Dear hoteliers,

Courtesy of Milestone Internet

You’re spending hours trying to make your hotel profitable, get customers in your bedrooms, manage inventories, solve problems, answer travelers needs / dreams / habits / complains… And now, those tripadvisor, twitter, facebook, flickr, blogs, youtube, foursquare… are making your days endless.

You probably heard about companies proposing to manage your social media channels or to take care of your reputation. However, you should strongly think about managing social media on your own.

While buying keywords on search engines or in Tripadvisor might be out-sourced because of its quite automated process, you should really listen by yourself.

It might be the director, a marketing member or anyone else actually but you will soon realise that if you want your hotel to be successful in this social era, you need to give this person plenty of liberty and allow her to speak and engage with most of your employees from human resources to cleaning ladies, chitchen… (more…)

Is the exact same thing happening to the mobile telecommunication industry than to the music and movie industry?

Courtesy of zdnet.com

The arrival of Smartphone and app stores such as the Iphone, blackberry or android has made a huge change in the mobile telecommunication industry.We are now using our 3G connections for more and more activities including VOIP communications and relying less on “classic” plans with a certain price for a certain amount of communications. We stopped spending money on SMS (a big source of revenue for telecommunication operators) since we’ve got push emails and access to our social networks through our mobile. There are, of course, examples of users sending thousands of SMS a month but that’s because there are unlimited plans for SMS usage.

One could compare it to the evolution which happened in the Internet field.Few years ago, those unlimited ADSL plans didn’t exist and we were paying based on our consumption. Then new competitors arrived and classic internet providers had to change their business model and start proposing unlimited packages. We went from a “pay what you use” system to a “pay to get access” model or data package.

The exact same thing is happening in the mobile telecommunication industry.We are still struggling with high communication costs and amazingly high roaming fees. Paying for something we could already get “for free” using VOIP systems like Skype or Ebuddy. But that’s about to change, in an abrupt way.

Let’s have a look at three typical and contemporary examples:

That’s a good question and it is still too early to tell. But one thing has recently changed: until now, we were considering television and Internet as two different channels when they are, de facto, complementary. Internet is a medium, an amazing way of improving, increasing, changing… the efficiency of any other industry.

Unfortunately, television owners still see Internet as a threat instead of the open door to new possibilities (I think I heard that one before…!!)

Let’s have a look at the actual situation of TV channels and the related advantages for this “old” media against Internet:

Comparative advantes of Internet and Television

I could have add, on the television side, partnerships with content providers but it is already happening on Internet with Hulu, Youtube, Spotify or the French football championship with Orange TV.

As you can clearly see, the advantage is in one camp and only one: INTERNET. (more…)

Following my previous article, I got several feedbacks about either Google Wave was about to “kill” the competition, as I stated, or if it is simply a game changer.

I shouldn’t have say “kill” or “destroy”. These words are quite strong and might offence some people. especially the ones I cited. I own an apology for such an aggressive approach.

Do not take me wrong, I love services like Bluekiwi or Seesmic Desktop and I’ve been recommending almost all of them to people in need of collaborative tools. @carlosdiaz, you are right by saying Google Waves represents an opportunity.

What I meant, like @mdangear said it, is that Google Wave might be a game changer. (more…)

Most of you probably heard about Google Wave or even saw the presentation held yesterday at the developpers I/O.

Google Wave presentation

In case you would like a summary of it, you can read this really good article by Tim O’Reilly “What might email look like if it were invented today”

I modified this article following feedbacks on Twitter.

Basically Wave is about start the new social e-commerce trend, put on the side of the road quite a lot of translators, revolutionize the way we collaborate (and consequently “either be a threat or an opportunity for bluekiwi, microsoft exchange, outlook, jira and other project management tools like this one) and I could continue like this for quite a long time… (more…)

If you don´t speak French, you probably never saw the TV-show: Plein Ecran.

Hosted by LCI, a French cable news channel (CNN-like) owned by TF1 (first TV channel in France), Plein Ecran is kind of an UFO on the French TV market.  An UFO in a really positive way.

Last week,  Cedric Ingrand (Plein Ecran presentator) invited Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, French Minister for numerical development, also know as @nk_m on Twitter. While the right and left wings are fighting in a useless politic argument about the already-outdated Hadopi law, this young minister, also known as the sister of Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, is starting several interesting reforms to put France on the right path again. I will write several articles during the coming week about these projects, ranging from new economic models for the entertainment industry to e-education for kids, seniors and Internet non-users.

But before that, I wanted to tell you a bit more about this TV-show: Plein Ecran. There are several things I really like about this program: (more…)

TF1 est en train de vivre son premier test grandeur nature concernant son implication dans les médias sociaux. Après la polémique concernant le piratage du film les bronzés 3 et la récente mise en place de facebook connect sur le site de TF1, la première chaîne privée d’Europe doit maintenant faire preuve de sa réelle implication dans l’écoute des internautes et de son audience.

Résumé de la polémique:

Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim vient de se faire licencier de son poste de “responsable du pôle innovation web”, au sein d’e-TF1, suite à un email envoyé à titre personnel à  Madame Françoise de Panafieu, sa députée. Ce jeune cadre dynamique  souhaitait faire part de son incompréhension vis-à-vis de la loi Hadopi à la députée de sa juridiction. Mal lui en a pris puisque cet email est remonté très rapidement aux oreilles de sa direction qui a décidé de se passer de ses services.

Je ne souhaite pas m’attarder sur les raisons valables, ou non, de ce licenciement mais plutôt sur le cas d’école que représente cet exemple: (more…)

21 millions iphone sold in 2008, 45 millions expected in 2009, 1 billion application already downloaded on the appstore…

There is no doubt about the success of the Iphone on the smartphone market. Steve Jobs and his teams at Apple stroke a hard one to the face of their “existing” competitors.

The release of the SDK 3.0 is not a secret anymore and thousand of developpers are already deeply looking into this new firmware to get the most of it.

I’ve read lots of good articles and blog posts about the new capacities of the Iphone and how it changed the market of mobile phones forever.

However, I’ve got the impression that we are focusing too much on the capabilities of the Iphone itself  (apple store, copy-past, video capabilities…) instead of focusing on the emerging eco-system that Apple is slowly but surely developing (more…)