Good Tuesday morning:
Apple pay is in the UK, Nokia is in the write-off section of the balance sheet. Busy days and a busy week with a bit of celebration — tomorrow I ‘turn two years as a Skyscannista (is that a term?)’ so happy Skyscanniversary to me.
Onto the good stuff.
Non-Travel Starters
Facebook is working on its own digital assistant, project-named Moneypenny. There aren’t ton of details yet, but it seems that it will be human-curated tool rather than a 100% AI driven PA. It will live within Messenger, Facebook’s killer and new platform, and will help people get answers to questions/problems/issues as a communication between real people via the messaging platform. Hm… Operator should take a note. Link.
Ellen Pao stepped down as a CEO and Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder and currently CTO of Hipmunk, returned at the helm of the community. Quite a bit of unrest at Reddit recently, but it all seems to be going in the right direction. Link.
Our neighbours in EDI, FanDuel, just raised $275M. Welcome to the unicorn club. Link.
Microsoft wrote-off the Nokia investment ($7.6Bn, allegedly right sizing by 7,700+ people). At the same time, it announced the release of Office 2016 for Mac, clearing focusing on providing services across platforms and devices, rather than trying to build them itself. Link.
Snacks
A couple of shameless pieces of advertizing here, as my team does some very good things. Skyscanner for Business— we are happy to work with Hipmunk and we are happy to share our thoughts on Push APIs. Link re: Hipmunk and Link: re APIs.
Priceline Group dominates in other news. Its answer to the sharing economy is pushing Villas.com, their vacation rental arm, onto Booking.com results and as an API to third parties. OpenTable touts ability to track location of friends within the app (link) and Kayak’s CEO Steve Hafner joins the board of SeatGeek, the meta for tickets. Link.
Google starts doing facilitated booking with Hotels. Not all chains are included, but the integration with Google Wallet could be significant, especially if applied in general search results and not only in the HotelFinder section. Link.
Airbus’ E-Fan, an all-electric plane, crosses the English Channel in a first all electric flight covering that distance — a great day for aviation. Link.
P.S. A Frenchman disputes the achievement. However, his plane was launched from another plane. So not the same. Link.
Dessert (Stats)
92/20: is the new 80/20. Apple’s iPhone captures 92% of the profit for controlling 20% of the market. Link.
400M: Travel intenders worldwide, according to Comscore’s study. TripAdvisor touches 13% of that. Link.
65M: Number of subsribers on Netflix.
3.5 Hours: The NYSE suspended trading due to a tech glitch. Millions of unrealized trades. If not billions.
Some Cool Reading (Watching)
Scott Gall0way rocks DLD with 90 slides in 900 seconds to tell us all about the Four Horsemen and why Amazon needs to open retail stores (nice confirmation as BirchBox is doing that already). Best 15 min to see the internet economy disected. Link.
The NYTimes covers what lessons Uber can learn from AirBnB’s expansion abroad, proposing that working with regulators leads to better results than trying to do things regarldess of law. Hm… (10 min). Link.
In another piece re: AirBnB, Brian Chesky reveals how 7 VCs rejected getting 10% for $150K of what is now a $24 Billion giant in the sharing economy. Rejections are ok. Most people get it wrong, so don’t be discouraged if you get a no. Link.
In an interactive tool, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) lays out the traps of strategic thinking. A good primer for anyone vaguely involved in strategic planning and positioning. (10 min). Link.
I made a commitment not to buy/start a new book before I finish my last one, which is Cartographies of Time. Next on the list is Straight to Hell, coming out on July 16th. What should be next? Comment/tweet and let me know what good books you have read recently.
*** Expressed views and opinions are my own.
Photo Credit: National Geographic is amazing. I thought I’d use their Photo of the Day on the day of the post as the picture on top. Please share and give credit to the photographs and National Geographic. Here’s the link for your daily inspiration: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/
