Cookbook: Round up of Travel & Tech #15

Good Tuesday morning, World, and greetings from Seoul!

Busy week, long read. Enjoy!

Non-Travel Starters

Nokia Maps should be enjoying the courtship of many bidders for the business — Uber, Apple, Baidu, and Facebook might be in the running, with Uber allegedly looking at a $3Bn bid. With Nokia’s technology, the new acquirer will have a legit competitor to Google Maps. Maybe that’s why Uber is seeking a new round at $50Bn valuation (wow!). Link on the bids. Link on Uber’s raises over time.

Microsoft might not be buying Salesforce, after all. At a market cap of $48Bn, with an assumed premium of at least 15%-30%, the price might be too steep. Link.

While Nike pulled out of its Nike Fuel business a while ago(quite smart, given the upcoming Apple Watch), CEO Mark Parker is bullish on the relationship and continues work with Apple to improve the experience. We might see more ‘tracking’ apparel in the future, seamlessly linked to the watch and iPhones. Link.

Pinterest raised $186 (addition to their Series G) from Goldman and previous investors, valuing the company at $11Bn. Employees will have the option to sell some of the stock. In another mega-round, TPG, Fidelity and A16Z plugged in $581M into Zenefits, an HR software management company, valuing the two-year old startup at $4.5bn. Pinterest Link. Zenefits Link.

Snacks

In the seasons of quarterly earnings, Trip, Expedia, and Priceline offer some comparison. Skift gives a nice versus view on PCLN and EXPE, where we see that while Gross Bookings for Expedia were higher, but PCLN did over 100M room nights, double that on their arch rival and netted $333M in income, compared to $32M for the Seattle-based company. Link.

Speaking of the top two OTAs, both are testing the waters into corporate travel management. After Booking’s discount offer for businesses (Link), Expedia releases its own version. AmEx, BCD, and CWL should be watching this closely. Link.

Meanwhile, Trip seems to be continuing strong with their InstaBook initiative, raking in $363M in revenue, of which $249M were hotel bookings. The growth is great, although RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney voiced concerns that Expedia and Priceline will constitute 50% of all revenue by the end of 2015 and up to 70% by end of 2016. Link.

AirBnB’s founder Brian Cesky is winning friends at the White House, being named the presidential ambassador of global enterpreneurship. This is a great move, especially in light of warm US-Cuba relationships. Link.

JetBlue pairs up with Amazon Instant Video to offer streaming on the planes. It won’t be long before Netflix gets in IFE (in-flight entertainment). Link.

Dessert

FitBit IPO S1 filing, 2014 stats — $745.4M in revenue, 10.9M devices sold (note — pre-Apple Watch), 6.9M paid active users. Interesting dissection on the numbers by Jackdaw Research, which happily questions the paid active user numbers. S1 Link. Analysis Link.

The founder of Tiens Group, Chinese Billionaire Mr. Li, took 6,000 employees on a 4-day, all-paid trip to France. The pictures look like a parade abroad. Nice one. Link.

Some Cool Reading

The New Yorker gives us a good, long story into Marc Andreessen’s thinking, current hypothesis and a not-so-well-known dislike of his years when he was growing up. Long read. Link. (20 min)

A hypothetical story (so close to the truth) about the Unicorn founder who walks out with nothing. Great piece by Heidi Roizen, Operating partner at DFJ. Link. (10 min).

Stuart Butterfield, Slack’s co-founder, muses on how to successfully launch a product/company. Great read on taking on user feedback as your product feature set. Link. (10 min).

In a bit of an informertial piece, Branch.io gives us a view on growing mobile usage. Link. (11 min).

*** 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/