We have just launched TravHQ.com, your gateway to Travel Trends & Insights

Here is a fantastic piece of news for all Travel Marketers, we have just launched www.travhq.com, a B2B website for the travel industry. Here is TravHQ Launch from TravHQ.com.

Today, we are happy to let you know, that www.travhq.com is now officially live. To set the background, it was one of those mornings when we were having a conversation with a leading hotel chain and they were aiming for a strong online campaign to increase the inflow of visitors to their properties. Midway during the dialogue we realized that somewhere most of the businesses are expecting technology & digital innovations to create immediate results. However, there is a sense of uncertainty in their decisions due to lack of awareness and direction. Since then we have been exploring the developments around us, doing some research and our conversations with number of such travel brands in India have revealed that they are keen to discover, how to align their communication around all things digital and the impact it can potentially make on their businesses.

At TravHQ.com, we will aggregate and review such developments that will guide travel brands across India & APAC in the time to come.

Travel Industry has been significantly impacted by the rapid rise of the MOBILE & CONNECTED traveller. The entire experience of discovering a destination, planning a trip and booking a hotel or even finding out nearby points of interest has completely shifted online. We are definitely not the first Online Travel Media to originate in India! There are some really good portals that are commentating on the pulse of travel but majority of them do have a specific focus. For us, our focus will be SMTD (Social, Mobile, Technology & Digital) and its significance for the travel industry. With our launch, we are also presenting a wide flavour of content for your consumption from Trends, Reviews to Campaigns. Do take TravHQ.com for a spin and let us know what you think about it. If you do like what we are doing, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter & show us some social media love (Facebook Twitter Google Plus LinkedIn Instagram). Happy Reading!

Smartphone Sales in India Q3 2011

Monday’s Economic Times brings an interesting piece of statistic in its news story Nokia Bets on Lumia Regain Market Share. The graphic in the story talks about the market share of different players in the Indian smartphone landscape and how things have changed from Q3 of 2010 to Q3 of 2011.

Certainly worth a look with the fortunes of likes of Nokia, Samsung and RIM swinging in opposite directions 🙂

Since the data is latest and from a credible source, I thought of sharing the info with you all.

Condolence

Last week saw an all-time low. I am still recovering from the shock, but have finally gathered some courage to tell ya about the sad demise of my dear friend Rana who passed away last week in a road accident. Rana and I shared fantastic understanding on the professional and personal front. But all that’s over bcoz of one devastating accident which took Rana away from us.

Above pic shows the RAD force (Rapid – Rana, Application – Ananda, Development – Daksh)

Cab Drivers as Word-of-Mouth Marketers?

Imagine the cabbies playing the dual role of a ‘driver’ and a ‘product-marketer’. Recently, I had read in a blog-post that the company that sells ads on the outside of cars in London would now secretly pay money to the car drivers for product marketing. 

Questions are already being raised about ethics, integrity, merit and even possible spam. Rather than criticizing the move, lets try to look at it from an Indian perspective and see if we can draw some merits out of this.

• In Delhi the move could be implemented in the ‘Autos’ and ‘DTC Buses’.
• The drivers would act as ‘customer evangelists’ by sharing their experience of products they’ve used. This could be absolutely anything under the sun as long as the driver has used it or is planning to use it. It could range from a tooth-brush to television.
• Several advertisements of different portals like ‘oktatabyebye.com’, ‘mapmyindia.com‘ can be seen on Delhi’s Autos.
• I think it would make some sense if the drivers can understand the purpose of these websites like mapmyindia, routeguru and even burrp.com by helping the travellers to connect their real needs with these city-centric portals.

Coming back to the news story, at this stage all one can say is that it looks interesting. Perhaps the companies should portray drivers as ‘Customer Evangelists’ instead of Spammers 😉

Image Credits – Via blog.verticalresponse.com. To browse the page with this image please visit this link

Dr. Ralf Klamma’s Blog: beamtenherrschaft

Although I know Dr. Ralf Klamma through an Indian knowledge-exchange forum, it was only now that I got in touch with him directly through email exchange.

I am thankful to Dr. Ralf Klamma for mentioning me in his blog.

He has been maintaining an interesting research blog about information systems, technology enhanced learning, social software, communities of practice, web 2.0 and more. 

Dr. Ralf has some insightful posts centered around Web2.0 and Knowledge Management. One that I really like was on “Web2.0 companies out of Business”. Dr. Ralf has talked about the closure of PodTech, Yahoo 360 and Judy’s Book.

Couple of other blogs to watch out for :Mitko Denev’s Trends in the Web and Seb’s Tec-Bites .

More this week..

Don’t forget to listen to Jeremiah Owyang’s budget allocation for Web Strategy in 2008 here .

News from Other Blogs

Vogue’s India Launch
Click to Read.

Measuring Social Media
Read/Listen here

Fake Steve Jobs meeting Guy Kawaski?
Read here

Bathroom Blogfest 2007
Read here

The comment contest winner
Read here