Webshots has just launched a great tool you can use to take a screen shot of any public web page.  The only thing I don’t like too much about this is that these are public and listed on the Screenshot Spy and Archive.

Some of the things I like though are that WebshotsPro includes an archive searchable by URL. This in essence will create the world’s largest directory of Web screen grabs. I think that in the near future we will start to see tagging, metadata and RSS feeds integrated so that there’s a bit more organization than there is now. But all in all, this is a great resource.

I have taken some screenshots with the tool so you can see how good the quality is:

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Personalization (sometimes known as customization) generally enables a web site to be more responsive to the unique and individual needs of a user. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, some of which require the user’s input, and others that operate behind the scenes, such as by looking at an IP address or geographic location and serving up content based on the user’s browser. Most of the portals and travel websites today, allow users to personalize the look and feel, and the content of their websites, depending upon the user’s preference.

Expedia gives users personalization simply by creating an account, Google offers a personalized homepage and personalized search,  Yahoo have recently upgraded its personalized My.Yahoo service.

And now Niall Kennedy (former Microsoft employee) is running a series on personalized home pages and their history

How is personalization on your website ?  Do you think this is important for your business ?

I recently posted the following post

3 Ways to increase your intelligence, so I have decided to take Timothy Leary’s concept and adapt it to the 21st century:

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3 Ways the Internet will help you increase your intelligence

1. The Internet will help you to continually expand the scope, source, intensity of the information you receive, by reading the blogs, the wikis, the websites of all unimaginable topics, at any time and almost anywhere. You will be able to read about different points of views whether it is on the tech sector or on politics.
2. The Internet will help you to constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what’s happening now, by letting you explore different cultures, different technologies, different products, different services, and comparing them with your current reality.
   
3. The Internet will help you develop external networks for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you, by letting you participate in forums, blog discussions, reviews and teleconferences around the world that are streamed via the Internet. It will let you express your point of view and getting feedback on it, like when writing a blog or participating in someone else’s blog.

The internet is there, it is easily accesible to everyone, it is your choice, you can use it for good or for bad, you can use it to make you dumber or smarter. You Choose !!!

- nc - An internet user

I have started to see a few hotels producing and distributing some podcasts

The Hotel & Motel Management magazine has recently published a story about this:

Hotels using Podcasting as a portable marketing outlet

I was recently sent this news clip.

Brazil judge orders Google to provide information on Orkut users

As I understand it.

Google strategy is to comply with every government worldwide (including China) but without damaging its image of a company that cares about its users privacy

I believe Google will end up giving up whatever the Brazilian government requests by law, but not after making a big case where they give the perception of really caring about its users privacy.

Smart move from Google, Wait for more of this coming.

The learning you can get from this is:  When was the last the time you reviewed your Company’s Privacy Policy and How serious are you about protecting your user’s privacy ?  Food for thought….

Internet Company 2.0

We have been talking a lot about Web 2.0, or the socializing of the internet and letting them take more control. I do believe that besides the technical changes that are currently underway there are also going to be tons of social changesin the way the users interact with those companies but there is also going to be ‘major’ internal organizational structure changes in these companies.
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Internet Travel Company 2.0 - Digg for Hotels

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In order to create the new generation of an Internet Travel company we must closely look at the social revolution that is currently happening on the internet. The social networks, the social search, the reviews, the RSS, etc, etc, etc, and start thinking about giving the users more power for choosing which hotels or travel companies to patronize, kind of a Digg.com for hotels, where the users make this or that hotel more popular and it is not the travel companies deciding which hotels to sell. This company will also allow user comments and reviews on its website, similar to what is TripAdvisor today, but with the difference that these ratings will push hotel properties up or down. In this new world the company will only play the role of platform governor or administrator and will not be the king, the customer will reign. It will be kind of a Democratic company where users get to pick and push what they like and what they want.

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Companies and their managers like to be in control. They like to control their products (e.g. six sigma), they like to control communications & brand (e.g. press releases & PR stunts), they like to control which customers they address (e.g. high networth individuals), they like to control the channels through which their products are distributed (e.g. DVD country codes) and they like to control processes.

Forget that! It’s a thing of the past. I believe that the most thriving companies of the coming years will be those that are able to successfully lose control. This doesn’t mean that they will let things get totally out of hand, but they will replace control with governance in order to create space for creativity. The reason? This new openness will allow people to live out their full potential, they will be able to focus on what they like and do best and they will have space to implement their best ideas. Openness will also allow people to install collaboration beyond traditional roles such as customer, marketer or engineer.

Uncontrollable Value Propositions

The value proposition of many striving Internet companies lies in the content its customers create and provide. While they might control the platform (governance) they don’t control the actual product (content). Flickr gets its value from the photos its users upload and the communities formed, Google’s Adsense gives advertisers targeted visibility but heavily relies on the quality of its members’ websites and eBay has to hope that offer and demand match on their platform. None of them is truely in control.
Out: product design
In: enabling solutions and value co-creation

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Unpredictable Customers

Isn’t the customer best suited to know what his needs are? It has been said over and over again that we have moved from a mass-market push economy to an environment of very informed and knowledgeable customers that carefully research product information on the Internet, especially in the travel sector. But many managers are still not realizing how to best cope with this fact. Take the music industry. The major record companies are still building on a business model that banks on pushing/creating hits for specific customer segments: step 1 identify potential stars, step 2 market them with big bucks through all possible channels, step 3 materialize on the few hits and flip the flops. But platforms like MySpace are giving the majors increasing headaches. On MySpace stars and fan communities alike emerge out of nowhere around different styles and bands of music. The platform has been hugely successful in giving unknown artists visibility and music fans choice.
Out: customer segmentation
In: matching offer and demand

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Unguardable Communication Borders

Communication departments think they have to control every message that goes out of the company. That doesn’t work anymore. In the era of blogs companies have to let their employees directly communicate with customers, employees of competitors and stakeholders. Company frontiers will become much more porous. IBM leads the way and has fully embraced blogging,as well as Google, Microsoft and eBay. By letting employees directly interact with the “outside world” companies get a much more human touch and feel. And that is important in a world where a a group of uncontrollable customer bloggers can potentially create a lot of negative publicity.
Out: controlled communications & company borders
In: from speaking to listening: permeability and customer collaboration

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Liberalize Distribution Channels

Selling is difficult. What could be better than getting others to sell for you? Rather than trying to manage & control your distribution channels it makes sense to capitalize on the entrepreneurial capacities of others to get your value proposition to the market. Amazon.com has long ago made the affiliation model popular by mobilizing thousands of small, specialized and often personal websites to market Amazon books. Grameen Phone of Bangladesh uses microcredits and entrepreneurial village women to sell their phone services. This so-called trend of minipreneureurship is one of the strongest flavors of the day.
Out: direct-to-customer
In: minipreneurship
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Adaptive Diversity

Innovation is hard to spark and even harder to manage. Nokia tries to foster innovation around its telecom products by running The Nokia Ventures Organization that invests money in promising ideas. But this almost seems outdated when thinking of how Google brings home innovation: By opening up their application programming interface (API) to the world they allowed thousands of programmers around the globe to access to their database and content. These developers then tinker with innovative applications built around google search, which the company picks-up on as soon as one strikes success. It’s innovation at zero and gives google access to talentend and innovative programmers around the world… At zero cost (read more about this trend). It’s sort of a shift from venture capital to open innovation platforms.
Out: deciding and allocating
In: prototyping & adaptive diversity

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In the future the most successful organizations will be those that are able to design business models that successfully build on participation, involvement and an enabling environment - but it will almost definitely be at the price of control.
Out: reigning
In: governance

There are two websites that I really enjoy reading,

The first one is one kind of a Daily blog and the second one is a monthly report which has a colorful and very clean Look and Feel, I would like to create a Vacation website with a similar look and feel, check them out:

1. Springwise
2. TrendWatching (Check out their past newsletters)

Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. Ferociously tracking more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets of world cities, digital cameras at hand.

To ensure true ‘glocal’ coverage, the central office is in close contact with more than 8,000 Springspotters in over 70 countries worldwide. The full colour, monthly Springwise (and related trendwatching.com) newsletters, to which you can subscribe for free, get sent to more than 210,000 business professionals in more than 120 countries.

So whether you’re a budding entrepreneur, head of a start-up, management consultant, marketing director, business development director, trend watcher, journalist, private investor, business development director, or venture capitalist, or anyone else interested in creating or expanding companies, Springwise will instantly inspire you by getting the world’s most promising young ventures and ideas right in front of you.

Springwise is the first company to compile and send out a newsletter like this on a global scale, making optimal use of an ever more networked world. Established in Spring of 2002, Springwise is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

I have been recently reading and writing about Web 2.0 and the social media phenomenom.

Today I want to write about the different Web 2.0 websites within the Travel Industry, that I have come across in the last few weeks.

As we have previously discussed Web 2.0 changes the way people perceive information. These type of websites use Web 2.0 elements like Blogs podcasts, user reviews and comments, ajax, tags, etc, and they are particularly attentive to RSS, which represents a formidable opportunity for the travel industry.

RSS is also spreading rapidly across the internet. The new format is changing the way we access news, revolutionizing the way we inform ourselves – the required information comes to the user. An intelligent tailored access to information – each surfer, depending on his requirements, can personalise his news bulletin: “It is information on demand.”

A well informed traveler is a happy traveler!

Here are some of the Web 2.0 websites that I have found in the travel sector:

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TripAdvisor is a collection of more than 5,000,000 traveler reviews & opinions of hotels, destinations and vacation packages worldwide. URL: www.tripadvisor.com

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TravBuddy: Easily create your own travel blogs with amazing maps, upload unlimited photos, share travel reviews and meet people from all around the world! URL: www.travbuddy.com

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43Places: Share stories about places in your city and around the world. URL: www.43places.com

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Epictrip: Epic Trip is a new and unique way for travelers to know what their destinations and their hotels are all about, even before setting off. By connecting travelers with videos, virtual tours, reviews, and the wealth of experience brought to bear by the very users of Epic Trip, it is their mission is to spark people’s desire to discover their own epic trip. URL: www.epictrip.com/

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TripHub Group Travel Site: Great site to plan, coordinate and share any trip or event that involves people going to a destination. The service allows you to: - Invite people to join your trip and keep track of who is coming (eVite like functionality) - Research and discuss hotel options in over 350 cities (provided by hotels.com) - Share travel itineraries from any source or supplier - Send e-mails to some or all members of the group - Track who owes money Cool site. Launched in March. URL: www.triphub.com

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World66: Open content travel guide, where people all over of the planet can write about the places they love, hotels and restaurants they love. URL: www.world66.com/

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Thisplaceiknow: There are tons of travel guides that have touristy places like The Empire State Building or The Hollywood Sign, but this is a travel guide that has places that are “more personal”. So for example: There’s this awesome place in Rehoboth, Massachusetts where you can see all the way into Providence. It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s a great place to go to see a really cool view of the city, and it probably wouldn’t be in any travel guide URL: www.thisplaceiknow.com/

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Rent Me A Vacation: World wide vacation rentals direct from the owners. Uses google maps. URL: www.rentmeavacation.com

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I would highly recommend to visit these websites and explore the different opportunities with them. I think that adding our travel content on these websites will be a good start.

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If you are running a large PPC campaign I suggest evaluating BetterPPC.com

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I recently came across the problem of sending a video file over email to my advertising agency, after many failed attempts, I went to Google and did a search on “Sending Large eMails” and I came across Pando

What’s Pando?

Pando is free software that lets you send and receive files and folders of any size* with your existing email address.

• Bypasses email attachment limits
• Opens .pando attachments emailed to you
• Accelerates downloads of huge files and folders

• Uses your existing email address
• Drag, drop and send entire folders
• Sends small .pando attachments, never clogs inboxes
• Easy: No web uploads or compression, just send via email!

The company develops cool technology that allows for the transfer of huge files — using email.  For me, it’s now a must-have (I am using it to transfer large video files from my laptop, as well as distributing those large files among my friends and family).

And Pando is certainly growing fast. Now, the company has more than one million installs;  about 3 million gigabytes have been sent.

I have always believed that if you have a quality product, people will spread the word, and Pando is one of them.

Also, Pando has added new features, like folder transfers, Mac support, encryption, and Yahoo! Messenger support.

I think Pando’s growth should continue — especially in light of the surge of online video, such as with YouTube, MySpace and  on and on.

It is easy to install and very easy to use.

“Try it out it is absolutely great, and it’s FREE”