Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Innovation (Page 67 of 78)

Travel 2.0 – I’m Breathless!

Regarding the conference I’ll be blogging from next weekPhocuswrightconf How can one not be enthusiastic after reading this update I received a few days ago from the event producers?

(beginning of excerpt)

Well, it’s just one week to show time in Hollywood, California!

At PhoCusWright, we are passionate about creating a unique conference in an industry mired in a “sea of same.” By producing a conference that’s changing conferences, we are fighting commoditization just like you and delivering a differentiated product along the way. Thank you for joining us in this quest to challenge the status quo.

Next week, The PhoCusWright Executive Conference will be the most notable yet in the event’s illustrious 13-year history for several reasons: record attendance, an unrivaled speaker roster that spans all aspects of our industry’s value chain; highly motivated and demanding attendees; and a tested, pioneering conference format that unveils what’s on prominent travel, tourism and hospitality executives’ minds, and a new “2.0 conference experience.” You’ll find yourself immersed in the strategic center of the world’s largest industry — surrounded by the heads of major suppliers, distributors and influencers.

This business trip is your key to the unvarnished truth about the vetted, the vexed and the victorious as “Travel 2.0 Confronts the Establishment.”

Overview and About PhoCusWright
For over a decade, PhoCusWright events have provided a more valuable experience because our analysts run the show. We leverage our travel industry expertise and interviewing skills to uncover truths, probe for clarity and reject sales pitches. Our clients (attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, speakers) know that we respect their time by providing superior production value, professional event operations, excellent meals and social networking opportunities with unique access to peers and industry leadership. The PhoCusWright Executive Conference on November 13-15 will be three special days dedicated to fresh ideas, expansive thinking, incredible energy and uncommon community.

PhoCusWright Inc. is an independent travel, tourism and hospitality research firm specializing in consumer, business and competitive intelligence. The company produces consumer, market and industry research, provides strategic consulting services and stages a series of high-profile conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

Conference Program and Agenda
At last year’s Executive Conference, we witnessed Travel 1.0’s swan song. Since then, the Travel 2.0 floodgates have opened with empowered consumers taking charge. It’s a positive, advancing force holding great promise for our industry.

Travel 2.0 – our industry’s collective application of Web 2.0 – embodies how companies can differentiate themselves in a vast, dynamic travel distribution marketplace. It challenges status-quo travel planning behavior. Travelers are now keen to take control and find/create the perfect trip, not just the cheapest trip.

The conference theme is huge: “Travel 2.0 Confronts the Establishment.” Content and conversation center on a unique collection of leadership and topics. The non-stop program is very busy by design and the format exposes attendees to a rare experience. Pithy and provocative commentary triumph.

PhoCusWright attendees (that’s you!) enjoy a reputation for asking savvy, deep-digging questions and not letting go without real answers. Don’t be shy! Our analyst team, armed with a cache of questions, draws the best out of everyone! With a relentless quest for meaningful debate and a probing perseverance for clear answers, together we will expose the very issues that have a vise-like grip on senior executives’ minds.

Be prepared for the unexpected!

New This Year
New this year, attendees are empowered to control their own conference destiny. Just as Travel 2.0 enables consumers to create their perfect trip, The PhoCusWright Executive Conference enables attendees to customize their perfect conference experience. For example, the Attendee Empowerment Heat Map (available at www.phocuswright.com/conferences/heatmap) illustrates your ability to control how much content vs. work you choose to focus on at any time and anywhere. Whether you soak up content in the theater, multitask in the cafe with headsets or camp out in the satellite theater, not only will you learn about Travel 2.0, you will live it!

Also new this year: real-time electronic question board, attendee headsets to listen anywhere, satellite theatre, 80 – person cafĂ©, sponsored workshops, “VC Talk”, myphocuswright.com and more.

Back by popular demand: WiFi, live blog, open exhibition showcase, I-mag projection that beams several different types of screens at different locations. Whoever is speaking — pundit on stage or attendee in row 38 — appears live on the screens, including subtitles with name and affiliation.

Dream Demographics
Wonder who you will be seated next to? Your strategic partner. Your big investor. Your hottest prospect. Your next key hire. Your awaited acquirer. Your biggest competitor. You’re not dreaming.

It’s very much prime time for our marketplace. We are proud to showcase industry heavyweights from the traditional as well as the online sector; from corporate, meeting and leisure camps; from the supply as well as the distribution side; from discount to luxury; from media and transaction vantages; from North America to Asia; and from Wall Street’s to Main Street’s perspective. We understand the people you interact with matter the most so we have lured an incomparable target audience you can’t miss.

In this fertile environment, millions of dollars of deals get done… and then some. Relationships are cemented. Leads are qualified. Paths are paved. Hires are secured. By joining your peers from around the world, you will shape your point-of-view, hone your strategy, fill your sales pipeline and cultivate business like never before.

The Bottom Line
That’s why we’re all congregating next week at The PhoCusWright Executive Conference to confront what’s next and profit from a keener understanding. Unrivaled insight, healthy debate, critical corroboration, peer talkback, audience grilling, credible forecasts, powerful thinking… even a better night’s sleep.

The PhoCusWright Executive Conference will be “a needle-moving” three days where clarity reigns supreme and buzz is palpable. You are among an unparalleled group: savvy, connected, demanding and poised to do business. Thank you for coming. We look forward to seeing you and to your participation.

Be ready to stand up and speak out. Travel 2.0 is confronting the establishment, and so will you!

(end of excerpt)

As I said, breathless! I’m getting pumped about this thing. And I haven’t even followed the online travel industry all that much to date….Flyspylogo_2except via my own personal experiences as an avid user of these services for my frequent personal and business travel. I’m especially looking forward to the talk to be given by Rob Metcalf, founder of Minneapolis-based Flyspy.

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Return With Me to Those Halcyon Days of the Internet ‘Summit’

Did you hear the Web 2.0 Conference kicking off today in SF just changed names to the “Web 2.0 Summit”? Web20summitlogo That’s to sufficently differentiate it from the “Web 2.0 Expo,” dontcha know — which debuts next spring (and will also be produced by O’Reilly Media and CMP).

Harkens me back to the days of the former “Internet Summits” of the late ’90s, produced by The Industry Standard and hosted by John Battelle — same cohost as this week’s conference. I was reminded of those heady events when I saw a guy quoted yesterday in the WSJ who was one of the many good people I met at those awesome Summit events that Battelle produced. That was Peter Cobb of eBags, which is one of the better e-commerce survivors from the dot-com era; he was part of the very interesting story on Google’s newspaper advertising test. Rock on, Peter!

Those dot-com era Summits were a $4000 ticket, not this week’s bargain(?) $3000 tab. [That must mean it’s not a bubble yet?… 🙂 ] But don’t try to buy a ticket to the Web 2.0 Summit — every VC and recepient of VC from here to China sucked those up quite a while ago. [Yes, just like the pre-bubble days.] Your best bet (only bet?) is to watch for some of the breathless blogging that will be emanating from The Palace Hotel for the next few days. Or else just hang out in the lobby. [My friend Steve Borsch secured a pass and will be one of those capturing some of the action on site. But just type “web2con” into any search box you can find, and you’ll have way more to read than you can handle.] Myself, I’m at a private Sony event in LA the next few days, and will only have time to take a glimpse of the online action occasionally during downtimes.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Conference-Land
An event that I wished I could have taken in last week was Startup Camp in Mountain View, sponsored by Sun. Looks like it drew 400 attendees, who are listed here.

I also heard from my former Conferenza editor in SF, the intrepid Gary Bolles, that another one of the MuniWireless events he helps produce, this one right here in Minneapolis in recent weeks, was a big success. He said they had some 300 attendees and three of our local mayors spoke, including tech-savvy R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis (a former Internet consultant, I kid you not).

Did I mention conferences are a booming business again? 🙂

Okay, so next week, since I was planning to stay in SoCal this coming weekend, anyway, I decided to catch a big “Travel 2.0” conference. The pitch: “Now in its 13th year, this event will cast a Hollywood-style spotlight on the world’s largest industry as ‘Travel 2.0 Confronts the Establishment’.” Yikes! They asked Minneapolis’ Rob Metcalf of Flyspy to speak, so I can’t miss that. Mr. Disrupto. I’ll be posting from there as much as I can, assuming they’ll have enough WiFi bandwidth to go around. It’s a jam-packed agenda, with lots of big hitters in the travel space, old and new, speaking. From the looks of the registration list, this one will top out at some 800 attendees and close to 50 press.

Ah, yes, Internet conferences — I love ’em! Watch for more, right here…

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Brightcove Is No YouTube Wannabe – It’s Bigger

My friend Jeremy Allaire busted out of the gates again today with a story that’s all over the web about his firm Brightcove, which is not just any old startup. Jeremyallaire It’s backed by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp and America Online, among others. And it boasts a management team with senior execs from Allaire, Macromedia, ATG, Comcast, Lycos, News Corp., MediaVest, and Discovery Networks. The firm just announced the launch of its Brightcove Network, which is aimed at what it calls “video prosumers” — the ranks of which are dead certain to be growing. I know for sure that will include me, but it won’t be just us tech-savvy folks.

As background, you may recall I published an interview with Jeremy earlier this year, onsite from the PC Forum conference in San Diego. And I also chatted at dinner one night there with his PR people, who had recently secured a front-page feature on Jeremy in the Wall Street Journal. Then, this morning, my buddy Mark Druskoff shot me an email on all this Brightcove attention today (he’s the former editor of Minnesota Business magazine, now working in Texas). He also pointed out that Barry Diller will likely earn the distinction of being this year’s highest paid executive. Yes, and a good guy for Jeremy to have on his board.

Here’s the latest Brightcove news as the WSJ covered it today (subscribers only), and CNet did a piece as well. For other background, here’s a TechCrunch post just out by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and a great wrapup on what it all means from Forbes.com, entitled “AnotherTube.”

Call it the revenge of the media industry. This is about professional video, or at least semi-professional — something more polished than raw crap, anyway. Brightcove1 Let’s face it, consumer-generated video is hardly what everybody wants to spend most of their time watching on the Internet going forward! Hey, this broadband video thing is just getting going. And no firm, startup or otherwise, is better positioned than Brightcove to take advantage of what will be a very, very BIG market — all kinds of video, from professional on down to user-generated. Brightcove3 Think online video marketplace, with every angle covered…and everyone makes money. Unique concept, huh? Making money. Quick, somebody get the YouTube-Google folks on the line — they’ll want to look at this!

I think Abbey Klaassen of Ad Age gets it right today in her commentary, in which she doesn’t hold back the optimism of her employer on this news: Meet the Next Media Mogul: Jeremy Allaire.

I would not bet against her being right.

Qloud Kicks Social Music Into New Territory

Frederick, MD-based Qloud (pronounced “cloud”) took the locks off its online social music site a few days ago to open a new chapter in “music discovery.” I met with Mike Lewis, one of the cofounders, a couple of weeks ago here in the Twin Cities. Mikelewis Mike grew up in Edina, MN, just about a mile from me, though we hadn’t met till he looked me up on his latest trip home. A veteran of online music, having worked at AOL and Ruckus after college at Dartmouth, he joined with former coworker Toby Mordock to found Qloud, and the pair received funding several months ago. [It’s from a notable source who must remain unnamed, or they’d have to kill me :-)…]

To use Qloud, you download a free plug-in for iTunes (Windows only right now). The site also works with the open-source Songbird player, which has Windows, Linux, and Mac versions [though I can’t find anything about that on the site right now]. “Our key points,” said Lewis, “are these: (1) we make your iTunes experience better by allowing you to organize it using tags, (2) we make it easy to search for new tracks, and (3) we make it easy to keep track of what your friends are listening to.”

Here’s a screen shot of the home page, and three others showing the main views, which are Music, Tags, and People. Qloudhome

Qloudmusic_1

Qloudtags_1

Qloudpeople_1

For more, view the Qloud demo here. And here’s the launch press release. Blog coverage has already appeared at GigaOm and Mashable. Qloud was also named Lifehackers Download of the Day on October 11.

Biggest issue for now? Well, on top of the initial bugs that any beta release has to deal with, which Lewis assures me are being dealt with very quickly, is the fact that only a PC version of the plug-in is available right now. “We’re hoping to have the Mac plug-in before the end of the year,” said Lewis. Actually, he told me it’s basically done and working, but it’s the testing that takes time — working the bugs out. “We know we need it and we’re pushing forward.” So hang in there Mac lovers….me included!

But, Hold On — Qloud’s About More Than Sharing Music
“Something we haven’t even talked about yet,” said Lewis, “is that, over time, people develop lots of data in their player – plays, playlists, tags, ratings, etc. And every time they get a new player, they have to start all over. What we hope to be is a repository of metadata for a user’s music. In the future, we’ll let them push their information down to other players and other sites. That’s a big idea that’s coming from Qloud, and I think it’s cool.”

If you’ve ever seen the stats for the number of music players the average online music junkie has already gone through — a number that will only be rising — I think Qloud is onto something here.

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The ‘Other’ YouTube Founder – Minnesota’s Own!

Great story on page 1A of the StarTrib today: St. Paul Whiz Kid Cashes In. Yes, Jawed Karim, the quiet one you don’t hear much about is from here. Jawedkarim He’s not involved day-to-day in YouTube right now, since he’s studying computer science at Stanford (which is why you don’t hear his name mentioned much) — but, as a founder of the company, he definitely benefits from the Google buyout. A quote from the story:

Although he has lived in California for several years now, he still considers himself “a Minnesota guy.”I think Minnesota has a unique place among the states,” Karim said. “It’s very progressive and modern, but it’s not overrun by all the negative things that come with progress. Things are a little more in balance with Minnesota.”

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