Travel is a huge space, and one of the companies that has been in it longest is WorldMate. Here founder Nadav Gur talks to us about how travel is changing due to mobile phones and how his apps are helping travelers. More specifically he’s announcing TripCatch, an app for business users on Blackberry that goes further than other travel apps like TripIt. How? It watches your email for travel messages from your airlines, hotels, and rental car companies, and parses those and gathers more information from around the Internet for those trips.

WorldMate web site: http://www.worldmate.com
WorldMate blog: http://blog.worldmate.com
WorldMate profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/worldmate

Just down the street from Twitter, in downtown San Francisco, is Engine Yard, a web hosting company that has morphed into a cloud hosting mecca for Rails apps. As product manager Abheek Anand explains, “It’s all about getting in front of your customers as quickly as possible. We want to have our clients come in and build and deploy in under a day.” Firm believers in the future and scalability of Ruby on Rails, Engine Yard’s developers are Rails specialists, serving customers who know exactly what they need, as well as businesses who have an idea for a killer app, but need an expert opinion on how to run it.

Engine Yard CTO Tom Mornini explains one of the benefits of being in the epicenter of startupland: great eavesdropping. In the ‘90s, the conversation was all tech, but these days, “half the conversation is business.”

More info:
Engine Yard website: http://www.engineyard.com/
Engine Yard profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/engineyard

The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Kevin Marks. Recorded live Friday, July 23, 2010.

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Guest post by Major Hayden.

Major Hayden is a Linux Systems Engineer for Rackspace in San Antonio. He works with the Cloud Servers and Slicehost virtualization products. Major’s primary focus is on base image maintenance, kernel customization and tactical optimization solutions. He also maintains multiple blogs and a MySQL optimization script called mysqltuner. Outside of Rackspace, Major enjoys contributing to the open source community, running, and taking care of his chinchillas.

I’ll admit it right now: I love engaging customers and learning more about how what we do at Rackspace can help their business or ideas take flight. Talking with customers can be a little nerve-wracking at first since you’re not always sure what their experience level is and which products they really need. However, you can get past that initial nervousness very quickly by getting an idea of what the customer needs and what they’ve tried already (that didn’t work).

You may not have realized it, but I covered the most important part of selling a technical product in the first paragraph without even mentioning the word “sell”. That was intentional. As a technical person, you have an innate ability to interact with customers without needing to actively sell them the product.

Whenever I meet a customer at a conference, trade show, or some other relatively informal event, I try to keep a few things in mind. I’ll share them with you:

Learn why your customers are seeking out your product and what they really need
It’s pretty obvious that this step requires more listening than talking. While the customer is explaining what they need but haven’t found, try to keep a running tally in your brain of what technologies are important to them so that you can rank your suggestions for them. Don’t think about which product will work best for them yet — just keep keep their general requirements in mind.

This is also a good opportunity to relate to what they’ve told you. If there’s a certain solution that ended up working really well or one that failed miserably, and you’re familiar with one of those solutions, tell them briefly about your experiences. This will re-affirm how the customer feels about that solution and it also shows them that you’ve been in their shoes before. They’ll also appreciate that you’ve been listening to their concerns and looking for ways to relate to their unique situation.

Make thoughtful production suggestions and discuss implementation
Some folks might say this is where the selling starts, but if you’re doing it correctly, you’ve been selling your product and your company the whole time. This is where things can get tricky. Most technical people I’ve met will try to avoid being pushy when suggesting a product for a customer to use, and that’s a good idea.

You need to do three things: pick the right product (or group of products), explain what needs it meets, and briefly cover some example implementations. As a technical person, this is where you really shine. Interpreting the customer’s needs and turning it into a mini technical sales pitch is a piece of cake when you know the product well and you’ve implemented it before.

It’s great to give a customer multiple options, but it’s a bad idea to overwhelm them. If you find that you’re talking a bit too much, there’s no harm in offering to talk about details later during a formal meeting. You can say things like these:

• “this product will meet all your needs, but if you want to save a little money, you can use this other product like this.”
• “if you combine these two products, you can meet these needs and save some time, but you can just use one and set it up like this…”
• “then later on, if you need to expand, you can start using this product by…”

Think about the customer’s future growth
Even if you have products that meet your customer’s needs, they’re going to be concerned about what’s going to happen down the road. What happens when they scale to a level that they can’t even comprehend right now? I don’t think any customer would expect you to cover all the bases, but try to think of some basic future-proofing for the customer. Even if it might involve a product that your company doesn’t sell, just mention it.

Of course, there are some things that you shouldn’t do:

• Don’t overpromise or push hard about a future product.
• Don’t feel obligated to know the answer to every question.
• Don’t use words like “infinite”, “forever”, or “perfect”.
• Don’t talk about cost constantly.
• Don’t force a customer to choose a product, take product literature, or take your contact information.
• Don’t make assumptions about the customer’s technical level, needs, or purchasing power.
• Don’t let it bother you if the customer isn’t interested in your product — it’s not personal.

And that’s about it. If you follow those three tips and avoid the things you shouldn’t do, you’ll get the confidence you need to engage the customer and create the beginnings of a relationship with them.

This post was originally posted on May 26, 2010 on Major’s blog, RackerHacker.

Guest post by Josh Levine, Founder and Chief Experience Officer, Alexander Interactive.

Redesigning a website is a daunting task.  Budget, deadlines, resources, features, content, platform changes, brand perception, SEO implications – the list of challenges is a long one.  The potential impact website redesign has on your organization is as enormous and critical as the process.  Will conversion go up or down?  Will your new site attract more visitors or will traffic drop off?

Before investing considerable time, money and soul into a redesign, it is important to critically evaluate why you are redesigning your site, and why you are redesigning right now.

People often think of design longevity based on x number of years after a redesign launches, but the truth is there is no ready-made formula.  Use the guidelines below to get a clear rationale (that makes business sense) for when and why to undertake a site redesign.  Gather up your traffic metrics, usage patterns, test results, industry research and customer feedback – and keep reading.

Redesign for Scalability: Accommodate Growth Gracefully

I bet your site looked and worked exactly how you wanted it to the day it launched a few years ago.  But how does it perform now?  In the interim, you may have tacked on new browsing functionality, made navigation changes, expanded products and content, and integrated offerings from third-party vendors.  Each change was intended to improve conversion, stickiness or increase traffic.  But in the aggregate, your site has gotten unwieldy.

Your site should be able to accommodate growth and evolve with your business.  If the “Frankenstein factor” is taking over, it may be time to redesign.

Redesign for Adaptability: Keep Your Site Flexible

Having a site that can accommodate your evolving business needs is crucial.  Setting up a sale, for example, should take hours, not days or weeks.  Changing an add-to-cart button from green to red and implementing a quick A/B test should be feasible without five meetings with your IT department.  Your site should be able to be easily updated and maintained by business users.

Redesign to Modernize: Rejuvenate Your Brand

Developing a visual design that attracts users while simultaneously fulfilling your brand and business goals is a tall order.  Doing so as your business evolves is tougher still.  But the visual design is your public face.  If your site feels stale, uninviting and unmemorable, it probably is, and it’s time to change—you’d do the same thing for your physical office or reception area.

There’s more to a redesign than just beautifying the website.  Consider typography, readability, scan-ability, visual hierarchy and clarity.  These behind-the-scenes components are arguably as important as integrating up-to-date design styles.

Chelsea Clock redesign

Redesign for Your Customer: Deliver Based on What They Tell You

Your customers are trying to tell you what works on your site –through what and how they are ordering, where they are dropping out of the transaction funnel, and through feedback from comments and customer service calls.  Keep it user-friendly by observing and listening to them. Redesigning around customer feedback is essential.  Try doing a survey, a focus group or a usability study, and deep-diving into your metrics.

Sometimes your customers may want things that won’t add to your bottom line. A good way of validating customer suggestions is through A/B testing, which provides a quantitative check on the qualitative feedback you are receiving.

Redesign for Retention: Keep Your Site Shopper-Focused

Step back for a moment and consider the following questions:

• Do you truly understand your shopper?  Do you know the various shopper types and their respective personalities, aspirations, backgrounds, preferences and tastes?
• What contexts and environments do they live in?  Are they social?  Introverts?  Small town or big city?
• How do they think and interact in the real world?
• What is their communication style?
• Are they experts?  Do they need hand-holding and explanation?
• Do they like pudding?  Flan?  Smoked fish?

Your site architecture must cater to your customers; your content and labeling should speak their language.  Your UI should anticipate their needs and limitations.  Your navigation structure should allow for customers to shop the way they want to shop – not how you think they should.  Be there when they need you, and by gosh, get the heck out of their way when they don’t.

Mighty Leaf Tea’s navigation structure addresses their customers’ needs and preferences by enabling them to shop by caffeine, mood, region, ingredients.

Logitech invites the shopper to explore by appealing to their personality and tastes.

Redesign for Behavior: Accommodate Social Media

It’s human nature – people’s decisions are influenced by other people’s opinions.  Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites have capitalized on this phenomenon.  So should you.

Integrating social sharing and interaction features with your site will increase traffic and sales. Some sites recognize that their audience is actively “social” and do a redesign to focus the shopping experience almost entirely around this concept.  Different businesses need different amounts of social exposure, but almost every site can benefit from it in some way.

Redesign for Features: Capitalizing on Tech Advances

As web languages have matured, things once impossible are now the norm.  What’s important is making technology work for your customer—and for your business.

In fact, your site can define how you run your business, giving structure to your business process.  Consider the following:

• Location-based functionality, such as Gowalla
• Third-party collective intelligence/collaborative filtering engines, such as Baynote
• Integrate reviews using functionality such as Bazaarvoice
• Introduce new methods for browsing and finding products through the use of rich DHTML and AJAX technologies
• Speed up your page load times by applying the latest techniques in HTML, CSS and image performance
• Offer compelling new features that reflect ongoing trends, such as the social media service Shoutlet

Through ajax and dhtml, we implemented functionality on Kaptest.com that allowed customers to quickly and easily find and compare courses making it easier to find the perfect class that fits their needs.

Evaluating your site through the lenses above can provide a concrete indication of whether now is the right time to redesign.  How to effectively redesign based on the considerations above is a much broader topic, however the ideas above will give you some good conversation starters.  Shoot me an email when you launch.

Josh Levine is co-founder and chief experience officer for Alexander Interactive.  He has created successful web initiatives for some of the world’s most prestigious brands, including Citigroup, Pepperidge Farm, Continental Airlines, Dell, Campbell’s Soup, Liz Claiborne, Kaplan, and Virgin Mobile.  Josh is actively involved in charity work, primarily with the March of Dimes.  He lives in New York, N.Y. with his wife, daughter, son and Mayor Jack Reynolds, Ai’s VP of security and integrity.  Josh runs a 49-minute mile and once owned a pig named Vincent (may he rest in peace).

You’ve seen Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news readers like NewsGator, Google Reader, or, even, newer ones for iPad like Pulse, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news aggregators like Techmeme, Google News, Skygrid, Yahoo News, Hacker News, or Huffington Post, but you’ve never seen one like this.

What is “this?” It’s Flipboard.

It’s from a new company you’ve never heard from before. Embedded here is an exclusive interview with CEO Mike McCue. You might have heard of Mike before. He sold a company, TellMe, to Microsoft for about $800 million dollars. Flipboard, the company, has already had one round of funding from Kleiner Perkins and today is announcing a new round of funding along with an acquisition of the Ellerdale Project (http://www.ellerdale.com/).

What is Flipboard? It turns your Facebook and Twitter account into something that looks like a magazine. It also lets you build a custom magazine, either by choosing from Flipboard’s pre-built curated “boards” or by importing Twitter lists. This is a very powerful and engaging way to read Twitter. You can also turn a single person’s Twitter account, or a single brand’s Twitter account, into a Flipboard. For instance, you can follow Techcrunch on Twitter with it and it will turn Techcrunch into a beautiful magazine-like interface that’s easier to read than any other reader.

The differentiator for Flipboard is the design. Lots of touches that make it engaging:

1. Touch an article and it “zooms” to reveal more.
2. Touch a video and it plays inline.
3. Turn your iPad and everything reconfigures, even photos switch from vertical to horizontal formats.
4. Touch “read more on Web” on longer articles and instantly be transported to the original website that was the originator of the information discussed in the tweet.
5. When you bring in your Facebook friends your friends’ photos, status messages, will all be laid out in attractive pages.
6. You can touch to share, favorite, like, or retweet, depending on what you are reading.

To get a sense of how dramatically different Flipboard is from any other Facebook or Twitter client, you should watch the video we filmed with McCue where he demoed the app for our cameras. In the interview he covered the philosophy of this interesting new company, demoed the product for us, and talked about where the company is going.

So, why is this disruptive, or even, revolutionary? Revolutionary isn’t our word, either, but is what actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher said when we showed him the app to get a feeling for how it would affect the content businesses he’s involved in. He’s not the only one, either. We showed it to Wolfram Alpha’s CEO, Barak Berkowitz and he said “it’s one of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen.”

Techcrunch has covered that in a second post about why Flipboard is a killer app that — on first look — appears very disruptive to Twitter client producers, news readers, and news aggregator/publishing companies. In that second article we’ve also laid out why Twitter and the iPad have set in place the ingredients for a real media revolution — one that goes way beyond other publishing systems and one that further moves our reading behavior away from RSS aggregators.

But here let’s discuss how it works.

You add in your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It builds tiles, or “sections” out of your accounts. If you are an advanced user you can add in other people’s Twitter accounts, Twitter lists, or choose from a pre-done set of custom boards to choose from. More on those in a minute.

You then click on the section it builds after you flip past a “cover” that is made from photos that it finds from your friends and people you’re following on Twitter. The cover itself is pretty interesting, but the meat is inside, so we’ll focus on that.

Click on “Facebook,” for instance, and you’ll see your friends’ photos, tweets, status messages, articles, and videos. Just drag your finger through page after page, er, board after board, of these things. This is your Facebook news feed, but in a way you’ve never seen it before — all laid out like a newspaper. Click on any item and you can see the originating status message and all comments. You can “like” the item, or comment on it too.

How did Flipboard find these things? After all, I have 1,800 friends on Facebook and am following 19,000 people on Twitter and it filters out most of the noise I see on other Twitter and Facebook readers. Well, it has a set of algorithms that are looking for highly engaged items. You know, items that have lots of comments, likes, or retweets. It also has an algorithm that senses photography that’s been linked to from Facebook status messages and it lays those photos out.

When you reopen Flipboard it re-paginates the whole set of boards (you can only display nine sections at a time, which is a major limitation of the first version, but more on limitations in a second.

Along the bottom is a timeline that you can run your finger across to see a menu of all items. If you get to the end of the timeline and want to see more, just flip the last board over and it will go and get more pages for you to view.

LIMITATIONS

This is quite remarkable, and addictive to play with, but there are lots of things we’d like to see Flipboard add. More section tiles, for instance, is desperately needed. I have 25 different Twitter lists of just my own, for instance, and if you go to Listorious you can find thousands of lists on all sorts of different topics, all of which make good Flipboard sections.

Some might wonder why RSS isn’t used. That will be a limitation for some people, especially if you are trying to follow a blogger who doesn’t yet put their stuff into Twitter (naughty!) In reality, though, there is so much that IS on Twitter or Facebook that this limitation isn’t that big a deal. If you find some cool blog you can Tweet it and then it’ll show up in Flipboard anyway.

After playing with this I wanted to have Flipboard on my Android and iPhones. Unfortunately the team has chosen to focus solely on iPads for right now but are considering other devices for the future.

There’s no advertising, which leaves us guessing as to what the business model will be in the future. Mike McCue told me they are looking at new, design-centric, advertising that could possibly fill a page or a portion of a page.

A major limitation is that this is a reading and commenting app, not one where you can build your own tweets or Facebook status messages. I found myself often wanting to tweet from inside the app as I was reading.

It also doesn’t use LinkedIn or Google Buzz, both social networks I’d like to turn into Flipboards.

WHAT IT GOT RIGHT

Flipboard got a LOT right. It shows how you can enter a crowded space of Twitter clients with something that’s beautiful. The interaction design is beyond anything I’ve seen from a startup since Siri came on the scene earlier this year (and was almost instantly purchased by Apple).

They are totally right to bet on Facebook and Twitter. These are the default information sharing systems for most people now and are both mature enough to serve as news sources. I have a Twitter list of world news brands, for instance, that is awesome in Twitter. http://twitter.com/scoblemedia/world-news-brands Lots of people haven’t seen the power of lists like these, but now they will, and they’ll also understand that Twitter isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing.

WHAT IT DID NOT GET RIGHT

There is a lot missing from Flipboard. First, the #1 thing we need is more tiles, or what they call “sections.” Nine is simply not enough.

Second, we need a far better “store” from which to find new sections, er, Twitter lists. Yes, you can eventually figure out that you can search for people, lists, etc, but we need a better way to do that. I wish there were a stronger tie between Listorious, which I find has a very nice way to find lists, and Flipboard, which makes it somewhat difficult to find new lists to make into Flipboard sections.

Third, as a content producer, I’m very worried that this takes too much of the brand and advertising dollars away from the content producers. If I share a Techcrunch article, for instance, I get more credit than Techcrunch does inside Flipboard. That’s not good. Also, they need a better way for content producers to tell Flipboard just how much of the text they are using. Right now Flipboard looks for an RSS feed from a content producer to see if they’ve set full text, or partial text, or headline only, to figure out the syndication rules but there needs to be a way inside Flipboard for publishers to communicate their wishes since I’m sure lots of publishers won’t like what they see inside Flipboard. From a user standpoint, though, I find this reading experience to be unparalleled, so media producers should work with Flipboard instead of flipping out, as I expect some of them like Rupert Murdoch to do.

There are still some bugs. I often see duplication of articles, especially in my lists that follow larger numbers of people (Flipboard’s own curated lists have small numbers of sources to keep them cleaner). I also occasionally see bad text or bad headlines that were pulled in. But those are minor problems for a 1.0 beta and will be fixed, the team says.

THE FUTURE OF FLIPBOARD

The acquisition of the Ellerdale Project, this morning, gives Flipboard lots of new “trending” features to build as well as some strong algorithms to further reduce the noise and pull out great items for us to read, no matter what the list is we’re aiming Flipboard at.

Overall this is an extraordinary iPad app and one that will shake the media world for quite some time.

ANALYSIS OF WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT:

Every once in a while I get an early look at a “killer app.” I still remember the day I first saw Pagemaker (back then from a company named Aldus, which later sold to Adobe). That app, along with a $5,000 laser printer from Apple, was a “killer app” for the Macintosh. Why? Because if you wanted to do a new form of publishing you needed to buy a Macintosh, a laser printer (back then $5,000) and Aldus’ Pagemaker.

I’ve been using my iPad since the very first day and have been looking for that “killer app” that would give me a reason to tell you why you must get an iPad. In other words, an app that would justify buying an iPad for a large number of people.

We’ve seen other companies get close. Last month Techcrunch wrote about Pulse, a news reader for the iPad. I downloaded it, but it wasn’t revolutionary, just a nicer done RSS news reader. Earlier this week another nice news app, Apollo, was announced in Techcrunch, but I quickly answered back on Twitter that I had already been beta testing something that went far beyond what they were offering.

“So, Scoble, spill the beans already!”

The app I’ve been using? Flipboard. See the news article elsewhere on Techcrunch for more details, since Flipboard also announced new funding and an acquisition too.

It does something very simple: it turns your Twitter and Facebook into something that looks like a magazine.

But, don’t miss what’s happening here, because there’s a news revolution that has been born due to Twitter. First, you must see that Twitter has moved from being just for a way to follow your friends to a way you can follow news brands. Techcrunch, for instance, has a Twitter feed that I follow in Flipboard and other Twitter readers like Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and Twitterrific. But go further, I have a list of 216 news brands like the BBC, CNN, New York Times, etc at http://twitter.com/scoblemedia/world-news-brands. You add that into Flipboard and you have the most complete newspaper-style media you’ve ever seen. You can follow just the BBC, or just the New York Times, or just your local newspaper on Twitter.

The problem is that when you see the New York Times on Twitter.com it looks boring. You don’t see the great photography that the New York Times provides. You don’t have an easy-to-read layout. And if you try to read the New York Times along with my list of news journalists or if you want to follow Techcrunch’s staff writers on Twitter you’ll see them all mixed together with all the noise that comes with that. If MG Siegler posts what he’s drinking on Friday night, as he did last week, it is weighted the same as a New York Times article of international importance.

This makes reading Twitter far less useful than it could be and it lays out why Flipboard is a publishing revolution. Oh, don’t take my word for it. I showed actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher Flipboard and he turned to me and said “this is revolutionary.” Then he asked me for an introduction to Flipboard so he could invest in the company (which he did). Nearly every person I gave a sneak peak to Flipboard said the same thing after playing with it.

It’s disruptive to several groups: those who publish media, especially news organizations; those who produce Twitter clients; and those who produce news aggregators.

“One of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen,” is what Barak Berkowitz, CEO of Wolfram Alpha, told me after he saw it. “It brings to life the real capabilities of social media.”

“It takes a lot of the stuff from nerddom to mainstream,” Gary Lauder, VC at Lauder Partners, and TED speaker. “My mother is not going to read tweets, but she will read Flipboard.”

But it isn’t just the app that makes this a significant new company.

It also is backed by an interesting team, starting with co-founder Mike McCue who started TellMe, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2007 for $800 million. < << http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tellme >>>

It also has already made an interesting acquisition, of Ellerdale < << http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ellerdale >>> which has been building algorithms using semantic technology that filters the real-time stream by topics, instead of keyword strings. Basically, this means that Flipboard has some cool trending topics features and noise control that will come in future versions.

It also has a list of impressive venture capitalists, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Google investor Ron Conway, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, and major investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Index Ventures.

But that’s not why I view this as disruptive. It just is plain fun to use. I’ve spent more than 50 hours on it so far and love that it removes most noise from my Twitter feed, makes me much more productive in finding interesting items, and is plain addictive to use. It also makes me feel like I’m reading an old-time newspaper with beautiful design that helps me find important items to my life. Not every Twitter item is interesting and Flipboard focuses on that.

What do you think? If you have an iPad already do you agree that this is a “killer app?” If you don’t have an iPad, does this app make you want to get one?

The Gillmor Gang — Brett Slatkin, Jyri Engestrom, Julien Genestoux, and Kevin Marks — on federating realtime with PubSubHubbub. Recorded live Friday, July 16, 2010.

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In this eighth episode of The Founders video series, sponsored by Rackspace, the competitors have to think about teamwork and relationships. The startups get a visit from Twitter’s Ryan Sarver, and they start to think about a cloud strategy after a visit to Gluecon. And Techstars’ David Cohen admits that his mom is something of a Twitter phenomenon.

If you are a professional publisher, you can probably study everything about your audience except when your audience copies text from your website and pastes it into email or Facebook or a blog. Wouldn’t you like to know more? Absolutely! Tynt has a neat trick: when a user copy-and-pastes text it uses Javascript to include a link back to your text. Now it can be tracked and Derek Ball, CEO of Tynt, shows us how it’s done.

More info:
Tynt website: http://www.tynt.com/
Tynt profile on Crunchbase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tynt

The Gillmor Gang — Steve Gillmor, Dan Farber, Mike Arrington, and John Taschek. Recorded live, Friday July 9, 2010.

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