Monday, June 9, 2008

Are you ready?

The Hyperconnected: Here They Come! is the name of a new IDC study of global communications habits commissioned by Nortel. They interviewed 2400 working adults in 17 countries. This will have implications on how business is being conducted as this group expands at a rapid pace and travel will certainly be affected. Their demands on the user experience will be higher than those of the less connected. They will also very likely be more willing to post their comments and reviews, good or bad, to their social network and beyond.

The study can be downloaded from the article page. Better get ready!

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Wednesday, June 4, 2008

“Making Sense of the Semantic Web”

This is a great video by Nova Spivack of Radar Networks on this topic still often misunderstood. I agree with his definition of the terms web 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0 being about time periods in the development of the web. We're now just about at the end of the second decade (2.0) and will enter the next (3.0) around 2010.

There will be definite implications on travel and the customer experience of researching, planning and purchasing travel. Before there will be dramatic changes, however, the pendulum will have to swing back to the front end or user experience focus, which he predicts will be the case in web 4.0 or more than ten years out, as web 3.0 deals more with the back end or the data.

In the meantime there will be new initiatives that will introduce semantic web tools into travel as we have seen with Uptake and TripIt. The latter is actually shown in one of his slides.

One of his comments I liked a lot is that we should talk about "artificial stupidity" rather than "artificial intelligence" that is required to eliminate humans from having to deal with the mundane, or stupid tasks, and let us focus on the intelligent ones. Couldn't agree more.





Nova Spivack at The Next Web Conference 2008
from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.