Travel
This new corporate travel booking app can teach current consumer travel apps a thing or two. Searching, booking and expenses are reduced to three screens. Travel planners can see door-to-door trip details in one view and edit any individual element.
An introductory how-to on Big Data, with practical applications, from Thematix by way of Tnooz. It has some reasonable advice to consider if you’re just starting out.
Another Tnooz piece from Thematix on using semantic mark-up to good effect in hotel site search engine optimization.
According to the IATA, the small proportion of airline passengers in the upper classes account for almost a third of airline revenues. To hoi polloi like me, flying first class is a distant dream. This Overhead Bin article describes all the comforts available to today’s first class travelers including lay-flat beds, privacy cubicles, showers and “a dinner of caviar, prawn confit, duck breast and an assortment of French cheeses.”
Don’t overpay: Rules of thumb for summer air fares.
Don’t even have the money for coach class? Never fear. This guy left home penniless and traveled 25,000 miles, all the way to Antarctica.
Every once in a while I like to include vignettes of Hotels I’d like to stay in some day. Check out the view from the Park Hyatt Shanghai, floor 92:
Fly the fish. Alaska Airlines brings back the Salmon-Thirty-Salmon.
Nice compilation of CNN readers’ inspirational journeys, with photos:
Tech
New developments, ranging from push updating, optimized JavaScript and PHP runtimes, network connector architectures, and more are enabling real-time websites and applications. It is incumbent on online application owners and developers to evaluate these developments. A long list of empirical studies has shown that web and app performance matters to end users and significantly affects the bottom line.
Google search gets new “knowledge graph.” The new system is identifying entities of significance and then mapping out the relations that connect them. It uses this system to surface relevant entities and their relationships in response to users’ queries. If search is at all important to you or your business, you’re going to want to read this article:
Pinterest’s next round of funding is shaping up, putting a $1.5B Valuation on the graphical social network.
Netflix launches a new slick web based video player…
…and gets back its customers.
When Microsoft installs Windows, without bloatware, it makes for a better user experience than the typical PC maker provides. Microsoft Store has offered this for quite some time on the computers they sell. Now they offer it as a service to anyone willing to pay $99. Walt Mossberg likes it.
Gotta admire Facebook’s consistent ethos. First Zuckerberg declines to dress up for bankers and now on the eve of their record breaking IPO, they’re going to host an all-night hackathon.
For everyone in the Seattle area, here’s an interesting alternative activity for the weekend of June 2-3. (Courtesy of Ram Harharan). Seattle Mini-Maker Faire – June 2/3.
“A family-friendly festival of innovation, creativity, and resourcefulness.”
This is an opportunity to see creative technical types demonstrate a variety of inventions, doohickeys, thingamajiggers, and highly technical silliness of their own making. Perhaps pick up an idea or two for an invention of your own. Tickets on sale here:
Just One More: I wonder if the Seattle Maker Faire will have anything as cool as this (mostly) home-built submarine to be featured at this weekend’s Maker Faire Bay Area:
TravelTekker 