Welcome Rick to the demo
We are talking about the power of social media.
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Heading down to DC tomorrow
Looking forward to the Amtrak train
Power of the Real-Time Web - US Airways $100M Bomb Fee
It's no secret that I generally dislike US Airways. I used to really like America West, but then they got greedy and got sucky. So one of my private (now public) pleasures is to look at their stock quote and hope it is tanking. Not that I want their employees who hold the stock in their retirement portfolios to suffer, but I do recommend they sell yesterday. Also stop being mean to me in Philly. I didn't cancel my flight. You did.
So it was with distinct, real-time web pleasure, that I saw the top news article for US Airways Group on Google Finance (look on the right-hand side of the screen capture below) was an article from comedy site The Onion declaring that US Airways would be introducing a $100M Bomb Fee. From the article:
"Your enrollment fee grants you full access to our prestigious Bomber's Club at participating airports, early boarding with choice of seat, the option to bring aboard knives and guns for a small additional surcharge, and allowance for an extra carry-on, which can of course be used for your bomb."
Frequency of content matters in the real-time web.
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Good sign for Bing - Growth Accelerating
Techcrunch reports that Bing is not only creeping up in total search ranking vs. Google, but also accelerating in query volume. From the article:
"What is even more interesting is if you look at year-over-year query growth rates for each search engine. Bing's growth is actually accelerating. Its growth rate in query volume was 49.4 percent in December, compared to 20.6 percent growth for Google (which was also above the average), and a 1.9 percent decline for Yahoo."
The steady growth comes after the rash of marketing promotion that kicked off the new Bing seems to have settled down, so my sense is this is more than just a temporary impact of some TV spend.
At CloudProfile we've recently added geo-tagging to Twitter posts in our staging environment, and have a couple of interesting Windows 7 gadgets that use Bing maps plus Twitter geo-tagging to surface tweets for local deals. With the growth in online coupons, this sort of hyper-local deal will be important. Discovery of those deals will of course be increasingly mobile (reference the Bing search deal with Verizon), but with increased focus on local deals, geo-tagging of content and mapping, it appears Bing is headed in the right direction.
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Airlines - Less for more. Software - More for less.
It's interesting to see all of the airlines moving to add as many painful, additional fees as possible. CNN reports today that Delta will be increasing their fees for checked baggage. Of course this is at the same time Southwest is hammering other airlines with their ads asking "why do you hate bags?" (video below).
Compare the airline industry to software, where "more for less" is nothing less than a force of nature. With modular software, new development tools and integration/mashup solutions, consumers and businesses alike continue to get more more more for their buck. This is one of the reasons the Freemium software model is becoming less of a sideshow and instead the status quo.
In my mind, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, like Salesforce.com has a soft underbelly like the one Southwest is attacking in the airline industry. It's expensive. And like Southwest got rid of a number of previously "must have" components of airline travel (first class, hub and spoke flights, lounges), I'm eager to see a new CRM company that blows away all the extraneous pieces that have been layered into SF.com over time, and gets back to some of the core value. Core value like "getting you from point A to B". Core value like "making your salespeople more effective and proving it." And I'm eager to see it cheap. Far less than $50/user/month.
