Yonatan Raz-Fridman is a visionary entrepreneur, technology executive, and the co-founder and CEO of Supersocial, a leading metaverse company that builds and operates cutting-edge virtual worlds for top-tier global brands and turns them into prosperous businesses. Supersocial has garnered significant recognition and support, backed by industry-leading investors who believe in Yon’s vision.
Yon’s entrepreneurial acumen in navigating emerging technologies are evident in his strategic decisions and forward-thinking approach at Supersocial. Through his leadership, he has assembled a team of experts with diverse talents, including deep Roblox knowledge and extensive experience in consumer brands and storytelling. By seamlessly blending their skills, Yon and his team create cutting-edge virtual worlds that resonate with metaverse communities and is revolutionizing the way we engage with brands.
Bruno Ver, Co-Founder and CEO of Niftify, is drawn to entrepreneurship for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, he loves the idea of being his own boss and having control over his career. He is excited by the prospect of creating something from scratch and seeing it grow into a successful venture. Additionally, Bruno enjoys the challenge of problem-solving and finding creative solutions to obstacles that arise in the business world.
He is also motivated by the potential financial rewards that come with being a successful entrepreneur.
Scott Stuart is the CEO of the Turnaround Management Association (TMA). TMA is a global nonprofit organization of nearly 10,000 turnaround and corporate renewal professionals. With 50+ chapters worldwide, TMA members are a professional community that strengthens the global economy by working with distressed companies to improve performance, manage disruption, restructure through insolvency proceedings, and preserve equity to drive overall results.
Before joining TMA, Stuart was an industry-leading attorney with over 30 years of experience in restructuring, litigation, and distressed investment. He has a proven track record of building, growing, and leading successful companies, from corporations to startups.
Utpal Kaul, then Global Head of Innovation and New Product Incubation at CWT (formerly known as Carlson Wagonlit Travel), discusses the applications of Artificial Intelligence and other emerging technologies to improve traveler experiences, drive operational efficiency, and optimize travel spend.
In a time when nearly every conversation and vertical revolves around Artificial Intelligence, travel is no exception – which makes perfect sense since nearly every person travels at one point or another, whether it be for business or pleasure.
As an industry, travel is ripe with technological, and oftentimes fragmented, needs ranging from payment solutions, health and wellness, to sustainability. TMCs, or travel management companies, like CWT, are one solution to manage organizations’ business travel programs.
TMCs provide the end-user with online booking tools, mobile applications, program management, consulting teams and executive travel services, meetings and events support, reporting functionality, and more. A more personalized (and urgent) service example would be the rerouting of an employee who is traveling and happens to get stuck at an airport. When such situations arise – and are understandably not within the core competency of companies to resolve themselves – TMCs are especially useful for optimizing spending (and lessening stress!).
When it comes to travel and Artificial Intelligence, the ability to predict travel disruptions with a high degree of accuracy is just one game changer for a seamless experience. For example, knowing a day before the flight that it is most likely going to be delayed or cancelled, or that missing an onward connection is inevitable, now has a significant impact not only on the traveler’s experience but also on their decision to travel in the first place.
Artificial Intelligence’s ability to predict airfare volatility is impacting when travelers choose to book their travel too. AI empowers the user to make an informed decision on whether now is the right time to book or if they should wait a few days for better pricing. Even more impressive are the facial recognition capabilities that use biometrics as an access key, thereby eliminating the need to show proof of identity at every checkpoint.
With Technology and Artificial Intelligence Moving at a Rapid Pace, How Can TMCs Keep Up?
TMCs must find ways to be on the lookout for what is coming, and which technologies could disrupt the travel landscape of tomorrow. CWT takes an “all ideas are good ideas” approach followed by due diligence. They keep up with technology trends by collaborating with third parties and startups. CWT’s participation includes product testing, market fit determinations, and consultation. The criteria they use to determine whether a technology is considered worthwhile, innovative enough, or of value, is that it should:
significantly improve the experience of the traveler,
help drive operational efficiency, or
significantly optimize travel spending.
CMT’s innovative capabilities do not come from collaboration with third parties and startups only, but from frequent interactions with their clients as well. By allowing their end users to know what is being worked on, presenting the metrics that accompany the project, and obtaining feedback – particularly on pain points – CMT is able to ensure product-market fit and offer the best, most innovative service possible.
With over 300 startups to review annually, what advice does Utpal have for those wishing to rise above the noise? First, startups looking to break into the travel and TMC industries must understand the problem they aim to solve before ever approaching organizations for partnerships. Second, they should already have a piece of technology built that solves said problem. Only after that can the review, feedback, and dialog begin.
The final piece of the innovation puzzle comes from within the organization itself. In CWT’s case they have a dedicated Innovation and New Product team which is headed by the CTO and supported by the CEO with frequent touchpoints to showcase projects and to provide feedback opportunities.
When to Buy or Build Technology
At any given point of time, there are a million things that a large organization could do, so determining what to buy, what to build and what to acquire can be tricky. Recognizing what you know and what you do not, and continuously researching via third parties or online via press releases are good places to start the resource prioritization journey.
Since no organization has unlimited resources for unlimited ideas, a product pipeline must be built. It is ideal to first consider what you have already committed resources to, how much more time it will take to complete, and how much else can be fit into the product roadmap.
But when it comes to testing, learning fast, and making a quick determination, the best way – the only way for CWT – is with a partner. CWT’s preferred partners are startups. Startups are nimble, they are hungry, they can iterate fast, and they are good at discovering new niches, disrupting, and innovating. The dynamic nature of working with startups allows CWT to run multiple products in parallel, to test quickly and to increase the odds of finding an innovative product that is scalable.
Utpal believes that such a third-party, startup innovation model can apply to companies outside of TMCs and the travel industry. Arguably it is the only sustainable model for any organization to drive innovation. This kind of “buy” approach frees companies from the risk of letting the time, money, effort, and passion spent on a project get in the way of the original problem it was trying to solve. The barrier to exit is a lot lower with an externally driven or an externally developed product than with an internally developed product. Results are not always black and white, but by using third parties it is easier to be impartial when determining what is working and what is not.
Similarly, the barrier to entry is also a lot lower when working with startups than when working internally. With internal products the approval process is much longer with more stakeholders, which inherently means process delays. At this slower pace, you run the risk of building a product when the product is already outdated. With startups you do not have such a limitation.
Of course, before licensing any product, the question that you should always ask is, “What is the value the product is going to bring?” Ascertaining what the relative value is in either having the product or not and what the options are helps in making the decision to move forward with a buy versus build.
How to Organize Third-Party Startup Innovation Efforts
At CWT, the third-party startup innovation efforts fall under the umbrella of the Product and Technology Group. But really for any organization such efforts could just as well fall under the Marketing umbrella. If you have executive sponsorship of the initiative, internal alliances will be forged. Therefore, it really does not matter where the initiative belongs because eventually everything rolls up to the top. On the other hand, without executive sponsorship it does not really matter how the initiative is structured because it would essentially be an academic exercise that does not drive value. Utpal’s advice is to obtain executive sponsorship first and foremost.
Based on Utpal’s personal experience, product people or engineers toying with the idea of a startup should spend a lot of time thinking through what the problem you are trying to solve is and how much of a value the solution you come up with represents. Test yourself and test your assumptions. Do not fall into the trap of believing that something you think is a problem is actually a problem. Finally, recognize that the devil is in the details. Do the due diligence of gathering domain expertise. And know that not all ideas that make sense on paper are workable. Laying domain expertise on top of ideas will go a long way.
Finding and Applying Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies in Travel at a Glance
Travel is ripe with technological, and oftentimes fragmented, needs ranging from payment solutions, health and wellness, to sustainability. TMCs, or travel management companies, are one solution to managing organizations’ business travel programs.
In a time when every conversation and vertical revolves around Artificial Intelligence, travel is no exception. AI’s ability to predict weather and scheduling disruptions, pricing, and other volatile elements of travel, as well as the use of biometrics and facial recognition have had the most impact.
One should move forward with a technology only if it improves the traveler experience, drives operational efficiency, and/or optimizes travel spend for clients.
Large scale collaboration with startups allows organizations to run multiple products in parallel, to test quickly and to increase the odds of finding an innovative product that is scalable.
Product people and engineers toying with the idea of a startup should spend a lot of time thinking through what the problem they are trying to solve is and how much of a value the solution they come up with represents. Knowing that not all ideas that make sense on paper are workable and laying domain expertise on top of them goes a long way.
How can ML technology help manage insane volumes of data and keep cloud costs in check?
Barzan has spent the last 15 years of his career on statistical and machine learning techniques for building smarter, faster, more scalable data-intensive systems. He is an entrepreneur, researcher, and professor.
Alongside being Founder and CEO of Keebo, providing fully-automated data warehouse and analytics optimization solutions, he is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he leads a research group designing the next generation of scalable databases using advanced statistical models.
Deniz Kent is a mission-driven scientist passionate about growing meat without killing animals, making healthcare affordable, and becoming a multi-planetary species. He co-founded Prolific Machines to help address all three of these domains.
Prolific Machines is inventing a new way to grow and control cells. Their technology will enable industry leading cost per cell produced, and they are open to making it available to all meat companies. Learn more and join the waitlist at www.prolific-machines.com.
Mikhail Krymov, the then Co-Founder & CEO of Sleepbox, shares his experience of reinventing the hotel experience. And as it turns out, thinking outside the box is… a box!
Sleepbox unlocked a whole new market niche while addressing the problem of expensive and inconvenient hotel stays. Their smart, turnkey solution is modular plug-in hotel rooms that can be easily installed in spaces like airports and office buildings, offering privacy in places where privacy is often limited. The rooms are fully equipped with features such as soundproofing, privacy windows, temperature control, and more.
Taking Regulations and Certifications in Stride
Sleepbox’s biggest challenge to date was navigating regulations and certifications for this new type of hotel accommodation. Convincing inspectors that the rooms were safe and compliant was a crucial step in making the concept a reality. Now a certified device, the company has launched in Washington DC’s Dulles International Airport, offering hourly services through an app-based vending machine. They are actively expanding to other airports through strategic partnerships, including Priority Pass.
The Future of Sleepbox
In addition to airports, Sleepbox has plans to enter the city hotel market by converting existing office spaces into Sleepbox hotels. For the economy traveler or long-distance commuter who is too tired to head home for the night, this is good news. Private and comfortable rooms (with shared bathrooms) will soon be available at a lower price compared to traditional hotels. The company’s long-term vision is to launch Sleepbox hotels in major cities worldwide, creating a network of affordable experiences that cater to urban explorers.
Modular Hotel Rooms at a Glance
Start-up Sleepbox has launched modular plug-in hotel rooms to offer privacy in places where privacy is often limited, such as airports and office buildings.
The micro-hotel rooms are fully equipped with features like soundproofing, privacy windows, and temperature control making for convenient and affordable short-term stays.
Modular hotel rooms are no exception. Regulations and certifications must be met for operation.
Already available in Washington DC’s Dulles International Airport, Sleepbox plans to expand to more airports and to enter the city hotel market by converting existing office spaces into Sleepbox hotels worldwide.
Ben Block, CEO of DH Enterprise & Associates (now TravelSmart International Group), discusses how the company is reimagining the relationship between travel agents, tour operators and digital platforms.
By combining technology, data-driven insights, and personalized customer experiences, DH Travel caters to a broad range of customers and provides them with high-value vacation options.
How Can Tour Operators Improve Relationships with Travel Agents Using Modern, Digital Tools?
DH Enterprise & Associates, a traditional tour operator, had previously moved towards a direct model of selling travel packages to consumers. However, Block recognized the importance of engaging with travel agents and created a digital solution to facilitate their access to DH Travel’s products.
What Should Interactive Digital Toolsets for Travel Agents Look Like?
Block and his team developed an interactive digital toolset that allows travel agents to access DH Travel’s products, including travel inspiration content, pre-built vacation packages, and customized trips. The toolset enables agents to share the content and itineraries with their customers while keeping the communication and booking process within the agent’s control. Agents receive alerts when their customers engage with the content, providing an opportunity to follow up and close the sale.
Privacy and data and analytics also play a crucial role in DH Travel’s business, allowing them to measure user behavior, improve the user experience, and make informed decisions about product development. By understanding customer preferences, they can suggest relevant travel options and enhance the overall customer experience.
How to Broaden Access to More Demographics
The company’s ability to leverage technology and employ a lean startup approach has also helped them to stay competitive in the fast-paced digital travel industry. For example, by recognizing the impact of platforms like Instagram on travel trends and customer preferences, they have utilized social influencer marketing to successfully tap into the younger demographic by offering affordable all-inclusive travel packages.
Tools for Travel Agents a Glance
The travel industry is an increasingly digital industry. The relationship between travel agents and tour operators needs to be reimagined and adjusted accordingly.
Digital solutions that facilitate travel agent and tour operator interactions include direct access to products, content, and itineraries and providing customer engagement alerts – all while keeping the communication and booking process within the agent’s control.
When developing digital toolsets for travel, measuring user behavior is crucial. Applying data and analytics will improve the user experience and help make informed decisions about product development.
Tracking and understanding a wide variety of marketing approaches, like social influencers, allows for both agents and operators to home in on travel trends and customer preferences and better target all demographics.
Stuart Greif, the then Practice Lead for Travel & Hospitality at Amperity, discusses the disruptive nature of customer data platforms (CDPs) and their impact on marketing and customer experience, particularly in the travel and hospitality industries.
What is a Customer Data Platform?
A customer data platform is a collection of software which creates a unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. This single, coherent, complete view of each customer is then made available to other marketing systems. In short, CDPs enable companies to unify and take action on their customer data, leading to personalized and more effective marketing strategies and, ultimately, drive revenue growth.
How Is Amperity Different Than Other CDPs?
Amperity, a CDP backed by major investors like Facebook, Amazon, and Salesforce, differentiates itself by offering a unique approach to customer data unification. Unlike traditional legacy systems, Amperity’s platform allows for the extraction and transformation of raw data at incredible speed, using machine learning to clean and organize the data in a scalable manner. The platform provides direct access to marketers and analysts, eliminating the need for time-consuming data retrieval processes.
Why a CDP Is a Great Tool for Travel and Hospitality
While Amperity’s platform is designed to benefit a wide variety of industries, it is particularly beneficial for the travel and hospitality industries. Companies such as airlines, hotels, rental car companies, and cruise lines, can greatly benefit from the ability to unify and analyze customer data at scale.
By leveraging their data more effectively, travel and hospitality companies can:
Personalize their marketing efforts,
Reduce customer acquisition costs,
Increase conversion rates,
Enhance the overall customer experience, and therefore,
Improve customer retention and loyalty.
Why Have a Customer-Centric Culture?
One important cultural aspect of Amperity is the company’s customer-centric approach and its team’s passion for helping clients succeed. The Amperity platform not only empowers marketers and analysts but also enables better engagement with end users, resulting in a tighter connection and improved customer satisfaction. As with any business, the need to expand the client base is crucial. Amperity’s focus on customer satisfaction combined with their commitment to continuously bring disruptive value to clients by enabling them to go beyond legacy constraints and realize the full potential of their customer data, is how they plan to grow.
Amperity, CDPs, and Travel & Hospitality at a Glance
Amperity, a customer data platform (CDP), focuses on solving the problem of unified customer data, enabling companies to personalize and improve customer experiences.
The Amperity platform extracts and organizes raw data from multiple sources at an extremely fast pace using machine learning and provides marketers and analysts direct access to the combined data.
Using a CDP provides significant results for travel and hospitality clients. Results include lower acquisition costs, improved conversion rates, and increased revenue.
Erin Kopp, then Global Strategic Partnerships Manager at VisaHQ, discusses the importance of modernizing the passport and visa industry – to ultimately promote the free movement of people, ideas, and innovation.
How Is Technology Modernizing Cross-Border Mobility and Visa Processing?
Since 2003 VisaHQ has provided online visa services and U.S. passport solutions which enable travelers to apply online for visas to virtually any country in the world. Their use of cutting-edge online technologies allows for customers to apply for travel visas simply by filling out a single, universal, and 100% paperless electronic form. For an industry that has been outdated for a long time, and with minimal changes in visa processing methods over the years, such use of technology is both refreshing and necessary.
What Software Technologies Does VisaHQ Utilize?
VisaHQ aims to provide a better experience for travelers before their travels even begin by leveraging technology to streamline the visa process. Examples of how software technology is being applied to visa processing include an online interface for form completion and digital document and digital photo uploads that save travelers time and effort by eliminating the need for unnecessary tasks like visiting the post office.
Other modernization efforts that VisaHQ has implemented are asking easy-to-understand questions, minimizing language barriers, and using online chat support. Of course, when using any technology, a strong emphasis on data security and compliance is a priority. VisaHQ is General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant and regularly undergoes audits and security penetration tests.
How Does a Streamlined Visa Process Benefit Business?
While visas are a requirement for both business travel and traveling for pleasure, modernizing visa processing is particularly relevant in the corporate travel sector. When travelers are not on vacation but rather are focused on growth and company priorities – efficiency matters. Since time is of the essence, and the delay or the denial of visas could severely impact the ability for companies to move forward in negotiations, offering personalized solutions and striving to be proactive in anticipating visa requirements is essential. Achieving such a high level of personalization still requires striking a balance between the use of technology and human expertise.
Technology and Visa Processing at a Glance
Modernization of the passport and visa processing industry inevitably now requires software technology.
Technology applications in the visa processing industry include the incorporation of online interfaces, digital document uploads, and online chat support.
Data security and compliance with regulations are a priority for online visa services.
The ease of corporate travel is particularly important for business growth and innovation.
The need for a balance between technology and human expertise still exists in the travel industry, particularly in passport and visa processing.
What are startup projects missing when compared to big corporations?
The differences between working in a startup and corporate environment are quite notorious. From the project budget to headcount, to alliances and partnerships that makes your work far easier. In all my years as an Android Developer, I would say that the biggest difference between an app developed in a startup and a big company is analytics.
In a young company, analytics is an afterthought. Feature work takes priority, and often resources are limited. And if you do have analytics, they are the bare minimum such as:
Number of visitors/daily users
Number of downloads
Rating in app stores
Number of crashes
All of which are pretty much provided for free by the platform you choose to publish your app on.
At big companies, analytics and feature work go hand in hand, and often you don’t release one without having the other on point. The number of downloads or the big new feature are not what drives business, analytics does.
Good analytics allows you to:
Gain user insights
Discover choke points in your processes
Help in resolving crashes and other issues your users are reporting through other means (customer service, reviews, etc.)
Take better business decisions
You might be thinking, “That’s great and all, but I don’t have the time or budget to invest heavily on analytics right now.” Don’t worry about it; I’m going to tell you how to bootstrap this thing.
Google Analytics for Firebase
Firebase is like a Swiss Army knife; it provides a lot of different services like database and app distribution. But today we are going to focus on Google Analytics for Firebase. Analytics is a free product inside Firebase, and it is compatible with pretty much any platform you can imagine; you can even use it in Unity (Apple Vision Pro anyone?).
Just by using their SDK you will begin logging a lot of information about your users: demographics, retention, engagement and even revenue (if configured properly). The ability to log unlimited custom events will empower your analytics to the cloud (pun intended). If you combine all of this with Crashlytics, their crash analytics suite, you can have an even better image of what is impacting your users and how to fix it or take advantage of it.
Audiences will allow you to group users by demographics, location, spending habits, and more. Once you have your audience defined, you can provide custom experiences to them or reach them with custom notifications or offers. Imagine you want to promote booking for your Caribbean resorts. Simply create an audience for people that want to escape winter and you are good to go.
Lastly, this being a Google product integration with ad networks, you can see campaign results and conversions right there.
Segment by Twilio
Segment is the next level in my opinion; it is not a replacement for what products like Google Analytics offers, but their integrations are more advanced. Let me explain more. Segment allows you to define information pipelines and the information can come from anywhere: your own custom logs, Google Analytics, 3rd party websites, you name it. You process the information and act.
Examples
Let’s say you have a mobile game and want to send a promotional code when a user invites X number of friends to play. You can send an event log for each invite (as per the usual) and configure Segment to send an email when a specific event happens.
Create a customer service ticket when an unexpected error happens and it’s likely that your user will contact you for resolution. For example, if the costumer card was declined or blocked.
The power of Datadog to improve your App
Datadog is my wildcard. While they don’t sell themselves as an analytics software, the logging capabilities, querying of big data, and custom dashboard can make it a viable alternative – especially if you already use it for monitoring. Datadog is not as user friendly as the other alternatives since it requires a more complicated setup, but it can be extremely powerful in the right hands.
As a dev, I really liked how easy it is to send structured data (not just the classic logs) to DataDog. You can also create pipelines to sanitize the data, interpret it, and make it available for searching.
Two of the coolest features that DataDog has are Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Session Replay. The ability to see what the user was doing before or during a crash, as if you were watching over the shoulder, is just game changing when fixing bugs. Session Replay is only available for Web now, but there are other services (like QuantumMetric) that offer the same features for more platforms.
Conclusion: Your app should not go blind without Analytics
I hope this brief introduction to analytics can open your mind to things you might be missing. Remember that if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. If you want to know more about how to implement analytics on your website or apps, give us a call. We will be more than happy to help you out.
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