Cookbook: Round Up of Travel & Tech #17

Good day, world!

What an interesting week for travel and tech. Right into it:

Non-Travel Starters

Twitter is making waves in the news. First, rumor has it that it wants to buy Flipboard for an alleged $1Bn. The heavily financed news magazine app, which had raised $160M to date, could be a nice answer to Facebook’s Instant Article as Twitter more openly competes with Facebook in mobile interfaces and functionality. Link.

While that is happening, there is another rumor circling around — Google is interested in buying Twitter. That has surfaced a few times before, but now the Tweet search is on again and with the departure of the original visionary of Google +, it might be another play to conquer social. Google + Twitter + Flipboard could be a nice answer to Facebook. Link.

I love what Satya Nadella’s doing with MSFT. After making a bold bet on the releases of Office and now Windows 10 becoming a continuous delivery as an OS, Cortana is coming to iOS and Android. Nice. Link.

Facebook is building messenger as a platform more and more. Now people have a Chat ID and biographical info for entities (note here: not only friends) that want to chat you up. I bet we will be receiving marketing info from pages we have liked. Link.

Snacks

Expedia sold it’s stake in eLong for $671M last week, as for a lot of analysts, it was a money-losing part of the business. Ctrip snapped up 37.5%, while Priceline today plugged in another $250M (on top of $500M from last year) to get 10.5% in the Chinese OTA. Consolidation continues. Link.

Delta made news on two accounts last week. It plans to deliver shareholder value through share buybacks (link), while it also mentioned that it is pulling out of certain distribution sites. Strategically, I will limit myself to saying that this looks like an interesting move. More academically, a Yale professor released a study that mentions that without price comparison sites, consumers could lose $6.7Bn annually. Link.

Uber is raising again, maybe because in each of the global markets it operates, it has competitors subsidizing first rides. The latest one is China, where the mega-taxi-hailing company Didi Kuaidi is prepping to give away $161M in rider subsidies starting next week. Wow! Customer acquisition just became a whole different game. Link.

Great cover of Trip’s Steve Kaufer’s thoughts during the J.P.Morgan’s annual tech conference. A lot of talk about Instant Book, in essence saying that the pricing is not right yet. Link.

Dessert

Apple is selling 30K watches a day in the US. Link.

60% of patients who sought second opinion received a different diagnosis and treament. That’s insane. Link.

Some cool reading (watching)

In a an article in The Telegraph, we learn that Jony Ive is now Chief Design Officer at Apple — the move solidifies the importance of design in today’s world and might change quite a few C-suites. Link. (5 min).

A 20-min video telling you how to improve your memory in an age where we ‘outsource’ our ability to remember things to the touch-screen devices in our pockets. Link.

Read Elon’s Biography, please. It is as much about what is probably the craziest inventor in our age as it is about his companies, but what a delightful and inspirational read into a man on a mission to make humanity interplanetary species. Hats off to that focus and determination. Link. 8 hours.

Favorite quote for the man in a race against time:

“I don’t ever set intentionally impossible goals,” Musk told Vance when asked about his lofty expectations. “But I’ve certainly always been optimistic on time frames.”

Brogan says Musk even pees fast.

“It’s like a fire hose — three seconds and out,” he says. “He’s authentically in a hurry.”

*** 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/