I spent the last weekend at the Boston Globe Travel Show and here are some thoughts: 1. Unemployment is actually helping some travel agents. Lots of tour operators I've talked to told me that their 2-week and longer tours have gained tremendous popularity with people in between jobs looking for a getaway. The price-points for these tours do tend to be on the mid-high side, but not high enough to appeal solely to self-employed business people and executives. 2. State-subsidized travel websites  run by Tourist Bureaus and Chambers of Commerce have come to be highly effective content portals, with a lot of traffic and great click-through rates for advertisers. (VisitFlorida.com is perhaps the best example) More importantly for us at WaySavvy, such travel content portals are indeed looking to complete the missing piece in their offerings - itinerary planning booking capability. 3. Travel suppliers are going social. This isn't really a new trend, but it hasn't caught up to traditional travel agents and tour operators in the way that it has for online travel companies. Now, however, tour operators are on twitter and facebook, and they recognize the importance of building a community online to generate leads and make sales offline. 4. Digital tour distribution platforms like RezGo, have a long way to go to penetrate the market (and they are deeply needed). Some tour operators have signed on to distribute their inventory at various online outlets, but few I talked to were aware of ubiquitous solutions to distribute their inventory to any online travel agency willing to sell it. RezGo is one of my favorite new travel technology companies, because they are pushing innovative distribution channels for travel products other than hotels, cars and flights. If you're a tour operator,they're a must-see.

Interesting article from Travolution Blog: Amedeus is pushing GDS distribution in Europe. From: http://ping.fm/WvoqK

Remember that "other" regular Boston startup gathering? where you couldn't find parking? and where you couldn't get in to see the presenters if you came late because the space was too small? Well, it's no more. The founders have listened, iterated, and tonight finally shipped a whole new product - Mass Innovation Nights 10. And it shines. Massachusetts Innovation Nights has been a presence on the local entrepreneurial scene for about a year now - it gained popularity quickly for its easy-going openness to anyone interested in making entrepreneurship happen in Massachusetts. Every second Wednesday of the month, people demo their products, pitch their ideas and ask experts for advice - all in good start-up cheer. MassInno's first nine sessions took place at Waltham's Museum of Innovation. The museum has some really interesting exhibits from the early days of Massachusetts' manufacturing industry (it's housed at a historic former Mill along Charles River), but it was not designed for very large gatherings - the amphitheater where demos take place can only fit about 50 people. So, starting tonight, MassInno moved to IBM's Waltham Innovation Center, and suddenly it had a completely different feel. Yes, people could find parking easily, but beyond that,the presenting companies had a full corporate auditorium at their disposal (with dual projectors and a wireless microphone),which got completely filled up! Several spacious adjacent rooms with large projectors housed table-top demos and there was a separate area for pure networking. There was plenty of space for power point presentations as well as impromptu laptop demos. To be honest, I am going to miss the gatherings at the Museum of Innovation a little - the venue had true character and was a nice respite from the glitzy hotels/conference centers of Cambridge and Waltham corporate offices parks and 4-diamond hotels. But ultimately, MassInno's mission is to create buzz, the more the better, and they are certainly better equiped to do so with from their new after-hours home at IBM. What about the presenters? There was wide variety of industries represented at MIN10 from the twitter app store Oneforty to Taste of Chocolate, which guides people on tours of chocolate boutiques around Boston. Taste of Chocolate provided free chocolate samples, and even gave away free tour tickets. Oneforty is a TechStars alum that's been generating some buzz (and investment) recently. I tried it out and found a couple of interesting travel twitter apps I didn't know about. Another company that caught my attention was Small Biz Computing.As someone who considers it below my geek's honor to buy a computer off the shelf instead of building my own using parts from NewEgg and MicroCenter, I was really excited to see a company building custom rigs out of retail components for businesses. I haven't had a chance to find out their prices, but I know that if they offered a good price and a good warranty I'd be temped to get some of their machines for my team instead of the "sterile" Dell boxes. (Of course, you can always get Alienware's, but good luck explaining that to your VC).

The past decade was explosive for online travel – we saw the market skyrocket and hordes of new players enter the field. New segments of the market have blossomed, including meta-search which saw a bunch of successful exits with one company now aiming for an IPO (Kayak). Finally, towards the end of the decade, we welcomed a whole new segment dubbed “discovery” or “inspiration:” sites like uptake.com, goplanit.com and joobili.com are all trying to help travelers approach the travel planning process in a way better tailored to their goals. In fact, the market has matured so much that some have come to call it “saturated.” My take - the travel market will change as much during the second decade of this century as it did in the first. Here are the top five trends I think we should expect:

1. Smarter search. No matter how you go about planning your trip online, booking it is still a process mostly unchanged since the late nineties. Online travel agencies simply expose their inventory to users through what is basically a prettied-up database browser – it is the user’s responsibility to compare hundreds of options across multiple sites to figure out what lodging, transport, activities, tours, etc.. they should actually book. In reality, everyone has unique preferences,which make the vast majority of the inventory irrelevant to them. We will see travel applications appear on the web which make intelligent decisions on behalf of users to find the most relevant products. WaySavvy,of course, is hoping to be among the first such applications, but we won’t be the only one. Advances in natural language processing and artificial intelligence technology along with ample cloud resources enable web apps to do a lot more processing now then they could 10 years ago. We already see that reflected in a variety of markets and travel will be no exception.
2. More people will switch from conventional travel agents to the web. Gone are the days when only the savviest young techies would dare make a few clicks online and then travel to a hotel with confidence they will be expected. As more book travel online, the service gains validation and draws in new customers. Suppliers are marketing their websites to their own phone customers before they connect them to an operator. The 55+ crowd is becoming much more comfortable with computers and will start using them to book travel. Smarter search tools will put a lot of travel agents’ tools in the consumers hands. All of this will put travel agents at a comparative disadvantage to online offerings.
3. To compete, travel agents will become more reliant on technology. Despite point 2, travel agents will still exist for a while because they retain the human factor. To effectively maintain this advantage they will need to work faster and provide better deals, which will be enabled by new travel technology products and companies. My guess is they will develop a funnel where they will use a web component to filter new users and aim to build stronger relationships with committed customers and suppliers, so every travel agent can bring a unique deal to the table for a highly targeted group of customers.
4. Suppliers will continue to push against the influence of OTAs. Expedia’s feuds with Choice Hotels in 2009 and IHG years ago are just a couple of examples that demonstrate how much suppliers want to disintermediate OTAs. Some are going about it peacefully by redesigning their websites like JetBlue, or introducing lowest prices guarantees like Mariott and Hyatt. Others seek to renegotiate their contracts with OTAs. Whatever the case, most suppliers are proactively looking for solutions to keep customers on their own websites and the market is bound to respond.
5. More developing countries will start creating/joining electronic distribution channels. The US and Western Europe are well covered by Global Distribution Systems which make inventory easily accessible to online and conventional travel agencies. Parts of Eastern Europe and South East Asia are now covered too, but travel to these areas and beyond is booming, and as inventory increases, supply channels will lag behind the volume for a while. This will create a lot of opportunity in those areas for startups to disrupt a market controlled by behemoths like Amadeus and Travelport.

Of course this list is not exhaustive - mobile will be huge with players like TripIt already making a killing, and meta-search will have an interesting role to play as a double-agent between suppliers and OTAs, but enough for one post. Your thoughts?

"Some of you are so smart you can take an instant failure and turn it into a 4- year failure." If only to hear Bill Warner say that in person, the UnConference was well worth attending. I can't wait to talk more about my experience at the event, but if you take nothing else ouf of this post just remember this: you HAVE to go to the next one, especially if you're an entrepreneur or an angel investor. Now, on to why... First of all, I've never heard the term UnConference before, nor have I ever paid more than $50 (yet alone $195) to attend any conference. I've heard from several people that last year's event was "good" but I was still a little skeptical until I saw a bunch of tweets urging entrepreneurs to apply for sponsorship "sponsorship" at the event. I checked it out, and the deal was promising - a sponsoring organization would underwrite my admission to $95 and I would get one-one meetings with experts from a list that includes industry captains, managing directors of major VC firms and nationally famous entrepreneurs. I have no idea what the odds were, but I applied and sometime later I learned I was accepted. So, last Thursday I got out of bed at 6:55 and headed out to the Nordblom conference center Burlington. I'm not really the early morning person...yawn...but I found that being among the first attendees has a huge advantage. The whole idea behind an UN-conference is that no agenda is prepared beforehand. At the start of the event, the organizers post a gigantic schedule on a whiteboard and people who want to host "sessions" during the conference can fill in the blanks in that schedule. Being a "sponsored entrepreneur" also gives you access to three face-to-face meetings with volunteer experts of your choice. These experts post their names on the schedule along with all the other sessions and it is the responsibility of the entrepreneurs to put stickers next to the names of the experts they wish to meet - first come first served.  Being first helps. I met with several outstanding experts all of whom helped shape the Boston startup culture for the past decade. They also helped me shape my product,go-to-market,and fundraising strategies. The atmosphere was so collegiate and down-to-earth among all attendees that I was able to sit down and talk not only with the three experts I was initially allotted, but with others I met in the middle of the day.  For a seed-stage company like mine, advice is arguably more precious than gold, and by that standard the UnConference was perhaps the most value-add large event I've ever been to. I had all my one-on-ones lined up in the first half of the day, which took me to the delicious catered lunch (think chicken with olives and apple-ginger-cinnamon cider), after which I set out to visit some of the general sessions. I caught bits and pieces of some really interesting sessions on angel capital and building advisory boards, and saw two sessions in full: "raising seed financing" by Brad Feld, and "how to launch your idea on no money" by Bill Warner. Brad Feld, in his session, coached people on what to expect when attempting to raise capital for the first time. Since most VC's generally expect cash flow before even talking to a first-timer, the session focused on angel investors. The takeaways were as follows: -Do or do not. There is no try. (Yes, Yoda said it first). But in the context of fundraising, this is very applicable. First, be honest with yourself - raising capital is not easy and there is a a significant chance you will not succeed. But after you've calmly made peace with odds and did not quit, there is no looking back. If you decide that you company needs money, do not go out there with the intention of "trying" to raise some. Approach one investor after the other with the firm intention of being successful. -If an investor turns you down, do not ask them to refer you to their friend - you would be doing yourself a disservice. Why would anyone take a deal that their friend passed on? They would feel like they are presented with leftovers. Everyone has their own unique screening approach to deals and your best bet is to be your own advocate in front of every individual investor. On the other hand, and this comes from another session, if you are pitching a group, make sure there are people in it (prefereably more than one) who already know you and your pitch. This will make the atmosphere in the room much more comfortable for everyone - you will be asked a lot of tough questions and it's helpful if you are not the only person present who knows the answers. -Ask for an amount, not a range. We're trying to raise $100k to $300k sounds meaningless - which one is it? Investors expect you to be efficient with their money, so showing you don't really know how to spend it right off the bat is a bad idea. If you requirements are flexible, present them in milestones - "we need $100k to launch in Boston and another $200k to launch nationally." -Ask investors for positive AND negative references. An investor with a good track record will be completely comfortable connecting you with the founders of his unsuccessful companies because (s)he hopefully learned from those failures and is comfortable with risk. -A point of some contention was whether to lean on some angel investors to act as "leads" to attract other angels into a deal. The consensus seems to be that while a good idea in theory, most angels do not want additional hassles beyond investing in a company they like. They can provide strategic advice and connections from their network, but raising additional capital is the entrepreneurs' responsibility. The other session I went to was probably mentioned in every other blog post about the UnConference, Bill Warner's "how to launch an idea on no money." I came into this session thinking it would be another tutorial on bootstrapping. Instead, I learned a valuable lesson on the very nature of entrepreneruship. Bill, who is gathering material for his new book, was trying to convey a simple message: innovative products, or "inventions" can only be successful if they are a result of a desire to help other people: "intentions." What's too often blocking the "flow" of intention to invention, he argues, is our focus on gadgets, buzzwords and markets before we know what they are for. Not that buzzwords or markets are unimportant. They are, to a company. And a company needs money to build itself up. But none of these terms, especially money, influence the creation of an idea behind it all. What influences ideas are intentions. "I intend to help people live healthier. I intend to make the world cleaner. I intend to make cars more affordable." Short statements that begin with "I intend to..." and that are free of buzzwords and technical lingo are the most fundamental ways to state a problem. Where there is a problem, there is a solution, where there is a solution, there is opportunity. Going into the rest of details of the UnConference would probably take many more pages, but I can't say enough what a helpful, insightful event this has been. Next time you get a chance, don't miss it.

October's shaping up to be a great networking month for innovation in Boston. It all started with WebInno23 yesterday - Boston's most popular (and free) consumer web gathering. The place was jam-packed as usual and was quite a fun place to be. Several cool startups presented - my favorite was BetterLesson, a collaborative workspace for students and teachers with great social integration as well as a robust core feature set. The highlight of the event was a panel by four rock star reporters ( Bob Brown, Peter Kafka, Scott Kirsner and Wade Roush) on start-up pr bootstrapping. Some of their messages were fairly intuitive - approach reporters openly, preferably through an intro, have big news to share, let them do the asking and don't try to impose an angle.The other point they made though, opened a real can of worms: never hire a PR professional. This one was contentious in the audience right off the bat, with quite a few big-name PR people tweeting and blogging on the subject almost immediately. The panelists' argument: don't hire someone for $8000 a month to get introduced to us if you can just come over and say 'hi.' The counterpoint: PR is about public relations, not just media relations. It's about building a community around your product and gathering media attention in ways some reporters don't event know about. Here are some posts on the topic: (Bobbie Carlton,  Chuck Tanowitz) I was planning a longer post, but the UnConference is tomorrow,and being a "sponsred entrepreneur" (I'll find out what that means tomorrow),I better get a good night's sleep! Look for a write-up on the UnConference and more info on October networking in the coming days!

Went to a great event yesterday, What's Next in Tech '09 at BU. There were some really interesting speakers including Bijan Sabet, an investor with Twitter, and Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot. Questions raised ranged from where the VC 's are looking to invest (they said clean tech and healthcare, big surprise there) to the meaning of cloud computing for startups. One aspect of the event that really caught my attention was the amount of students who were there, even though it's summer. In fact, about half of those asking questions of the panelists were students. Scott Kirsner, a Boston Globe writer who hosted this event, has recently made it a part of his agenda to make the Boston entrepreneurial ecosystem more inclusive for students, and some effects of the effort were apparent. There were definitely more students present than there were at several previous events I've attended.  About 10 or so of us from BC, BU,Babson,and Brandeis had our tickets paid for by the Stay in MA program from Flybridge Ventures, a new initiative to enable students to attend high-profile events. Fittingly, a lot of discussion centered around the fact the Boston investors, unlike many of their Silicon Valley counterparts tend not to take student entrepreneurs seriously. Someone brought up an interesting argument that in Silicon Valley, the highest-return companies were most often started by 20-somethings. Perhaps some of this divide can be explained by the almost-Ricardian specialization between the East and West coast as producers of education and corporate growth  respectively. People go East to create ideas and West to execute them. It's a cycle. In the healthcare sector, that cycles seems to be broken, in part because of the Longwood Medical Area's tremendous pull as a healthcare research platform. People are already calling Boston the Silicon Valley of medical tech. With software, not so much. The very Boston-based company that invested in Twitter has few investments in the Boston area. Not that Boston doesn't have its fair share of ultra-successful startups. In the travel space, TripAdvisor and Kayak are making a killing. But the economy of scale for turning a powerpoint into a company is bigger in Silicon Valley, and VC's feel their money is safer where more people have succeeded in the past. TripAdvisor was acquired by a West Coast company, and Kayak gained its star status after an investment from a star Bay Area investor. So, newly-minted Boston wanna-be-Sergey-Brins and wanna-be-Michael-Moritzes flock to the Silicon Valley even if their ideas are born here. One of the few ways to break this cycle for the software business is to bridge the gap between Boston's academic and entrepreneurial circuits. After all, the Silicon Valley was created by first-time entrepreneurs. Who are the first-time entrepreneurs in the software and conusmer web sectors? For the most part - students and recent grads. The big challenge is doing it locally. Making seed capital more acessible. More importantly, making local executives more acesssible. Initiatives like TechStars and CRV Quickstart are definitely helping. One day though, I hope to see our town become one huge startup incubator in and of itself. Already, a lot of the events in the area publicize with an eye to students and offer steep discounts  - it's a solid first step. Guys in suits and guys in ripped jeans (or girls of either wardrobe) are the yin and yang that have to be in balance for a sucessful startup ecosystem, and I think Boston is finally on the verge of finding that balance. Tip of The Day: Check out this great list from Scott Kirsner's blog about regular entrepreneurial events around Boston and their openness to students. One great newer event that would probably score an A+ here is Mass Innovation Nughts. Stay in MA is also a good way for students to get into 3 paid events per year.