The Airfare Predictor

Farecast, the start-up that predicts whether airfares are about to go up or down, has launched NATIONWIDE. I first came across this website last June, when the company launched a test version covering flights originating from Seattle or Boston. As of Monday, it covers 1,800 markets, including 55 origination cites — including Orlando (MCO), Miami (MIA), Tampa (MIA), West Palm Beach (WPB) — for our clients coming to Florida.

“I would imagine that people using Farecast would also like to save some money on their hotel acommodations, and it immediately made me think about a ‘Hotel Price Predictor’ - Great Marketing Concept…”

Farecast, backed with $7 million from Greylock and others, shows whether the lowest fares for the trip are rising or falling over the next seven days. It takes into account past experience, and lets you know the degree of certainty it has in its prediction. Take, for example, a search for Orlando to Las Vegas. You will get a page that looks like the one below. It advises you to buy, because it predicts with 80 percent certainty that prices will increase over the next seven days; It also shows prices are at a two-month low.

Airline tickets are one of the big-ticket expenses all of us (including our customers) face every year, and which we seem to have the least knowledge about. If we delay our ticket-buying plans by a week, we’ve found ourselves paying $300 more– or sometimes less — than had we booked the week before. Farecast helps crack this opaque process, using historical patterns as its prime guide.

Farecast has unveiled an additional feature: A way for you to subscribe to regular alerts (via an RSS feed) that tracks the going fare for your chosen route, plus predictions.

Advertising is contextually driven. If you are flying to Chicago, Farecast will show ads about Chicago hotels or rental car companies.

Farecast’s VP of Marketing Mike Fridgen said hundreds of thousands of people have already accessed the site. Some 50,000 people clicked its “add my city” button since the company launched two months ago.

“Even if you are not yet able to build a similar technology for hotel rate forecasting, I am very confident in predicting that people using Farecast would also like to save some money on their hotel acommodations, so how about at least advertising on Farecast ?, what do you think ?”

I recently came across this ‘weird’ website:

How Web 2.0 aware are you ?

As it describes itself it is part disturbing, part humourous, but all in all this is a fun “Web 2.0 Awareness Test” that uses some slick technology based on a combination of CSS and Javascript which allows a site to programmatically determine if a link has been visited before, and then it assigns you a Web 2.0 awareness score.

In any case I would love to use a similar type of flash animation (the rolling numbers and the rolling drums) for a Vegas Vacation type of promotion…   Let’s think about it…

Lycos, Blinkx: 5 Million Hours of Video for All

I have recently been reading about Blinkx.  They just have recent deal with AOL, which focuses on educational videos.  As I have always believed, online video is not just about jokes and pratfalls; there is certainly a huge market opportunity for specialized content, that can be monetized with advertising or with downloads.
They are also working on a new partnership with Lycos, in which the powerful Blinkx video search engine will be a platform for the Internet portal.

As we have previously discussed, video search is pretty tough, mainly because it is not text-based.  But, Blinkx is one of the early players in the space – and has some key technologies that streamlines the process.  For example, the search engine analyzes what is actually said on video clips.  In fact, the engine has more than 5 million hours of video.  Even companies like Yahoo and Google have had difficulties with this stuff.

Since the dot-com implosion, Lycos has been overshadowed in the US.  However, the portal has a strong presence in Europe.  The site is ranked #15 in the world and attracts almost 25 million unique visitors per month.

I don’t use Lycos at all, but with a strong video search engine, I might give it a try.

There is a post on the Flickr Blog announcing that 1,234,384 photos were geotagged in the first 24 hours after the new feature launched this week.Flickr Geotagging, which allows users to drag photos on to a Yahoo map and mark them with a specific worldwide location, received rave early reviews, even from competitors. I haven’t yet tested it myself, but I’ve read that it is incredibly easy to go back and geotag hundreds of photos with very little effort.

I have always admired Flickr (Social Web 2.0 type of website).

Flickr continues to rock along, with 4.5 million registered users and 17 million unique visitors per month. They have just under 230 million total photos uploaded and 900,000 new photos are uploaded daily on average. Read more about Flickr on Wikipedia

Now, just think of the possiblities of geo-tagging photos for the travel industry, the marketing opportunities could be incredible. Let’s start a discussion about this.

Social Media Optimization: It’s Like SEO, For Social Sites

One of the coolest things about the rise of social networking and sharing sites like MySpace and YouTube are the new opportunities they offer to marketers, even to search marketers. Into that space seems to have come a new term, SMO — social media optimization.

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) from Rohit Bhargava to my understanding is the first use of this new term. In it, Rohit expresses how SMO and SEO can work together:

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

In other words, many who do search engine optimization have learned to build search engine friendly sites. Do that, and the search engines often will naturally reward you with traffic. But is your site social media friendly? Have you added the things that will get you into the new fertile ground of SMO?

It’s worth considering. Conceptually, some of this stuff isn’t new. For example, we long had people taking about ways to help others bookmark your web site. But today’s new wave of social media sites can operate as a magnifying glass. Get that one person to bookmark you to del.icio.us and in turn you might tap into many other links. And those links, of course, flow back into helping with search rankings.

Rohit’s got tips in his post above. If those aren’t enough, check out Cameron Olthuis’s Introduction to Social Media Optimization, which provides further tips. Loren Baker then goes on with further ones in Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO, recapping those from Cameron and Rohit and adding his own. For yet more, Lee Odden offers some up on New Rules for Social Media Optimization. Need still more? You can’t go wrong keeping up with post from SEOmoz. Rand Fishkin’s never happier than when he’s offering some SMO advice. And someday I’m going to sit Dax Herrera down and debrief him on the many sharing sites that I’ve him frequent with the ease of a native. The sale of his mustache, while not technically on a sharing site, was still a classic of working another site (eBay) to drive traffic to your own.

One of the biggest adjustments coming from the SEO world and into SMO, understanding that your presence can be in multiple places without being harmful.

Generally in SEO, it’s good advice to have one single web site that you point to. Build traffic to a common domain, rather than divide it among various places. Sure, as you mature in SEO, you learn the advantages to having multiple sites. A corporate blog and a corporate web site can equate to double the representation in top search results. But there are limits, and you’re still basically driving traffic to places you own.

With SMO, the adjustment is understanding that you have multiple places that while you don’t own them still can be valuable to you. A Flickr profile can get you traffic in the Flickr space. Similarly, your del.icio.us bookmarks while on the del.icio.us site still might drive traffic. And have you gotten a MySpace profile yet? Go now, because you might decide you want it to drive traffic from MySpacers down the line.

Matt Cutts didn’t — and now someone else owns his valuable Matt Cutts persona over there. Meanwhile, I might never flow into MySpace the way my 16 year old niece does.

Want to know more? There are two good threads going in the Search Engine Watch Forums, Here Come’s Social Media Optimization? and What Is Social Search?

Gregory Kohs is a junkie for sites like del.icio.us and popurls.com.  “I love seeing what the web community is currently gobbling up, and thanks to these folksonomy and democratic bookmarking sites, it’s easy and fun to do,” he said.

One night last April, he found Placeopedia, which is a mash-up of Google Maps and Wikipedia.  He tested out some places in Atlantic City.  Interestingly enough, there were no casino hotels marked.Hmmm….might there be a business opportunity?

Well, he started MyWikiBiz.com.  Basically, his service is to author articles for companies and organizations that currently lack a presence on Wikipedia.  “First and foremost, if you’re an eligible corporation or non-profit, make sure you’re on Wikipedia,” he said.  “But I just can’t fathom how a company’s marketing or communications manager can shut off the lights for the night, knowing that his or her organization is missing out on a daily Wikipedia market of 6 million people – each of them hungry for information.”

I recently posted on Starwood’s Virtual aLofts in Second Life

I usually read Ilya Vedrashko blog the MIT AdLab mostly because he is a grad student at MIT University and is very much updated with what is going with the emerging media. He just recently wrote his graduate Thesis on “Brands in Games”, for which he also created a blog where he wrote this post that I want you to read: A Store is taking hostage by the Second Life Liberation Army - …. “Weirdo Stuff happenning in SL….” What do you think ?
I hope I can build my Resort one day, and no one will come and take it hostage, at least in Second Life…

Do you want to know how to advertise on YouTube ?
Read the following post from the blog Random Culture: How to Advertise on YouTube

Also read: AdvertisingAge: YouTube’s Ad model lets users vote on ads

I also recommend reading this article: CNet Article: YouTube: Too rough for advertisers

I always enjoy reading Ilya Vedrashko Blog (Ilya is a grad student at MIT’s comparative media studies program, researching new advertising channels within and outside the existing media structures)

Ilya wrote the following post on MIT Advertising Lab: YouTube’s new ad formats: links, screens

YouTube is already showing ads to market a Paris Hilton CD - Read this NewYorkTimes article

As I have recently talked about, the owner of the Westin, Sheraton, and W chains is testing out a new loft-style hotel with prototypes in the suburbs and in virtual reality , you won’t be able to check into aloft, Starwood’s new line of moderately priced, loft-style hotels, until the first quarter of 2008. But in September, you can wander into the lobby of its digital Doppelganger inside the popular online world of Second Life.

Why is Starwood doing this ?

Starwood, owner of the chic W brand as well as the Westin and Sheraton chains, is the first real-world hospitality company to open in Second Life, and joins a growing list of other companies who are using the online world to build their brand name, test products, or simply sell merchandise—albeit digital merchandise

Created and run by San Francisco’s Linden Lab, Second Life is a 3D digital universe with a growing population of some 400,000 people. This alternate world is filled with the same mundane interactions as our real world: People buy land, build homes, and pay for a range of everyday goods and services. And they pay in cold, hard U.S. dollars (which are exchanged for Linden dollars, Second Life’s currency).

FISHING FOR FEEDBACK. For Starwood, opening aloft in Second Life is a way to test-market the hotel’s design and rapidly prototype the evolving concept. For instance, staffers will observe how people move through the space, what areas and types of furniture they gravitate towards, and what they ignore.

The project is also an effort to tap consumers for ideas. The ultimate goal is, of course, to attract hip, youthful, tech-savvy customers to the aloft brand. For that reason, the virtual hotel will remain online, as an interactive marketing tool, even after the real-world buildings open.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE. The prototype being built in Second Life is based on a physical prototype under construction in a nondescript warehouse near White Plains, N.Y., a quiet suburban setting north of Manhattan where the company is headquartered. Starwood hired two New York-based companies to build the digital model and then to market it within Second Life and beyond: marketing firm Electric Artists and the Electric Sheep Company, which specializes in designing goods for sale within Second Life.

Visits to the aloft prototypes at both the White Plains warehouse and online in Second Life revealed parallel works-in-progress. In the warehouse, index cards were taped to the walls indicating where some architectural features, such as an indoor waterfall, would eventually be placed. And sample fabrics were draped over ottomans in the bar area. In the Second Life version, one designer placed photographs from the warehouse near furniture to compare the digital models to the real objects.

Both sites featured the clean architectural lines, high ceilings, and minimalist couches, tables, and beds that characterize the aloft brand as efficient yet stylish hotels that offer sophisticated, W-style environments at budget prices (Starwood hasn’t set final pricing yet).

MORE PROTOTYPES. “The aloft brand fits well into Second Life. It’s about sleekness, and the buildings and furniture don’t take a lot of time to render or load,” says Marc Schiller, chief executive of Electric Artists. He adds that while it’s possible to build an ornate Rococo-style hotel in Second Life, “the aloft project is much more appropriate.”

This is the first time the company has created a complete mock hotel—digital or physical—to serve as “a laboratory,” says Starwood Vice-President Brian McGuinness, adding that they’re already building a second physical prototype for an extended-stay hotel under the Westin label in the same White Plains warehouse.

This is unusual for the industry. Hotel prototypes usually don’t amount to more than a single-room model that might be shown at a trade show. But the company says that both prototypes made financial sense.

OPENING SOON. “We’re saving money. If we find that significant numbers of people don’t like a certain feature, we don’t have to actually build it,” says McGuinness. “We don’t have to have a painter here for 40 hours changing the color of a wall. We can reconfigure a detail. It is very parallel to rapid prototyping.” Starwood doesn’t disclose the actual cost of producing the prototypes, both physical and virtual.

The first aloft hotels are scheduled to open in Lexington, Mass., Tucson, Ariz., Cherry Creek, Colo., and the San Francisco and Philadelphia airports, and are available for franchising. Starwood predicts that by 2012, there will be 500 aloft properties worldwide.

The company’s ambitious launch of what it hopes to be a rapidly growing line of stylish and affordable new hotels reflects analysts’ predictions that there’s room for sales growth in the hospitality industry. In his presentation at the 2006 American Lodging Investment Summit, PricewaterhouseCoopers analyst Bjorn Hanson predicted that U.S. profits in the lodging industry will increase steadily between 2005 and 2007, from $20.8 billion to $29.7 billion.

LONG-TERM CHALLENGE. The increase seems dramatic after a period of low profits after September 11, when the travel industry cooled. Still, Hanson predicts hotels will see profits surpass the industry high of $22.5 billion in 2000, in part because U.S. hoteliers such as Starwood are building more properties. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts hotel room construction starts will rise from 77,549 in 2005 to 127,708 in 2006.

While Starwood’s approach to developing the aloft design is certainly innovative, the long-term test for the company will be to lure Second Lifers, and, more importantly, real life guests, toward the brand. Opening the doors of the aloft hotel in Second Life next month might be a big help in meeting the challenges ahead.

Private Island

The Second Life version of the aloft hotel is located on its own virtual island (a standard piece of Second Life real estate). Although Starwood doesn’t disclose the cost of building its virtual property, Second Life islands start at $ 1,250 and can reach $5,000, depending on size. In real life, aloft hotels are scheduled to open in less exotic locations such as Tucson, Ariz., and near the San Francisco Airport.

Drawn from Life

Designers at The Electric Sheep Co. and ElectricArtists based their digital renderings of aloft on photographs taken during their visit to the physical model in White Plains, N.Y.

By the Book

The designers of the virtual version of an aloft hotel consulted actual floor plans, seen here, that were used to build the physical prototype.

Less Is More

The minimalist design of the aloft hotels, seen here in an architectural rendering, includes many clean lines and bold modern shapes.

Good Translation

The sleek environment is easier to render in 3-D digital form than a Baroque-style building with lots of details and flourishes, making the aloft interior a good match for Second Life.

Early Concept

Starwood hopes that the Second Life version of the aloft hotel prototype will help the company test market the floor plan, furnishings, and other elements of the structure’s design. Seen here is a rendering of an early aloft hotel concept.

Be My Guest

Designers at Starwood will consider how virtual hotel guests in Second Life react to the configuration, color scheme, and other details of the building when finalizing their plans for the real aloft hotels.

Bigger Ice Buckets

The hotel in Second Life is both a testing ground – a way to get public feedback on the designs developed in White Plains – and a marketing strategy aimed at tech-savvy, hip consumers.

As you might already know Google has just announced today that it is unveiling a whole set of new products.

Read this BusinessWeek article

They will be offering web based Office (Right against Microsoft) for FREE !!!

Microsoft - Here they come…