Gadget Blog

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Mobile devices, including tablet computers and smartphones are rapidly becoming the computing and communications device platform of choice for consumers and business users. Messaging, gaming, engaging friends on social media, web surfing, reading e-books, and making payments (m-commerce) are just a few of the activities that consumers are doing on their mobile devices, for work and leisure. Just as the world wide web transformed travel distribution forever back in the late 1990s by enabling consumer-direct shopping and booking, mobile apps too will again alter how consumers plan their trips to achieve their travel dreams and experiences, and shop for and book travel.

Mobility devices

Home PC purchases and usage peaked in 2008 and have been on the decline ever since. And the companies that missed out on the mobile computing wave such as Dell and Intel are now feeling the pain. It is more likely to find a traveller in a café or at home on their couch using their Apple iPad, connected to the internet via Wi-Fi, dreaming about their next trip and researching new destinations and the sites and activitiesthat are available once they get there. It took 10 years for smartphones to reach 40 million unit sales, but tablet computers only required 4 years to reach the same level of unit sales. Analysts predict tablet unit sales will reach 100 million by 2015, so the race is now on to build the next generation of travel apps for mobile devices.

The mobile entrants are both large incumbents and new upstarts. Expedia launched their newly redesigned mobile app for iPhone at the 2012 travel industry expo PhoCusWright in Scottsdale, AZ. Critics hailed it as the best new mobile app for booking travel from any of the large OTAs. Also highlighted there was WeHostels, a Mobile Travel Agency (MTA) app that enables youth travellers to find a hostel to lodge for the night that is within their price range, has availability and is located via their mobile phone GPS geo-location feature. WeHostels is 100 per cent mobile -- no call centers, not even a web site -- WeHostels is the perfect offering for the wired up, young traveller on the go seeking shelter! HotelTonight is another immensely popular mobile phone app for the adult traveller who may find themselves stranded away from home overnight on business, or wanting to stay an extra day on a leisure trip for that one more day of fun, and needs a place to stay -- find it and book it in a few easy steps right on your smartphone!

According to research from Expedia and comScore, 58 per cent of mobile users have already booked air travel on a mobile device, and 56 per cent of mobile users have booked a hotel. By the end of next year, mobile bookings will be higher than “classic” desktop bookings, and not only for last minute reservations. But what about before making the booking? Travel begins with an experience in mind that the consumer wants to create with whom, when and where they travel. Two thirds of mobile users surveyed spend time dreaming about travel at least once per month. Forty eight per cent of travellers use their mobile device to research their dream vacations to far flung destinations. The majority of travellers, 49 per cent in developed markets and 66 per cent in emerging markets, are both undecided and budget-focused when they start planning discretionary travel. Seventy eight per cent of travellers planning a quick get away don’t know where they even want to go! Fifty per cent of travellers surveyed refuse to stay in a hotel that has no favorable reviews.

Travellers are first and foremost looking for credible sources of information and curated content (photos, videos, video tours, ratings, reviews and recommendations) from trusted advisors, including family and friends, travel bloggers and experienced travel agents.

Mobile Vacation Planner

Mobile Vacation Planner (MVP) is a tablet computer-based app by Blue Star Infotech (initially available on the iPad), that will enable travellers to plan their itinerary for a trip or vacation to any destination of their choice. MVP enables consumers to search a wide range of curated content and enjoy a highly-interactive user experience for travel planning using destination photos, videos, maps, and detailed descriptions of hotels, activities, site-seeing opportunities, and ratings, reviews and recommendations of travel content.

Mobile Vacation Planner (MVP) expedites travel planning and makes the process an enjoyable and hassle-free experience.

From the pre-booking stage to pre-travel itinerary management, as well as intra-trip and post-travel sharing, MVP addresses all of the aspects of planning a trip and telling your friends about it afterward. Simply enter the date and the travel destination, along with your desired activity timing and preferences, and MVP will offer a variety of suggestions for hotels, dining, cultural events, and activities suitable for different types of trips, including family, adventure or romantic getaways. MVP also offers an automated itinerary generation feature complete and the freedom to manually select activities to plan, re-plan, add, rearrange, and delete activities until the customer arrives at his or her perfect vacation travel plan.

Mobile Vacation Planner (MVP) is designed to be highly interactive and travel content-rich. MVP includes features for seasonal, context & time-sensitive, geo-location-based, pre-and intra-trip planning and post-trip sharing, and offers APIs to integrate with Google Maps & Places, TripAdvisor, Bing Attractions, a  Travel Planning Calendar, including export  to Apple iCal. MVP also offers Travel Booking Engine & Commerce Integration, as well as  the capability to integrate third party travel  content sources. MVP also includes the capability to upload trip details to Social Media, like Facebook, Twitter, and instagram, and the  facility to use the app both online and offline, has enhanced user experience, flexibility, and  ease of use.

Private labelling of MVP is available to companies seeking to engage and add more value to the consumer in their experiential travel planning, including tour operators, traditional & online travel agencies, youth and adult travel management companies, hotels, casinos & resorts, vacation clubs, event management companies, and convention & visitors bureaus. The business benefits of Mobile Vacation Planner (MVP) include powerful consumer bonding with your brand and increased customer loyalty, increased long-term revenues, increased travel agent productivity by offloading some of the travel planning activity to the consumer, and reduced computing infrastructure costs by leveraging both open source technologies and cloud computing-based hosting services.

Blue Star Infotech also offers other traveller value-added mobile apps including two for mapping routes to destination locations and providing turn-by-turn directions, one at street level (iRoadGenie) and the other inside large facilities for large resorts, convention centers, casinos and other venues with navigationalchallenges (iMapGenie). The company has also developed mobile native and web apps for booking air, car and hotel services, travel itinerary management, and weather and flight delay information.

The new age of mobile travel apps that increase traveller productivity, enhance their travel and user experiences, and help plan and  realize their dream vacations is upon us, and the forecast looks bright!

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The fear that our devices are somehow altering our brains might seem exclusively modern. But in 1931, Technology Review published  “Machine-Made Minds: the Psychological effects of Modern technology,” in which John Bakeless explored how machines had transformed the very nature of human thought. here’s what he had to say:

It is a curious fact that the writers who have dealt with the social, economic, and political effects of the machine have neglected the most important efect of all—its profound infuence on the modern mind. Anything that shapes our thoughts shapes society also; and the efects of the machine on contemporary thought must, therefore, be at least as signifcant as its effects on contemporary economics or industry, or the life of society in general.



Even our republican form of government is possible only because a few machines—mainly vehicles (railroads, airplanes, and motor cars) and means of communication (mails, telephone, tele- graph, radio, wireless, and machine-made  newspapers)—bring the minds of a continent sufciently close so that we can live  and work together. In fact, if we may trust Shakespeare, who certainly was not a product of the Machine Age, “there is nothing  either good or bad, but thinking makes  it so.” If the machine really controls our thoughts, no wonder it controls all else.

Consider the mental equipment of  the average modern man. Most of the raw  material of his thought enters his mind  by way of a machine of some kind—often  through the agency of several machines.

Newspapers, magazines, moving and talking pictures are the clearest examples.

All this creates an almost incalculable  diference between the modern mind—the  scholar’s in his study, the technologist’s in  his laboratory, the engineer’s in the feld,  as well as the giggling, gum-chewing shop- girl’s on her way down town in the sub- way—and the mind of the Eighteenth or  early Nineteenth Centuries. For the frst  time, thanks to machinery, such a thing as  a world-wide public opinion is possible.

Quite as significant as the machine- made power of the press and of mechanically reproduced art upon our minds, are  the various mechanical devices developed  during the last two decades for pouring ideas into our eyes and ears—movies,  talkies, radio, and television. Some of these  mechanical devices probably have more  efect upon the less literate levels of modern society than the printed word could ever  hope to have.

The danger is that our minds may be tied down to the machine. Our art may  some day be restricted (as advertising art  always has been) to that capable of mechanical reproduction, our music to the requirements of radio, talkie, and phonograph ...

All because we have misused the machine,  or allowed it to misuse us.

If the world ever realizes that hitherto  Utopian vision of a general difusion of the  good things of life—an ample assurance of  food, clothing, and shelter for everyone, to  which is added leisure for art, letters, pure  science, and philosophy, the gorgeous play- things of the mind—it will have to look for  them to the machine.

That is, it will have to  look to the machine for the economic basis  on which these things must inevitably rest. Strangely enough, we have hitherto  been willing to enslave ourselves to the  machine instead of enslaving it. Most of our contemporary troubles arise from that  odd willingness to allow the machine to be  master instead of slave. If we are to build  a great civilization in America, if we are to  win leisure for cultivating the choice things  of the mind and spirit, we must put the  machine in its place.

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A venture capital frm throws out intuition and uses computer models to determine investments.

Aldea Pharmaceuticals, a startup developing an emergency treatment for alcohol poisoning, seemed like an attractive investment to venture capitalist David Coats. But he didn’t rely on a hunch—he consulted the computer model he’d built.

Wenjin yang is research vice president at aldea pharmaceuticals, which got funding thanks to software suggesting that its method for speeding up alcohol metabolism was a good investment.

Two weeks and a few phone calls later, he cut the company a $1.25 million check. “A decision like that would have normally taken a minimum of three months,” says Tim Shannon, who is Aldea’s CEO and a partner with the frm that had led Aldea’s $7 million fund-raising round.

The $1.25 million was a follow-on investment from Correlation Ventures, which calls itself a “new breed of venture capital firm”—one driven by predictive analytics software built over the last six years by founder Coats and his partner Trevor Kienzle.

Correlation Ventures asks startups to submit fve basic planning, fnancial, and legal documents. It enters these into a program similar to credit rating software.

Entrepreneurs with low scores can get their rejections in as little time as two days.
High scores lead Correlation to a 30-  minute interview with both the startup CEO and the outside venture frm leading the investment, plus a quick legal review and background check.

Once it makes an investment, Correlation backs of and doesn’t take a board seat.
That policy is itself data driven: the frm’s analytics show that companies with more than two VCs on the board are less likely to be successful.

What’s not yet clear is whether this system works. Correlation Ventures has so far invested in 26 companies in diverse sectors but says it is too early to grade its success.

None of this might have been possible a decade ago. Harvard Business School professor Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, who advises

Correlation Ventures and is an investor in the fund, says the venture capital industry has only recently worked through enough business cycles to look for subtle trends.

There was also no complete, accurate, public set of venture capital data, so Cor-relation Ventures hustled for it. To build and maintain its database, it partnered with Dow Jones, scoured the Internet, signed nondisclosure agreements with more than 20 venture funds to see their internal statistics, and called hundreds of companies.

While so-called Big Data companies have attracted plenty of investors, the reputation-  driven venture capital industry itself has yet to embrace their tools. (There are exceptions, such as Google Ventures, which uses quantitative analysis to help guide decisions.)

One fnding from Coats’s research is that while top-tier frms invest in a disproportionate share of “winning” companies, the majority of successful investments are led by venture frms that don’t even crack the top 50. So it makes logical sense for Cor-relation Ventures to focus equal time and energy on many companies and co-invest with a diverse set of venture capital frms, he says.

To explain his project, Coats cites Money  ball, the book and movie about how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane rejected the conventional wisdom on evaluating baseball players and built a winning franchise by letting a computer tease out variables that others overlooked. He believes the averages will work out. “We’re not claiming to have a magic crystal ball,” he says. “We’re tilting the odds a little in our favor with each investment.”

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WHY TODAY’S  SMARTEST SYSTEMS

The good news is IT solutions  are now more sophisticated.
The bad news is they’re also  more complicated. And all  this complexity is taking its toll.

In fact, the typical IT  department now spends up  to 161 days just to specify,  design and procure hardware  for a new IT project (even  longer for software). 1

IBM PureSystems can be up and running in under four hours. 2

A SMARTER APPROACH TO I.T.

IBM PureSystems have been  able to achieve up to twice  the business application  performance and up to twice  the application density as  conventional approaches. 3

With IBM PureSystems,  computing is not just getting  faster and simpler. It’s taking  another important step with clients and partners, has  been turned into a pattern of  expertise. An IBM PureSystem  can follow this pattern to  automatically set up a database  infrastructure in minutes. The  system then monitors how the  database is being used, tuning  it as conditions change.

HAVE BUILT-IN EXPERTISE.

Recently, IBM unveiled a
new class of systems that
make all this complexity far
less complicated. We call
them IBM PureSystems™ . 

BEYOND CONVERGENCE.

Unlike today’s “converged” IT  solutions, IBM PureSystems  are more than just prepackaged
bundles of hardware and  software; these systems are  integrated by design, using  built-in expertise to balance and coordinate IT resources to create a radically simplified  experience for the end user.

Take the example of a database: IBM’s extensive research  on topics like transaction  processing, honed through  thousands of engagements  toward making our companies, cities and planet smarter.