Good morning, world, and happy Tuesday!
We return to our round up after a great week of yours truly in London, when our very own David Low demonstrated at the Amazon Web Summit how voice search works in travel with Amazon Echo and its personal assistant Alexa. Truly proud of the team. Off to a great piece this morning — enjoy!
Non-Travel Starters
The IPO market is back, or at least for some. Atlasssian, the enterprise software company from Oz (don’t we all love Jira) will test the markets on its private valuation of $3.3Bn, while IAC will float its dating portfolio, Match.com, OKCupid, and Tinder (~600K paying members and ~10M daily active users with 35 min + on the site) at $3.4Bn.
The market might be back, but valuations might be a different story. Square’s pricing at its high end ($13 per share) will give it a valuation of almost $4Bn, less than its latest round of private financing. Now, a lot of folks believe the high valuations are in a bubble and not sustainable — when you take in liquidation preferences and the fact that big ticket funds will make their cash before everyone else, the public market correction territory might bring paper to dollars at the true value. Link.
Google is open-sourcing its Machine Learning software, a bold move. That’s one small step for the community, one giant step for Big G — as machine learning and AI benefits from more information, it is critical for Google to get access to training grounds outside of the data centers owned by the company. Read the fine print — data remains with Alphabet. Link.
Facebook’s massive quarter is just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook’s M (digital/human-operated assistant), Instant Articles, and now Events (watch out Yelp!, TicketMaster, Eventbrite) move into our daily habits strongly. Events is particularly interesting one as it will get to a point where buying and selling tickets for concerts and NFL games might be done right in the app — the harbinger of e-commerce for the giant. You have a dedicated site to create them now. Link.
Snacks
The big news from last week is Expedia buying HomeAway for $3.9Bn. In its shopping spree, Dara has focused on building an incredibilty strong portfolio and the private accommodation market was missing, as Expedia competes with AirBnB and Booking.com’s private lodging offerings. A major win for the Seattle-based machine, adding some $16Bn in pass-through bookings. Consolidation in the fragmented travel market continues. Link.
Not to be outdone, Booking.com announced 21 million bookable rooms, which is outside of the hotel properties it distributes. With its recent deal with Concur, Booking.com might offer a viable alternative to AirBnB for home owners and property managers, especially in light of AirBnB’s increasing fees. Link.
Lufthansa might be hurting from its Direct Connect Charge (16 EUR on top of any GDS booking) according to the GDSs, but that doesn’t stop the carreir to explore new avenues — it recently went live with direct bookings via Google, a major step in cutting the middle man (or creating a new one). Still, the size of the agency bookings is humongous compared to what Google can drive direct. Link.
United’s boss is set to return in January, after suffering a heart attack in October. We wish Mr. Munoz fast recovery. In other top level changes, an outstanding man who I have seen speak a few times takes the helm at BA — Alex Cruz will be the CEO there. My humble prediction for his next stop — IAG CEO. Link.
Dessert (Stats)
6 Billion: Video views on Snapchat as of last month. Bear in mind that each platform treats ‘view’ in a different way — YouTube counts it if 30 sec have been watched, Facebook goes down to 3 secs, and Snapchat… well, who knows. Link.
8 Billion: Video views on Facebook, given at the Q3 call.
~900M: Daily Active Mobile Users on Facebook.
68%: Chinese men who smoke. 4 million smokers are just in Beijing (haze, anyone? :)). Wow. Link.
Some Cool Reading (Watching)
Sir Mike Moritz talks about leadership and the Valley in one of the best 1-hour pieces you will hear this week. Kara from Re/Code nails it again, despite a few commercial breaks. Bottom line: to build a great performing company, you need an outstanding organization and team that follows the rules. (1 hour). Link.
Emirate’s safety video before an FC Benfica sports game is brilliant. Benfica lost that game, but Emirates scores a hat trick with that viral advertizing. (2 min). Link. If that was not enough, watch an Emirates A380 have company in the sky by two jet men — unbelievable. (2 min). Link.
To clean your reading mind, here’s a good capture of where we are headed as humans — The New Yorker at its finest covering Human 2.0 — or how genetics will change the way we live. (8 min). Link.
//Expressed views and opinions are my own.
Photo Credit: National Geographic is amazing. Please share and give credit to their photographs and photographers. Here’s the link for your daily inspiration: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/
