While many spend hours scouring Google Earth looking for topless sunbathers, aeroplanes or mountain climbers Google’s new Street View maps will be so much more fun! See my post earlier in the week for more information.

Here’s some of the best so far:

• Steve Job house
• The geeks outside Google offices
• Someone who looks suspiciously like he is breaking and entering
• The faces of people in an adult book shop
• A drug deal
• A ghost
• (Which would explain the presence of Mystery Inc)
• A sweet Ferrari
• Which unfortunately is not the one getting this parking ticket
• And of course two obligatory bikini shots - bikini1 and bikini2

I also found a link to a Police Investigation - but it has been removed by Google already - the first of many I would suspect.

We are starting to receive a number of guest posts and will be upgrading the Xebidy site in the coming weeks to handle this. In the meantime check out this from Bruce Thurlow at Oz Experience and Adventure Tours today, on life as a social Internet junkie:

Got to work early this morning I logged in and I looked at:
- My facebook page for news of friends
- Oz Experience My Space page for new friends
- Hotmail for personal emails
- The Age and NZ Herald newspapers
- Looked at my internet banking
- Logged into ebay looking for a fridge
- Searched google for a page looking for best ph and broadband plans
- Uploaded photos to my flickr account
- Checked my www.youtube.com/100adventure page because I had been notified someone had posted a comment to one of my videos
- logged into my last.fm account to listen to music while I worked
- Checked xebidy.com for any new blog info
- looked at readwriteweb.com for the latest word on the internet street
- scanned gapyear.com for any new Oz Experience or Adventure Tours related posts

Did all this in 40 mins. I then started checking my work emails!

All I can say Bruce is you need to master the art of RSS to speed up the way you receive all this information

As you will know if you follow my blog posts, I was in Cairns last week so could not attend the Trenz trade show. But nonetheless, I had an intrepid reporter on the scene, Celia Schollum from Stray and Spaceships fame. Here is her report:

We just got back from TRENZ 2007 (Tourism Rendezvous New Zealand) and I have to say that out of the four TRENZ’s I’ve attended it has to have been the best.

This year TRENZ was held in Rotorua for the first time and they certainly put on a show. The theme was ‘Rotorua – birthplace of New Zealand tourism’ with Maori culture and the history of tourism in the area integrated throughout the week. It was great to show more of this side of New Zealand to the overseas visitors. My favourite evening function was at the Blue Baths with art deco surroundings, swimming pool, historic museum and synchronised swimming all rolled together to make a cocktail party with a twist!

There were about 450 exhibitors this year with some very impressive displays of products; as always it was great to catch up with all the operators we work with through the Stray bus and Spaceships. Everyone seemed pretty positive about the industry as a whole, with most having record numbers this summer. There were quite a few new companies exhibiting this year however there was a disappointing lack of innovation or anything truly new or creative. One company that did stand out for making an effort and trying to do something different was Hotel So - it will be interesting to see how they go once their first property opens in Christchurch in September.

It was obvious that there were fewer agents than there has been in the past (which is to be expected with the consolidation of so many agencies and the increase in web direct business); thankfully for Spaceships the lack of quantity was definitely offset by the quality of agents. Word is spreading about Spaceships and its unique features, with many agents saying that they had colleagues who had visited NZ and then on their return had insisted that someone meet with us at TRENZ. Having an actual Spaceship vehicle parked inside for the first time definitely helped to fully explain the concept and quality features and there was very positive feedback overall

The final gala night topped off a great week with a huge party. Music from the Black Seeds, Jordon Luck of the Exponents, and Spacifix got everyone (including lots of the overseas agents) dancing for hours.

For those that have not seen this yet, check out this new feature on Google maps: link here

Google maps now include street level photos that you can navigate along. Click on street and then navigate using the arrows. Unfortunately, Street View as it is known is only available in New York, San Francisco, Miami, Denver and Las Vegas, but it will awesome when it available everywhere — how long does it take to photograph the whole world?

Product manager for Google Maps, Stephen Chau explains some of the cool applications:

“We can see all sorts of uses, I just moved to a new apartment, and I used Street View to check out the neighborhood…. You can preview the location to see if the real estate listing is accurate — is it close to public transportation, and so forth. There’s a sightseeing aspect to it that way… It could also be helpful if you’re trying to find that great little Italian restaurant downtown whose name you forgot. If you don’t know the name, you can’t exactly look it up, but if you can retrace your steps, virtually, you may find it and be able to zoom in on its sign.”

I am starting to get a few posts saved in Technorati - so this post is the beginning of me setting up a profile for Xebidy Strategic Design.

Technorati is a social bookmarking site where you can save all your favourite blog posts from around the blogoshpere. To understand the idea of social bookmarking sites and in particular, tagging, read my May article on What is Web 2.0?

I received a Hitwise Report this week from a number of sources (thanks to all) which showed the top travel websites in the US for the month of April 2007. The top website by a long shot was MapQuest, followed by Yahoo! and Google Maps. I don’t if map sites should really count and to this end in my view the top sites were fourth placed Expedia, fifth was Cheap Tickets and then Southwest Airlines.

Sites that could be considered Web 2.0 that ranked highly were Yahoo! Travel at number 10 (seventh if you ignore the three mapping sites) and Trip Advisor at fifteenth.

If measured by the number of page views then Travelocity jumps right up to second place behind Expedia, from seventh based on overall visits.

But, the very top website for the month of April by average session duration is Lonely Planet’s forum site Thorn Tree. To me this shows the importance of peer reviews and advice sharing. The average time spent of the website is just under 30 minutes. Funnily enough the website with the second longest duration is the Sunset Beach bar in St Maarten, Netherlands Antilles. Have a look at this site is great fun and a lesson to us all in how to create and maintain a relationship with you customer both offline and online.

As expected Google kicked butt as the top search engine used for reaching travel industry websites. Finally, amongst other things, the report showed that 43% of users clicked onto another travel industry website straight after being on one. This means users are searching more than one travel site to find what they are looking for.

Remember, these figures were for the US only.

I have had a great week in Cairns capped off with a few beers with Nigel Hobbs, Head Story Teller and Director of Sales and Marketing for AJ Hackett Bungy. It was great hearing about the Macau site, which is now the largest bungy jump in the world at 230 meters! An opportunity in Shanghai sounds exciting also and I am most looking forward to being one of the first to jump in Second Life when it goes live. It was good to hear also that AJ Hackett International now has control of the domain www.ajhackett.com. I had previously done a few things with the guys at Hackett’s and this had been an issue as it was pointed to New Zealand (which is a separate business). It is good to see this is sorted and it should means a lot for their search engine and Internet efforts.

The whole week has thrown up a number of interesting hypothesis that I thought I would share with you. One of the most interesting is the growth of Peter Pans travel shops versus Backpackers World. Most accredit the rapid growth of Peter Pans on their ‘back end’ software; which means they only need one accountant. When a customer makes a purchase the money is immediately split by the ‘back end’ into the suppliers portion and the commission earnings of Peter Pans. Once a customer redeems their travel the supplier can go into an extranet and retrieve their portion without the need to invoice. It is a massive reduction in overheads for both the supplier and Peter Pans. It also means the supplier gets their money earlier, speeding up cash flow - an ongoing problem in the travel industry.

With a faster payment turnaround and their rapid expansion Peter Pans have been able to demand higher commission portions from the suppliers with little resistance. The interesting position now happening in the industry is that Peter Pans have been extending their software to a whole raft of travel desks across Australia, who are signing on to use the software because of it’s ease in use, because it lowers the cost of running these businesses (which have typically had very tight margins), because using the software gives them access to a large number of products that they might not normally have access to and because by using Peter Pans they receive a higher commission than they normally would.

There is a similar occurrence in Cairns with a company called Destination Cairns Marketing (DCM). DCM has over 60+ travel desks in Cairns and Port Douglas with a revenue model that is a real challenge to the industry. DCM partners up with a smaller travel desk that might normally only be on a 10 - 15% commission based on their volume and brings them into the DCM network which is earning as much as 25% commission purely because of the sheer size of their turnover. DCM is then able to split a portion of the increased commission back to the travel desk.

It is often discussed how Peter Pans is beginning to replicate this model nationally. The impact is clear; while suppliers are attempting to drive down commission earnings in the face of increasing costs and demands by the travellers themselves that prices are getting too high, leading agencies such as Peter Pans and DCM are driving up the average commission payments.
From my point of view the interesting point is the relentless growth of both these agencies; Peter Pans in particular is exciting based on it’s software model; as well as their growth into such stepping stone destinations as Thailand I predict these guys will only get bigger and bigger.

Two other businesses seem to be regularly bought up in discussions with all sorts of people this week. The first is Global Gossip, who to summarise sentiment, are the Sleeping Giant of the industry. The Global Gossip Internet Cafes are all well positioned and well run; and since he acquisition of Internet Outpost have really grown in number. They have an exciting network of shops now supplying a service that travellers want. The discussion nearly always centers around what will they do in terms of developing a community through their network. I hope to catch up with Peter Ovenden in the next month when I am Sydney.

The second company is Nomad World Hostels. I heard this before but decided not to make comment, but it appears that most people are now predicting a name change in the near future. Nomads recently took over the Footprints Westend hostel and renamed it The Legend Has it Westend. Is this to be the new brand, or is this still simply gossip?

Thanks to everyone I have met this week and I wish you all well - hope to be back soon.

After being shy on the blog all week I seem to have a lot to say today!! For those of you who do not receive the Stray Travel and Spaceship weekly newsletter you missed a gem this week. Stray has a driver/guide called James who writes a regular column for newsletter. His absence in the past month has been extremely noticeable. Nonetheless, he has come back today with avengence; read on:

Many people seem to think that I have been away on holiday but this is simply not correct! Over the last few months I have spent a lot of time at Jeff Patel’s workshop in Cambridge helping Arthur Tank (Dilmat Industries’ leading researcher) fine-tune Stray’s latest development. All new Stray passengers will have a biodegradable implant just under the skin of their left shoulder, holding their relevant travel information, including pass details. Infrared scanners similar to a bar code reader in a supermarket are being fitted to the inside door of our buses – these will download the passenger’s travel details as they enter the vehicles. This can then be accessed by the driver using handheld internet capable mobile phones. The biodegradable implants are made from a revolutionary new product using compressed potato fibres which break down conveniently after 12 months once the Stray passenger’s unlimited bus pass has expired. The drivers that have looked at our new system are grateful that they will no longer have to count their passengers after each stop – a green light on the dashboard will indicate when everyone is one board. It will also be good for the environment, cutting down the use of paper. Many thanks to Jeff and Arthur for the many extra hours you have put in to getting this idea operational.

James is obviously simultaneously extremely clever and one very freaky rooster. But you have got to wonder what an agent overseas reading this newsletter would think?

Sorry there has been no posts earlier this week I am in Cairns this week working on the new website strategies for Adventure Tours Australia, Oz Experience, and Wayward Bus. I have to say they are going to be great when they come out later this year.

I have discussed the importance of planning in so many posts before; but, I just can’t emphasis it enough. It might be very boring, but we have spent a week locked in a hotel room mapping out the content of each site, the path a customer will take to make a purchase, and then the design elements.

Although we still have a long way to go we have followed an interesting methodology. Over the past six months there has been a lot of critical analysis undertaken of the current websites and from that we went into these sessions with a pretty clear bundle of functionality that must be in the websites. From there we started the session by building up some personas with the ideal customers. By identifying how they use the sites and what these customers look for in the websites we began to build up a picture of how the sites should look like. Likewise, we took the list of necessary functionality and applied a funnel process. For those who have not heard my expound the merits of the funnel design process I will write a post about it next week - but basically it involves identifying the real measurable objectives (to sell tours and bus tickets in this case) and then identifying all the functionality that is essential to achieving these objectives. The more important the functionality the closer to the narrow end of the functionality it goes. Suddenly you realise that there is functionality there that does not contribute to the objectives. it is outside the funnel - and therefore it may not be needed in the website at all; in some cases it may distract from the achieving of the objectives or even cause the customer to abandon the website.

Armed with this knowledge we finally got to the fun part of getting some design ideas down on the computer. The idea of all the planning is that the design phase is the easiest - but it’s not! It’s the most emotional and we have had a number of hurdles to overcome nonetheless - but we are underway.

I am taking the plan away to the Xebidy crew not for a few weeks to come back and present the designs back to the ATA team for a review. At this stage the plan is to look at as many different scenarios to see if the first release designs achieve the stated objectives. We will also apply the personas to these scenarios. I will report back.

For those of us behind the times (me in particular) congratulations to Brett and Brad from Calypso on their recent acquisition of Inn the Tropics Hostel in Cairns. Calypso has always one of the most ambient hostels in Australia, if not the world, and I am sure they will turn Inn the Tropics into the same funky environment.

I have been amazingly looked after this week by Brett, Axel (a mate from Stray UK days) and the crew and just wanted to say thank you and good luck with the new hostel.