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Entries in Personalization (6)

Thursday

May202010

Personalization: an answer to the future of mobile for Travel?

Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 8:00PM

Last night, I attended an event organized by Travelmole on the future of mobile for travel with some tenors from the industry, including Amadeus, Openjaw, Cartrawler and others.

There were interesting discussions about why mobile booking isn't really being adopted for hotel bookings in the UK. There seem to be a consensus that since bookings are done about 30 days in advance on average, people typically use their PC. But for more last minute activity, the panel agreed mobile might be more used more. Someone also suggested that the real mobile opportunity for travel is once the hotel/flight booking is done, where mobiles can be a support tool and new channel for ancillary revenues (eg once I am at the destination). In short, the mobile opportunity isn't about displacing existing revenue streams, but rather about exploiting new channels.

That said, our lack of time and mobile usability were also mentioned as key limiting factors on why booking isn't picking up on mobile. One person from the panel touched on that point when saying that search needs to be improved and that the mobile opportunity for travel companies is for smart people to come up with creative results.

While I agree much innovation is needed in the travel space, at LikeCube (http://www.likecube.com) we believe that mobiles aren't great tools for searching because of their form factor limitations. This directly impacts the experience of booking on a mobile. The problem with booking on a mobile is not booking, it's finding the place in the first place. On a PC, we got a plethora of information and screen estate to research and make that decision, but on a mobile, it simply isn't an enjoyable experience.

When it comes to music (last.fm or Apple Genius) or movies (Lovefilm, Netflix), we now assume and accept the services understand our taste and help us find what we'll like, bypassing the need for search alltogether. The same concepts are certainly applicable to travel, and even more on mobile

After all, wouldn't it be better use of our precious time if information would be more relevant to who we are, what we do or want and where we are?

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Location collides with real time. What's next?

Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 9:39PM

Thanks to the great folks from Chinwag and UKTI, we were amongst the 40 UK hottest digital companies that took part in the #digitalmission to South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin TX.

This year's edition had a very strong coverage of anything that touches geolocation, realtime and personalization. Not surprising when you think that Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla became mainstream in the previous editions of SXSWi.

This morning I attended the panel on the realtime web, with Google, Gowalla, Microsoft discussing where the future lies. There were challenging arguments about the need for an open standard on realtime information. However making the realtime stream more digestable was surprisingly unaddressed... at least in public.

People say corridor talks are the essence of SXSWi and I have to agree - it was the informal chats on where geolocation and realtime should go that were really interesting, especially with the great folks at Gowalla and Foursquare about where services like these should go next.

There was a brilliant panel on Engines of Sociality: 2010 and beyond, which concluded that nearly all the changing information on the Internet will flow through social streams. It was argued that this is the reason why the majors have all been so excited by realtime data, because they essentially offer unparallelled access to information and more importantly they recognise the personalization potential it holds.

But for those using realtime information, the constant question remains: Am I missing something?

And finding the right fliter isn't trivial, should it be the wisdom of the few? Or the crowd? Or our friends? Or by the self? Or the social graph?

At LikeCube our approach has always been to use our expertise in discovery and personalization to apply the right filter to the right type of data - making sure you don't miss things, by feeding you the right data at the right time, filtered to your taste.

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LikeCube to deliver opening keynote at HEDNA spring meeting

Monday, February 22, 2010 at 12:53PM

Founder and Director of LikeCube, Eleanor Ford, will be delivering the opening keynote presentation at the HEDNA Spring meeting in Prague on 27th April, speaking about the power of personalisation and predictive taste, and the associated impact on conversion.

HEDNA, founded in 1991, is a not-for-profit trade association whose worldwide membership includes executives and managers from the most influential companies in the hotel distribution industry.

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