Travel
If you haven’t checked out Trippy.com, a social travel experience/aspiration site, have a look. Its Facebook integration makes it easy to get started and features like a bucketlist keep people engaged. It has been nominated for a Webby award for Best Travel Website this year.
Tnooz wonders if Expedia is conceding the hotel inventory position race to Priceline/Booking.com. Expedia has 150,00 hotels and Priceline has 210,000. Expedia says not to worry: “we’re optimizing what we’ve got.” And no wonder: the excellent quarterly financials and stock price speak for themselves.
Rating the Review sites: New site from reputation management firm Kwikchex will rate the quality of review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, and the review portions of sites like Expedia.com. But as the commenters to this article point out, as a reputation management site with clients like hotels, Kwickcheck itself isn’t itself impartial. Who will rate Kwikchex?
OpenWays software enables your phone to function as your hotel room key.
Tactics for getting travel upgrades
New 4,000 passenger Norwegian Cruise Line ship to have massive water park with 5 water slides.
Venere leads Frommer’s list of websites to help you find top values for your next vacation.
Tech
Facebook’s Scuba tool allows for real-time ad-hoc analysis of arbitrary datasets.
T.G.I Fridays is now accepting payments via a smartphone app from Tabbedout.com. I can’t wait until this becomes commonplace. I hate waiting for restaurant staff to bring the bill and process the payment after I’m done eating.
Many people don’t realize the number open source technologies available on Windows Azure. For example, Node.js, Hadoop and MongoDB are supported.
Yahoo’s counter-counter punch versus Facebook
Macs can now get Java security fixes directly from Oracle. Updates will now be at the same time as Windows and Linux versions rather than via delayed Apple releases.
Just One More: Ex-Atari developer Scott Williamson has ported the 30 year old Star Castle vector arcade game to the 33 year old Atari 2600. It runs using 8K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. The clear cartridge case lights up and was machined on a CNC (computer controlled milling machine) that Williamson built himself.
Says Williamson:
“Every engineer, no matter the discipline, is drawn to some particular project. This project becomes the nagging pull that draws an engineer ever-onward. For me, that project was Star Castle.”
TravelTekker 