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December 5th, 2008 by Dan Roberts If you don’t know by now I love Twitter. I actually don’t tweet that much but the 100 or so people I follow regularly share links or interesting stuff that I find relevant almost everyday in work.
Yesterday Darren Rowse of Problogger was attending a Search Engine Boot Camp in Melbourne and live twittering - I grabbed these four quotes which I thought summed up web development (and indeed the outlook on things we have here at Xebidy):
November 26th, 2008 by Dan Roberts The announcement yesterday by the British government that taxes on long-haul flight departures from the UK are set to rise by over 75% over the next few years is a massive blow to New Zealand and Australian tourism industries. The move was announced under a veil of offsetting carbon emission - the idea being that the passenger pays more the further they fly. This means that New Zealand and Australian bound passengers will be looking at paying the most.
November 25th, 2008 by Dan Roberts Why oh why do sites insist on spamming this and The Travel Generation blog - adding comments that are irrelevant basically to trying generate links and traffic to their site. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but it does nothing for your search engine rankings effort.
November 25th, 2008 by Dan Roberts The use of technology to save money is a catch phrase in the tourism industry - and one that I have never shied away from in order to generate work. In fact, I very much believe that companies should be using Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, community building software and even corporate Twitters such as Yammer to improve communication and collaboration and ultimately lower costs within the business. However, I have started to become aware of how many industries including tourism are using technology at the detriment of customer service and the experience.
November 19th, 2008 by Dan Roberts Right now in California (Hollywood to be precise) the Travel Innovation Summit is underway. Unfortunately I have not been able to go - but as good as being there I have been following the course of events on Twitter (#phocus08). Good thing is that I have been able to watch more than one sessions at a time and many of those present have been live “twittering”.
Here is some interesting facts that I have grabbed from the Twitter feed that I thought were worthwhile sharing.
November 14th, 2008 by Dan Roberts I was this week in Sydney for firstly a Backpackers Tourism Advisory Panel (BTAP) forum on Digital Marketing and secondly the ABiC conference and TNT Golden Backpack Awards. In this post I round up what I thought the BTAP forum was about.
October 21st, 2008 by Dan Roberts I have discussed quite a bit recently on Twitter our work with AJ Hackett on their new photo and video sharing community - called i-didit. It is a pretty exciting project and one that in a few weeks we will be able to reveal. The actual technology we have used is pretty cool - building the whole interface on the drag and drop “Canvas” platform. Rather than expounding the virtues of this project in this post the whole project has led me to do a lot of work on the philosophy behind creating of a community for a corporate (and I use that word liberally in the case of Aj Hackett.)
October 16th, 2008 by Dan Roberts While I write this it would seem that we might have ridden out the worst of the “global credit crunch” and some level of confidence restored. For all of us with enough nouse there was a great opportunity to make significant money buying Google and Apple shares on Friday and selling them on Monday. But [...]
October 8th, 2008 by Dan Roberts I found this interesting article on ChrisBrogan.com discussing an analogy between social media and a phone. Chris quotes Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, who had said that companies needed to realise that some of their customers are “dialing the social phone”, and that they better have some “operators standing by”. The most interesting takeaway I got from Chris’ post was the emphasis on the the way we use the social phone.
October 7th, 2008 by Dan Roberts An interesting piece of correspondence came across my desk recently and I thought it worth sharing. The thread of emails was a discussion on pricing and promotional strategies for a tourism operator to manage flow through shoulder seasons and in fact grow the business overall. This large well-known operator has enjoyed fantastic growth in their traveller numbers in the past three or four years but have reached a bit of a plateau recently and the strategy talk was on how this might be arrested.
Xebidy designs and develops leading edge Web 2.0 eCommerce strategies, websites and Internet marketing and search engine optimisation marketing programmes
Xebidy is based in the beautiful city of Queenstown and boast a proud list of international clientele.
Xebidy has completed re-engineered the way Oz Experience sells on the web resulting in the design and development of this magnificent site.
Brand new site for Australian Adventures called Discover Australia designed and developed by Xebidy.
Xebidy developed the original Base site and this reincarnation is designed and developed by Xebidy.
Xebidy is undertaking a Google cost-per-click campaign on behalf of The Park.
Xebidy converted a flash site to HTML and Javascript. The project is ongoing.
Beta release of a completely new site designed and developed by Xebidy. Subsequent releases are due early '08