10 Things That Caught My Eye: Week of 8-2-10

Originally posted by @ Software Industry Insights.
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Well that was an interesting week: HP’s Hurd and Google’s Wave are out (and IHMO Wave had the more egregious indiscretions), Travelport may finally revive their IPO and a few more things.

  1. Is a Travelport IPO in the very near future?
  2. LAN Airlines chooses Orbitz over Expedia for dynamic packaging.
  3. HP CEO Mark Hurd resigns amidst sexual harassment investigation. The wording of the statement appears as if he admits inappropriate behavior, which if you read it quickly would seem to admit guilt to the charges against him. But it seems as if he’s clear of the sexual misconduct charges, but made several other indiscretions which sealed his fate.
  4. Excellent article from GigaOM on the FCC, Net Neutrality and “Reclassification”. Once again it looks like the consumer is screwed by politicians and big business. Interestingly, Google seems to have signed on to the concept of charging premium fees for bandwidth as part of it’s partnership with Verizon.  Pretty surprising move for a company who’s motto is “Don’t be evil”.
  5. Google Wave, the hyped piece of software that was going to change the way we collaborate is no more. Remember when you had to beg to get a Wave invite…then found the interface to be confusing and none of your friends or colleagues were on it?  Good times.
  6. Apple sacks mobile hardware development head Mark Papermaster, ostensibly as part of the fallout from Antennagate. Now if only his name was Antennamaster things would be very different today ;)
  7. Why does the travel industry seem to hate the people at TechCrunch? While many aspects of Michael Arrington’s rant about his recent Delta flight resonated with me, it doesn’t hold a candle to the hilarity of MG Siegler’s “My Bloody Valentine” post about how Expedia screwed up his romantic weekend.
  8. The iPhone-to-Verizon rumors are picking up speed again, as it appears Apple has ordered a boatload of CDMA chipsets. But what if this is really for Sprint, rather than Verizon who looks to be getting deeper in bed with Google every day. Sprint only has the HTC EVO and Samsung Galaxy Android phones and has a gaping hole in their lineup where the Palm Pre used to be.
  9. OpenTable profits are waaay up. But perhaps more importantly, they’re launching a Groupon-esque service called Spotlight that can provide meals up to half off normal prices. Will other parts of the travel and hospitality industry start adopting this model to drive volume?
  10. After four years, Amadeus announces its next generation faring and pricing platform. Tnooz wonders if it’s enough to take on the new breed of fare tool vendors.
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