by mcoletta | Jul 21, 2014 | Uncategorized |
I’ve been extra busy lately helping to run the DreamIt Ventures Startup Accelerator summer 2014 program in NY, and I’m happy to present two of the companies in the program at this Travel 2.0: Tourlandish and Zairge. Details...
by mcoletta | May 21, 2014 | Other Events |
The Travel Tech Talk series, hosted by Gillian Morris, is dedicated to bringing the leaders in the travel space into dialogue with startup/innovation community. Each features a half hour fireside chat between two travel industry leaders, a Q & A session with the audience, and informal drinks & nibbles before and after. David Pavelko, Head of Travel at Google, and Drew Patterson, CEO of Room77, are two of the chief executives leading the charge in building a better online travel booking experience. Join us for an intimate fireside chat to hear how they plan to improve the customer experience in this $600bn market. Details...
by mcoletta | Apr 21, 2014 | NY TravFest |
This Saturday I’ll be hosting a full-day Travel 2.0 session at the 2nd annual NY Travel Festival. “Travel 2.0 @ #NYTF” is a full-day event packed with informative presentations and panel discussions exploring what’s next in the travel industry. The event offers a unique opportunity for travel startups to showcase what they are working on to a mix of top-notch industry, media and tech-savvy consumers. As with all Travel 2.0 events, networking and brainstorming will be encouraged! Details are here:...
by mcoletta | Mar 17, 2014 | Travel 2.0 |
This Thursday March 20th, another co-hosted Travel 2.0 Boston event will be run by Gillian Morris of Hitlist. She’s put together an amazing travel tech talk featuring Adam Medros, TripAdvisor’s VP of Product, and Giorgos Zacharia, CTO and CPO at KAYAK. They’ll be discussing what’s next in this industry and how you may be able to get involved. Please note that we closed RSVP’s on the Meetup.com Travel 2.0 group page because we’re using Eventbrite for this event. Here’s the link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/travel-tech-talk-featuring-adam-medros-tripadvisor-and-giorgos-zacharia-kayak-tickets-10883600141 I won’t be in attendance but hope you can make...
by mcoletta | Mar 12, 2014 | Trends |
Many travel tech predictions are made at the close of one year and beginning of another. I find it interesting and useful to look at trends a couple of months into a new year to see how things are taking shape. Here is the first of five travel technology trends that I believe will cause real transformation in the travel industry in 2014. While the iPhone has been around for seven years now, 2013 was the year that mobile matured and really took off. As late as April 2013 some travel brands were still questioning the value of investing in mobile, recognizing the significant cost and challenges in updating websites to be mobile-friendly, building mobile apps for a multitude of devices, and converting mobile users into bookings. Mobile was often enough still viewed as a user acquisition and branding cost. But the handwriting was certainly on the wall. Converting a legacy web business to be well-positioned in a mobile world is a monumental task. But the risks of falling behind are far more hazardous. Fast forward to November, and desktop was arguably still dominating, but after another Christmas season of frenzied smartphone and tablet purchases and the resulting mobile traffic spike, it was clear that a tipping point had been reached. As we hurtle into 2014, with both mobile web traffic and mobile app usage skyrocketing and the debate about mobile web vs mobile apps raging on, it’s clear that mobile is undisputedly the future. It appears that mobile apps will beat mobile web purely because of superior user experience, but that could change as HTML5 matures and as mobile computing follows desktop into the cloud. The window...
