Feb 29, 2012
Five Useful Things I Read This Week
Groupize, a booking engine for large hotel room blocks
Groupize is a new travel industry tool. It’s a hotel booking engine. So what, right? Its cool trick is booking blocks of up to 25 rooms at a time, which no other hotel booking engine does at present. Awesome if you’re a wedding planner… and the UX is nice.
Facebook is making another design change. This time it’s to Facebook Pages, which are bread & butter for the social marketing community. This post on spottedsun.com has the skinny.
Microsoft, partnering with the government of the Balearic Islands, has established an innovation center specifically for tourism (site is in Spanish). The Balearics are an out of the way place to do this, but it’ll be interesting to see if this yields any fruit for the travel industry.
O’Reilly Radar post on the state of APIs and the directions in which they’re currently developing. As a web app guy, I found the bit about using APIs to drive analytics particularly interesting.
And one more Facebook-related article… This piece from Fast Company describes (puportedly) leaked internal Facebook documents that describe their future vision for online ads. Briefly, it looks like they want to drop display advertising completely in favor of social ads that show up as conversations. Will users go for that? A few years ago I would have said “no,” but they might be on to something with the approach outlined here.