Travel Tuesday Cookbook: Weekly Roundup of Travel and Tech #4
Good Tuesday Morning, World!
What a week of numbers!!! Some of them good, some of them disappointing, especially for the Seattle Seahawks. Here’s what caught my eye in the past 7 days.
Non-Travel Starters
Streaming music is clearly on the up these days and Jay-Z wants a piece of the action. Rumor has it that he is buying Tidal, another Scandi company, which focuses on high-quality streams, for $56M.
Uber might be going head-to-head with their investors in developing their own driverless car. Travis is opening up an R&D centre at Carnegie Mellon to develop the necessary tools to built the vehicles. Hat Tip: Andy Sleigh
Google’s virtual assistant, Google Now, gets some good integrations by partnering with tons of companies — if you don’t own the purchasing funnel, own the post-purchase notifications. Smart. Let’s see where that goes.
Apple’s massive quarter is just the beginning — with cash north of $140Bn at the moment, share buy-backs continue, probably via debt, so that it doesn’t get hit by taxes for repatriating some of the international cash. I wonder when Apple will buy back all outstanding shares and take itself private ☺
Made.com teases before its potential float, showing 63% YoY growth in revenue. Good one.
Snacks
Qatar increases its share of IAG to 9.99%. That’s smart — as part of OneWorld and now owning a good part of BA/Iberia/Vueling, which soon will also buy Aer Lingus, Qatar might end up owning part of its alliance. The strategy is an interesting one — similar to Etihad’s own stakes-alliance. I wonder when Emirates will start investing more in carriers to build its own global connection network.
Qantas jumps on the Virtually Reality wagon, hopeful to give VR sets to its flyers. Initially, the 3D experience which will feature promotional videos. The Samsunggear is said to be powered by Facebook’s Oculus — I bet ad space in the shows will be super expensive, as people will watch ads just for the VR experience.
Capacity constraints will become more pronounced in the future — the UK needs to increase the number of runways if it is to be competitive with the Middle East push in building new airports. In a recent report by KPMG, you can see where the new capacity is coming from — check out Asia — wow.
Qunar, the Chinese hybrid meta/OTA/GDS player, counts on technology, mobile and hotels bookings to get to profitability. At PhoCusWright, CEO CC Zhang assured that the company will invest for the next 2 years and seek profitability in 2016.
Carriers want to have a multi-sensory experience by introducing airline scents that are recognisable by customers. Turkish, Air Canada, United, and now Delta spray their cabins to differentiate. I wonder whether the trend will pick up with Low Cost Airlines and what the scent will be ;)
Dessert (Now Facts)
You don’t need the data geeks 538 to tell you that Sunday’s Super Bowl was one of the most epic ever, with the Pats stealing yet another, allegedly deflated Lombardi Trophy. But if you care about the numbers more than the Superbowl ads, here’s the proof — apparently, it was one of the most epic Superbowl games of all time.
Staying with the Superbowl, here’s what a 30-second ad slot worth $4.5M, can buy you, according to the WSJ: a year-long magazine campaign, 500M online video ads over 18 days, or 800M ad impressions on sports-related sites.
Apple’s massive quarter introduced some nice comparisons, such as: $74.6 Bn: Apple’s quarterly revenue | $60.1 Bn: Luxembourg’s GDP in 2013. For more of those, go here.
New York City (I love NY) saw 54.3 M visitors in 2014, of which nearly 750K from China. Impressive. AirBnB should be excited, since hotels are not built fast enough.
Some Cool Reading
My blog post from Friday night got quite a bit of attention on LinkedIn and otherwise. If you haven’t read it, here it is — Why Facebook Should (and probably will) Buy Transferwise? (5 min)
Nadella’s Microsoft, by WIRED. Good piece. (9 min)
UN’s World Tourism Organization releases facts about travel and tourism. Good report, if you want to dig in. (9 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/
