PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit - my pick for the top six

32 companies spent today presenting at the PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit. Six get to move onto the Centre Stage sessions. The six will be announced tomorrow at lunch time based on anonymous voting during today's session. Here is my pick of the six (note have to pick two each from New, Emerging and Established Companies). In no particular order

Pick 1 - Uptake.com: I have spoken about Uptake before. They have built a meta-search business for travel reviews and built a search methodology that goes well beyond the tradditional capabilities of Google, Yahoo and MSN. [Emerging]

Pick 2 - Triporati: I have long been a fan of last.fm and Pandora. Both are music companies that have approached (respectively) a compunity and a genomic approach to helping people to discover new music (rather than search for known music). Triporati is doing the same for travel. Focusing on discovery rather than search through breaking down travel into 62 "DNA" elements and matching those against 1,200 destinations. [New]

Pick 3 - Dealbase.com: The test of innovation is an idea that no-one else thought of that has been executed well. The idea for deal base is a qualified lead generation business for OTAs and hotels. This is a new idea for the travel industry and the execution looks good. [New]

Pick 4 - Rezgo: A supplier and vendor matching system combined with long tail distribution management system. No other product in the 32 like it. [Emerging]

Pick 5 - Worldmate: The best of the mobile solutions I saw (but just). Very close competition with TripChill (see this post for more on mobile). Have given my vote to Worldmate (after a close debate with myself) due to its distribution deal with Nokia. Distribution is the hardest part for a mobile app. [Established]

Pick 6 - Fogglight: Home & Away have built a component based trip planning site builder. Enables travel companies such as hotels and tour operators to set up a whitelable sales operation of complementary product providers (ie a hotel building a web and packaging site using Expedia's white label solution). With acceess to content, a contact management system and more. [Established]

I will let you know what the vote is tomorrow.

PhoCusWright: Trying to sort out the mobile options - TripChill, ekit, iM@, WorldMate

In my first post from PhoCusWright I highlighted a lot of the different approaches companies from the Travel Innovation Summit (and elsewhere) were taking. A slightly different story emerged when the conference turned to the companies focused on mobile tools. Four mobile focused companies have presented so far TripChill, WorldMate, iM@ and ekit.

Two groups emerged.

The Assistant: TripChill, WorldMate and to a lesser extent iM@ focus on giving consumers real time local information. TripChill and WorldMate impressed me with the real time ability to check the latest travel information associated with an itinerary around flight changes, hotel reservations and support information (weather, parking, driving options). Looking at these tools in action, I can finally see delivery on the promise that mobile has been making to online travel for ten years. The ability for a traveller to be able to seamlessly update and change trips based on conditions that can only be known through real-time connections is what we have all be wanting from mobile.

The locator and sharer: iM@ and ekit focus on the destination - what to do when you are there. iM@ is an adverting and offer driven business. Focused on pitching activities to travellers driven by destination and advertiser promotion. ekit is something else entirely. This (Australian based) company made it's start in international phone-cards and global SIMs. The product they displayed here was an innovative (and at times unsettling) travel journal product where GPS technology linked a SIM purchased from ekit. This SIM can be linked to an online travel journal (think blog). The travel journal can be instantly updated as to where to you are every time you make a phone call. That's right you make a call, the phone registers where you are and then posts to the travel journal your location and time of call. Posts can be enhanced with SMS text content, photos and more. This is the ultimate trip blog tool as it knows were you are but is also very scary because...well..it knows exactly where you are and what you are doing. I love the idea but feel very uncomfortable using it.

Looking at these four companies I feel like we finally getting somewhere with mobile in online travel.

thanks to William Hook on flickr for the photo