That may be why the industry evolves quite slowly.

I hadn’t realized how frustrating it could be to describe a conference secondhand before I wrote this post – and I fear the outcome might be a bit like playing Chinese whispers! But it’s good to get the impressions of someone who was there to see whether we were picking up on the right messages.

I kind of agree about the semantic web but must confess I’m having a little difficulty getting my head around it at the moment.

My impression of the semantic web concept at the moment (beyond the merely technical) is that it will effectively be a method that allows for better, mutually understandable, databasing of online material to the point that you can start to integrate and contextualize information from multiple sites.

In other words, it will help you answer seemingly simple questions such as, “I don’t know when the Canucks are playing in Vancouver in late March, but I would like to book a flight under $500 (!) from Glasgow and hotel based around this” and not have to muck about looking on four different sites to find an answer.

Is this how you see it? Anything that helps me understand this better gratefully received!

Wish you both could have been there to get a hands on impression of the innovation summit. I think the word evolution is an appropriate theme for the demos, as would ‘aggregation’.

Kayak really brought forth innovative travel booking aggregation, and now you can find it in different spaces and verticals (reviews, longtail product)

As far as where we can look for the next ‘wow’ change, I can only guess, but if you asked Joe Buhler, he would undoubtedly say “The semantic web of course!’, and I think he is right.

Hope to see you at ITB,
Phil

I’m glad I didn’t misinterpret you (too much).

I think we shared the recognition that there wasn’t a ‘this will change everything’ moment (this is the phrase I was looking for and failed to find when writing this post!) but rather, as you say, the potential for some of these products to develop a successful niche nevertheless.

I think the product that I most immediately ‘got’ at a consumer level was Triporati with its emphasis on being a ‘pre-click’ destination database – an obvious idea but this was the first one I’ve seen done that seemed to work for me.

And staying on that theme of search, I thought Rob Torres (Managing Director Travel, Google) comments interesting as well.

Wandrian offers something new for example (online train booking). Is it innovative? Or is it something new (train) to an existing service (online booking)? Either way they can be very successful.

Problem I see with some other websites is that they offer a bunch of bundled technology that’s either nothing really new, or it’s a new feature with a website build around it, or it’s very complex to use.

Vibeagent is a good example from last year. Cool website. Very impressive technology. Nice people. But really just Kayak + Tripadvisor. So far it’s not really going anywhere. I’m still in their top 15 reviewers after a year and I also recognize a bunch of other travel bloggers in their top reviewers (http://www.vibeagent.com/community).

The first time I used Kayak, I had a ‘this will change everything’ moment. Same with Tripadvisor. Last year Farecast impressed me a lot. The closed I got to that this year (so far) was TripIt.