Ric Shreves is a web applications consultant and author. He has published books on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo and Ubuntu. Ric is also the lead analyst on several industry white papers, including the Open Source CMS Market Share Report (from water&stone) and travel industry white papers from PhoCusWright Consulting. He is the founder of digital agency water&stone and is presently focused on creating a new travel startup: GottaGetaway, a Singapore-based company offering users a better way to find, plan and book their travel online.
I spent a good portion of this week in meetings with various companies and individuals in the Singapore travel industry. There were some interesting chats and some great feedback on what we're doing here at GottaGetaway. One of the most interesting conversations concerned how online travel is evolving. In short, the discussion went something like this:
The first phase of online travel was the arduous task of putting inventory online and making it possible for members of the general public to make (and pay for) a confirmed booking without the necessity of human intervention. This phase was a beast. Travel had historically been solely the realm of authorized agents, and being an agent often meant extensive training, licensing and in many countries, bonding. I'm not sure it's possible for someone who's grown up in the era of online travel to fully grasp what a big change it was for tickets to be sold online without a human being involved. The process of finding, reserving and then writing a physical ticket that had to be delivered to the client was the way travel booking was done until only just recently. All of us who are in this business today owe everything to those early travel innovators who cracked this nut. But, it was only the beginning...
>> Read the entire post on the GottaGetaway Blog
Packt is pleased to announce WordPress 3 Cookbook , a new book that covers over 100 recipes to help users to develop their WordPress site.
We've just released the 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. For the fourth year in a row, I've served as the lead analyst on this paper, which seeks to identity the Top 20 brands in the Open Source CMS Market.
Bali, Indonesia – water&stone is now in the process of gathering data for the fourth annual Open Source CMS Market Share Report. This year’s report will be looking at survey data gathered from CMS users around the world. The survey is now available online at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2011-OSCMS-Survey
Packt Publishing has released the most recent installment in their popular Drupal Themes series of titles: Drupal 7 Themes. The new book updates and expands up on the Drupal 6 edition.
