainline.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Students at Edinburgh, St Andrews, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Durham univeristies. We are also working with some key festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe and Hay-on-Wye.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

We have over 1,000 users to date but the service if currently free to use. We have got some initial traction but are now focusing it in a more specifc demographic.

We are piloting car sharing in Edinburgh and are doing joint promotion with Streetcar.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We are focusing on specific localised areas before expanding the business. The website is free to use.

Once we have scaled the user base, we will looking to getting passengers to pay through the site, taking a commission of about 10% and passing the balance onto the driver upon completion of the journey.

There is also the potential to do location based advertising, advertising products and services relevant to where people were travelling.  For example, if people are travelling to Edinburgh in August during the festival period, to advertise shows and hotels in Edinburgh.

As well as this, there is the potential to do bespoke work for organisations on a needs basis.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• We have a fun and simple to use website with a strong brand.

Weaknesses:

• We do not yet have a developer or CTO in house, but we are looking to recruit one – any leads with good PHP skills are greatly appreicated.

Opportunities:

• There is a huge potential to do something exciting in the mobile space, so that people can use their smart phones to make a real time decision about who they are going to car share with.

Threats:

• When we have validated the market and proved demand, a big company could step in and replicate what we are doing with a larger budget.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

I’ve had people say that there simply isn’t the demand for car sharing amongst individuals, that people are too resistant to change to try something like this.

For me the B2C market is where the opportunity is but we’ll keep an open eye on the B2B market in case we can’t generate sufficient demand.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

If people are coming up to me and saying that they are having a great time using goCarShare and are telling there friends about, then it my mind, it has been a success.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

CEO Greg Turley reckons the strategic decision to ramp up its search coverage for locations away from traditional airport pick-up/set-down areas is a major opportunity.

The “off-airport” market is currently around 50-60%  of the entire $35 billion car rental industry, but is largely unmanaged from a distribution perspective, Turley claims.

Until now, partners using CarTrawler have been limited to airport terminal locations on the system, but a new maps engine created for a number of clients will handle searches for areas such as rail stations and hotels within cities, opening up the market to a string of online travel agency and airline web users.

The mapping tool also drops in real-time pricing and availability from the various car providers at each location.

Meanwhile, an enhanced mobile strategy is also scheduled to emerge from the company in the coming months, with a B2C-focused iPhone application ready for release during Q1 2011 but more importantly a mobile version of its existing services for airline and OTA partners.

The platform has been specifically designed so that the service can be integrated with travel management systems along the lines of Mobiata and Worldmate.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

We are a convenience driven airport car parking website. With quick, simple intuitive steps, we provide our users with a large variety of car parking services and supporting information. Simply put, we are the “search engine” for airport car parking in the UK.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

The funding received to design, build and execute the project was supplied by ATMEDIA.co, founders of Parkat.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Parkat was born through the lack of “true” airport comparison services available on the web. Most services are company specific and do not offer a large variety of services. Parkat is striving to change this.

We are effectively aiming to become the number one airport car parking comparison website. Unlike other websites, we are independent thus allowing us to convey “true impartial status”.

Describe the business, core products and services?

As previously mentioned we are a comparison website. We provide users with various types of airport car parking services. These include long stay, short stay, meet and greet and park and ride services.

We also provide other convenience based features to help our users identify how reliable, secure and popular a given car park is. We then build on this by providing location and mobility information. This is then tailored to the user’s whereabouts and final destination.

We even go as far as to provide estimated distance, duration and fuel costs from user specified location.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Our user scope covers anyone who wants to use air travel without the pre and post headaches of transit. As you can appreciate when flying the problems are not “in flight”, they are the “getting there on time” or “getting all your luggage there” etc.

Naturally taking your own vehicle eradicates these problems and allows people to have more control over the whole process adding convenience and peace of mind.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Having conducted numerous surveys and reports what we found was many users wanted more from a parking service. They wanted it to be quick and snappy with as little input as possible. With Parkat you can fully book a service within five simple steps.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Although I cannot comment in specifics (due to company policy) what I can say is the Parkat infrastructure is distinctly partitioned allowing for a very robust and effective revenue and strategy model.

In regards to profitability, Parkat is a long-term investment. We are not expecting an instant turnover. However what you will find we Parkat will never use banner ads to generate revenue. We feel this can be obstructive and frustrating from a users perspective thus defeating our mission statement.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Parkat is founded by ATMEDIA, a reputable and innovative digital agency. Naturally, this provides a good solid foundation for our development, as the ATMEDIA team are specialists in digital marketing, web development, search engine management/ optimisation, online pr and social media. We feel the key to success is to know and appreciate your area of expertise, ATMEDIA allows us to do this.

Weaknesses:

• Being passionate is great but here at the Parkat headquarters we have collectively decided we can no longer hide our weakness for perfection. This is formally known as OCD! We have come to this conclusion as an average works outing normally consists of work, Star Wars and a ardent discussion on the latest IE bug!

Opportunities:

• We have found a niche market where the current parking websites do not provide an independent and impartial comparison service. We compare without being biased towards a particular provider giving our users a true and accurate reflection of the cheapest parking deals.

Threats:

• Naturally, the current economic recession has greatly affected both businesses and individuals alike. This essentially means people have to prioritise their earnings thus influencing their spending habits. Parkat tackles this by providing a plethora of parking services in one neat and tidy search allowing our users to quickly and easily identify the best deals. This essentially means users do not have to sacrifice such amenities.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

Surprisingly we were never discouraged when taking on the Parkat project. Fortunately, a lot of the initial research phases had been thoroughly analysed and corroborated by the ATMEDIA team therefore we didn’t really experience such conflicts.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

With the right key performance indicators in place and the current encouraging feedback received, we foresee Parkat being successful. As with all startup websites, initial success is unpredictable, however, we have a number of systems in place to create a successful, maintainable and lively web service.

Quite simply, Parkat is striving to provide a concise system, which provides our users with a variety of convenience based features.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

The auction giant’s marketplace division for local goods and services typically features hotel and activity deals alongside other products such as entertainment, motoring and electronics.

Now the service can also be accessed using a mobile phone’s camera to pinpoint the location of deals in a particular location.

So, imagine a busy tourist area with a number of attractions such as museums and restaurants. By pointing the handset’s camera around the street, a user can establish which venues have deals listed on eBay Classifieds.

Chief technology officer for Junaio creator Metaio, Peter Meier, says very little data is required from the user as the handset picks up the location automatically.

Once a product is selected from the camera screen, users are shown details and how to get access to the product or buy it directly from the existing eBay smartphone application.

The technology to handle the augmented reality system is available on both Android and iPhone handsets.

Here’s a clip:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVQ5Gb_mx-Q

Dublin-based CarTrawler is working with Spain’s fast growing budget airline Vueling to provide car search facilities on and offline.

Vueling is hoping to spread its wings further in 2011 and has signed CarTrawler to run the car rental white label on its main website, call centre and at various venue kiosks.

The airline calls itself a “next generation” low cost carrier and has spent the past six years slowly establishing itself in its home country, with six bases (including its headquarters in Barcelona) – a base in Toulouse will open next year.

Vueling claims it is second only to Iberia in Spain in terms of size.

Visitors to the airline site or kiosks will get access to around 550 car rental providers in 25,000 destinations around the world, CarTrawler says.

The deal was signed in September 2010.

To start off, are you tired of being gamed? Tired of being put off by acres and acres of ads and sponsored links and not so subtle forms of promotion guided on by more come-ons than a porn portal?

Well, welcome to Travel Search circa 2010.

It seems that a lot of people are beginning to get ticked (as opposed to ticketed) off by this behavior. Even the digirati is starting to notice, just see what Techcrunch had to say recently about TripAdvisor.

I have a simple problem that I cannot seem to solve. It keeps me awake at night and I don’t see any simple solution to it. The problem is rooted in the design of airline products – air fares.

Fundementally a legacy airline distributes its products by allowing its distributors to determine the price of its product according to a set of rules. As long as the game is played right, then we are all okay.

However, if the game is not played right then the airline issues a debit memo to the agent. This often comes with a penalty of the price of the full fare on the route. Punitive indeed.

Some might say this is a bit discriminatory, because when a fellow airline which also has the right to do it, then the penalty is not anything like this, it is just the difference in the fare.  So the airline feels smug in that it has allowed someone else to set its pricing.

There are not that many business sectors that actually do that. In order to address the vast majority of people who want to search for a product, the numbers of searches per ticket now exceeds a ratio of 1000 to 1.

This is based on a low industry average of 400 looks to each segment booked and using 2.5 segments to the ticket). And that number continues to rise.

An airline ticket is not like a book, it is not fixed with a bar code. The low cost carriers have a different approach – they offer the fare that they think is appropriate at any time. They demand that each request which comes in is dealt with uniquely.

This is great when you have a simple product with no connections and nothing other than a one way or a round trip fare to deal with. A legacy carrierm however, has a magnitude of extra complexity.

There are a significantly greater number of products and prices that are possible as a result of the complexity of network carriers. Despite the fact that most people still take simple out and back trips, the rules are byzantine in their complexity. And all because the airlines want to hide the true pricing of the product. Indeed, airline pricing may be the ultimate consumer game!

So, for an online search that wants to be neutral across all possible channels and suppliers, there is no easy way to do it. The possible results are an iceberg of information.

If you ask the GDSs, they will probably say are constrained in what they can report by some simple constraints inside the structure of the fare system combined with the availability system.

Even advanced fare and availability search systems such as ITA Software or Everbread cannot give the possible answers all in a reasonable time without an incredible waste of processing. Essentially if one is a purist, then the answers must be thrown away as soon as they are served up. They have aged and the next person might get a totally different result.

So, enter the requirement for personalization. The airline wants to know everyone who is requesting fare information, by every channel, so that it can have pricing protection and parity on the channels where it chooses to operate.

And, actually, I don’t fault them for wanting this. But the result is that there is no way that anyone or any machine can ask the question and get a reasonable answer in real time to: “Show me the lowest fare by parameter for all possible choices across all channels – please?”

So now we have a real conundrum. The OTAs can pass data about the request to the airline, but it would slow down the process. I would hazard it would slow the results to a crawl and we could not get a result for the customer in under, say, 15 seconds.

This is not a guess, it is based on some hard data. It would also raise the cost for each search to around $1 per search. And if you use the number above this would be a cool $1,000 per ticket. Even if you reduce that number, cost-per-search to $0.01, then we are dealing with a $10 charge per ticket. That would be unacceptable.

So, now you see the dilemma – the cost in time and hard cash for the provision of the service is too costly. This is not a good thing.

And now you can see the war between search and personalization is not going to go away, and it will not get any better than the processes we get today. There is no right answer.

But we had better do a better job of being honest and truthful to the consumer or the big bad wolf will come and eat you all up. And whether you are supplier or an intermediary/seller it doesn’t matter. Both of you can be roadkill.