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Kayak Partners With Trip Advisor

February 17, 2012 10:36:00 AM

Kayak Partners With Trip Advisor To Integrate 60 Million Travel Reviews Into Hotel Search

techcrunch.com

Kayak is boosting its hotel search today with the integration of hotel reviews from Trip Advisor into search results. Via an agreement with the reviews giant, Kayak will be integrating all all TripAdvisor reviews into the Kayak Hotel Search. Simply put, when you search for a hotel on Kayak, all of the over 60 million TripAdvisor reviews will be included in the KAYAK search results.
In October, Kayak launched a hotel Recommendations filter that allowed users to narrow results by expert recommendations, and pulled in reviews from Frommer's and Budget Travel. Users will also be able to filter search results by TripAdvisor as well, ticking off a box will filter out any non-TA reviewed properties.
When you filter hotels by Trip Advisor ranking, you'll see how many stars each hotel received on Trip Advisor, where the hotel rated overall (excellent, very good, average, poor etc.) and what the hotel's rank is on TripAdvisor in the destination. The feature will be launching in the US and the UK today will be rolling out globally and mobile apps soon.
Considering TripAdvisor's place as the leader in user-generated reviews in the travel space, this is a big content win for Kayak. After a search for what hotels are available for a given trip on Kayak, I tend to go to TripAdvisor afterwards to checkout which hotels had the best reviews in my price range. And Kayak says that most of its users exhibit similar behavior as well. Clearly, by incorporating these reviews in search results, Kayak is saving users time.
For TripAdvisor, the Kayak integration will certainly help spread the reach of the site's reviews into other travel portals. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. TripAdvisor also has similar deals in place. For example, Expedia already integrates travel reviews from TripAdvisor.
With the IPO on hold , Kayak has been heads down on product development over the past few months. In December, Kayak redesigned its iPad app and consolidated the app with its iPhone cousin. The company's website most recently got a big UI upgrade , creating a more universal and comprehensive consumer experience across all Kayak platforms: web, mobile web and apps. Kayak cleaning up and innovating as the companybattles with Google in the travel search space.

February 13, 2012 3:00:32 PM

Fair Labor Association begins Foxconn inspections at Apple's request

www.tuaw.com

Apple has announced that the Fair Labor Association will conduct voluntary audits of Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, at Apple's request. Inspections began Monday in Shenzhen.
In a press release issued this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports."
The FLA's inspection procedure will consist of three main parts. Interviews with employees regarding living conditions, work place safety, compensation and hours; physical inspections of dormitories and work areas; and review of documents "…related to procedures at all stages of employment."
Apple recently came under fire for working conditions at some of its assembly partners' plants, prompting some concerned customers to deliver petitions to Apple Stores .

February 13, 2012 3:04:48 PM

BitTorrent doesn't hurt US box-office, delayed international releases drive downloading

boingboing.net

Economics researchers at Wellesley College and U Missouri have published a study showing that feature films' US box office returns are not correlated to BitTorrent sharing. They also show that shorter delays between the US exhibition and overseas releases result in less file-sharing — that is, people outside the US download movies because they can't buy tickets to them.

The second point is an important one. There's only one Internet, networked culture doesn't respect national boundaries. A particularly effective marketing campaign for a new release in America will stimulate demand in other countries, and if there's no legitimate way to fulfill demand, then some portion of viewers will choose illegitimate routes. For example, the new Muppets movie has only just been released in the UK, some months after the US theatrical release (which was attended by enormous publicity). Presumably, someone at a studio concluded that there were too many UK movies in the pipeline at Christmas and not enough in February, and chose to delay the film's release to now. However, a certain portion of the audience for Muppet movies have been reading reviews, watching viral YouTube clips, and sitting through extended online discussions of the movie without being able to see it and participate. I'm pretty sure that a lot of these people downloaded the movie so that they could be a part of this moment.

Maybe they'll still buy tickets to the cinema, too. I'd guess that a lot of middle-class families with small children will do this. There aren't many kids' movies in cinematic release at the moment, and Muppets is certainly the best bet for a Sunday matinee during the record-breaking cold-snap, when no one wants to take the kids to a park on the weekend. But child-free adults who love the Muppets may well have slaked their thirst, and there are a lot of adults in the Muppet cohort, and adults who like kids' movies often complain about paying a lot of money to attend screenings that are disrupted by crying, talking, squirming children. If you've already seen the movie on your computer, that may be enough. Finally, there are families in the "squeezed middle" who are struggling to pay the bills may want to see the movie in the cinema, but simply lack the funds to do so, and the amount of time that's gone past since the initial release has meant that there are more online copies and that they're easier to download (for example, more BitTorrent seeds) than ever before. For them, the delayed release makes downloading easier and more attractive.

"Anti-piracy" efforts are often painted as life-or-death struggles for the studios. But in the case of international windows, this is about profit maximization, not survival. If the studios can outsource the titanic expense of policing copyrights in delayed-release nations to the countries themselves, they can wring a few more points of profit by delaying release to an otherwise optimum moment. But considered as a societal problem, it makes no sense to spend a million euros on copyright enforcement just so Universal can save a few thousand euros on the cost of making new 35mm prints.

Here's the study: Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales , by Brett Danaher (Wellesley College - Department of Economics) and Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - Carlson School of Management ; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - Department of Economics).

"Consumers in the US who would choose between the box office and piracy choose the box office (and the remaining US pirates had valuations lower than the ticket price) but that international consumers who would consider both options choose piracy due to a lack of legal availability," wrote the researchers. "If piracy displaced box office sales in the US, we would have expected the slope of the returns profile to shift more significantly as BitTorrent became more widely adopted."
In other words, researchers were unable to discern an irregular drop in returns of domestic box office sales, which could fault BitTorrent as the culprit.
Despite the mounting evidence and studies providing evidence to the needlessness of the movie studios' assault against file-sharing services, their attacks have been intensifying. At the end of the day, these results suggest that, while directing the blame at file-sharing services induces the fear of prosecution among other file-sharing competitors, much of the power to curb piracy remains in the hands of the studios.

Study suggests U.S. box office not affected by BitTorrent (Thanks, Xeni ! )

February 13, 2012 2:54:08 PM

Sony raised price of Whitney Houston albums after death

boingboing.net

Sony raised price of Whitney Houston albums after death

At The Guardian , Josh Halliday writes about Sony's rush to profit from Whitney Houston's death .

Sony Music has come under fire after it increased the price of a Whitney Houston album on Apple's iTunes Store hours after the singer was found dead.
The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston's greatest hits album, The Ultimate Collection, at about 4am California time on Sunday. This meant that the iTunes retail price of the album automatically increased from £4.99 to £7.99.

The clockwork regularity of Sony PR disasters is really something. It's as if a Division of Unbridled Cynicism lurks deep in the bowels of its vast workforce, issuing Spite Directives to ensure an ingeniously varied drumbeat of fail.