Great one day event in Berlin. Here’s one man’s take on the best and worst of the latest PhoCusWright

Most honest - David Roche, head of hotels.com (globally) and Venere. (I’m paraphrasing him liberally): “we have a match for Priceline in the U.S. with Hotwire, but Booking.com is on fire and we don’t have a match for them globally” {my two cents is that TripAdvisor is the bulldozer Expedia eventually uses to level the international field}.

Most greedy - Matthew Goldberg, CEO of Lonely Planet. Matthew is credited for convincing Rupert Murdoch – when he bought the Wall Street Journal – that News Corp. could have their proverbial cake and eat it too (i.e. keep readership free but also charge a premium for a slice of premium content). Well, Matthew has rebuilt the LP team and is doing the same – and then some – down under: licensing LP content, selling content in snippets to consumers via iPhone apps, and making money off transactions and ads on the LP website. Hey, in Canada, we call that a hat trick eh?

Most controversial - Séverine Philardeau of TripAdvisor starting off her talkback with Matthew by asking (again, I’m paraphrasing because I have a memory like a sieve) “Matthew, you lost 7 million pounds last year, what’s that all about”. In the genteel world of PhoCusWright, that’s the closest thing to controversy we get.

Most disappointing
1. Google. Yes, we heard you aren’t entering the travel vertical (but nevertheless, the reality is that the local “horizontal” business is having a huge impact on organic search for travel businesses), video is the next big thing, and we should all buy more ads. Hey, we have heard Rob Torres say that for years – and eloquently too. So… what’s new? Stop coming and telling us the same thing. {note: apparently Travelcom got a little bit more – see Dennis Schaal’s post}
2. Bing. OK, visual search is the next big thing and consumers love it (hey, if that’s true, share some numbers to convince us; it’s hard to believe visual search makes a material difference to consumers and Google can’t be bothered to replicate), you are a global search engine and you are in Germany but you don’t have a German product yet, and you do software releases quarterly (quarterly?!?!?! That’s slower than shrink-wrapped software companies). Note: these are all nits, after 9 months, Bing has shown clear market share gains — from 8.4% to 11.5%. In the world of web search, this is ENORMOUS!

Most not-sure-what, but good news nevertheless
1. Tripology off death watch, purchased by Rand McNally (Tnooz news, of course)
2. Pixell bought by Amadeus
3. Norm Rose – great data on the continued evolution of mobile, complete with a prediction that 50% of phones will be smart phones by EOY 2010.
4. Rick Seaney from FareCompare about U.S. carriers starting to update rates for international flights hourly. Gone is the day where we could check Tuesday morning – real time all the time!

Most surprising – that only three hands when up when Norm asked the attendees who had built a mobile application already.

Most common occurrence we have elected to accept – “The black screen of Apple” – attendees who couldn’t check email or anything else because their iPhones ran out of battery life. That is one heck of an exceptional phone for us to suffer through that terrible battery and AT&T in the U.S.

Most unknown company (not in attendance) with a travel pedigree that came up – After Norm Rose’s insightful take on mobile and implications for travel, two different attendees mentioned they use the Skyfire mobile browser and it’s great. Remember Jeff Glueck, formerly CMO of Travelocity? He’s the CEO of Skyfire. Nice to know there is life after the gnome (note: Skyfire is also a Trinity portfolio company).

Best after-party – I would tell you, but I can’t remember the name of our host (but I do want to thank Christina Norton for getting us in). I do remember it was a FABULOUS party complete with ice sculptures, cavier, cohibas and Abba. Who could want more?

I welcome your comments – please let me know what your observations were about the day, if you there.

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