Linkedin Share Network Map

Looks like Linkedin has been busy, with their latest Linkedin Maps and Linkedin Swarm.

Linkedin Maps shows how you are well connected to the people in your network and how they connect to each other, not only that you get to identify which contacts you want to expand next. You also get to tag in colors your network contacts, whether by industry, profession, groups, etc. Accessing this is easy and free, just sign in your Linkedin account and grant access, Linkedin Maps will do the rest and later on you just need to do the tagging manually. You can also zoom in details and have a look at that little dot, displaying each people's profile, it will also show on the right side bar their full profile.

Here is a youtube video post explaining Linkedin Maps and here is how my network map layout.

(download)

Google Approach Travel Industry, Reshaping the Landscape

After reading this article by Daniel A. Crane - "Let’s Calm Down On The Google-ITA Deal", I started to look again on Google move onto the travel market. Last year Google Map launched an upgrade in UK, which enables people to search hotel booking date directly on the map website, it also compares several sites at once per hotel listing. It looks like the service now have started to expand to other regions, for Bali and KL. The map results also displays the hotel reviews from multiple sites, which is useful. Although I did several search for China and it didn't show the hotel, probably due to Google still having inconsistent performance in China. I'm sure you've heard on Google's recent approach on the travel industry case such as - ITA and TripAdvisor. 

Google's mission is for sure to enable access of information to anyone publicly, whilst the travel industry is based upon a very old system - GDS which originated from airlines. But it's funny how the industry revolves, hotels and airlines rely on GDS or Online Travel Agent (OTA) such as Expedia, Orbitz, CTRIP, etc. But OTA relies on public, in order to reach the public it of course relies on buying keywords on search engines as one of their key marketing activities - namely the major search engines player such as Google, Yahoo! (although now Yahoo pulls search results from Bing), Bing (currently accused copying search results from Google) and Baidu.

Hotel of course in the recent years have tried to gain market share and tries to route booking directly, as this will lower their commission cost per booking, with Google on the verge of making a deal with ITA and enabling people to search directly from the search engines will definitely change the whole game plan. It will for sure draw or rather reduce traffic to OTAs website. Currently I haven't seen any room rate comparison coming from the hotel directly, but I see that more hotel groups will definitely race for including their hotel rates search results on Google Map. Although a lot of companies are against Google ITA buyout, but this will be a very interesting time as it will/might give the hotels a fighting chance.

(download)