Stories about: Travelocity

Imagine having to provide authentication and authorization services for some 1,000 departments within your organization, while giving about 360,000 administrators control over which individuals get access to what resources. Now imagine that the vast majority of those groups and administrators work for companies other than your own.

I work as a senior manager for a small high-technology engineering firm. We were recently acquired and integration is now being inflicted upon us. One of the early integration targets was corporate travel. For the first time since the genesis of Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, and their ilk, we have a corporate travel agent whose use is mandated for all travel. If there is anything more useless to a bunch of brilliant engineers with Web access and smartphones than an old-fashioned travel agent, it's hard to imagine what it is.

Viewed by many as open source's most compelling business play in the past few years, MySQL made waves this year, accepting Sun Microsystems' US$1 billion acquisition bid, opening eyes on Wall Street as to open source's potential to shake up the software industry in the process.

What are the next steps needed for open source as a software production methodology to reach the next level?

Many partners in Facebook's Beacon seem reticent to address the raging privacy controversy surrounding the ad program, resorting to terse, vague statements or opting for outright silence when asked for comment.

Facebook presented its master plan for boosting its advertising revenue now that it has the challenge of living up to its stratospheric US$15 billion valuation.

Portland Trailblazers fans are using a new social networking Web site set up last week by the team to join together and lobby the National Basketball Association to add Trailblazers power forward Zach Randolph to the lineup for Sunday's NBA All-Star Game in Las Vegas.

Online travel company Zuji has rolled out an online customer service module for deployment within the Asia Pacific Zuji call centre in an effort to improve customer service and reduce customer enquiries.

Nearly 150 million U.S. consumers visited a travel Web site in 2005, a 35 percent increase over 2004, according to a new study released yesterday by ComScore Networks Inc. Annual online travel revenues exceeded US$60 billion in 2005, representing a 20 percent increase over 2004.

It used to be that, while programming wasn't easy, it was straightforward - you wrote code to specified requirements. If you collaborated at all, it was with another IT guy. But, regulators had not yet discovered IT's role in the compliance race and business stayed out of the IT shop. Today, dramatic change is afoot: SOA (service oriented architecture) with its code reuse mantra, the need in every company to build closer ties to business users, often working with a team whose members are working on the other side of the globe and the way application development teams work now reflects these mega trends.

Although online travel firms provide more information about their policies and are more responsive to customers, many of them continue to share users' personal information with outside parties, according to the Third Quarter 2005 Online Customer Respect Study of the largest airline and travel firms. The study was conducted by The Customer Respect Group Inc.