Travelocity's secret Web 2.0 app

July 24, 2007, 1:01pm PDT | Length: 00:01:59
Barry Vandevier, the CTO of Travelocity, describes a new Web 2.0 applicationwhich emerged from the company's "Hack Day" contest. The new app is now beingincorporated into Travelocity's web site.

Transcript

Travelocity's secret Web 2.0 app

>> So my question would be then, how do you create a culture of innovation among your staff and how do they process all the ideas that are coming in and get ideas and, and then turn them into products?

>> The first and foremost is empowerment. And really empowering your employees to bring forth ideas and leverage them. And we do it, we do it in some of the traditional ways such as research and we have a labs environment where we can test out new technologies and, and experiment with those technologies in a beta type presence. We also do it in terms of providing some of employees will take a little bit of time on their own to explore new technologies. We also do some formal products. Yahoo introduced the Hack Day concept and we do, we participate in Hack Day within the entire Saber environment where we do across all of our global locations, every year. We have different various locations versus participating in a one day Hack Day, where our employees are able to go in and experiment for 24 hours. And we make it a contest. And so that's an example. And in fact, a recent example is we had an employee out of one of our offices in Sydney who participated in a Hack Day, won the Hack and it was about a mash up. So when you talk about what inaudible, one of the big buzzwords is mash up where you combining multiple content maps, different various content. And so that, that, that hack that they won on where exactly the business liked it so much that we're actually working to get that incorporated into the product.

>> And what was that hack?

>> Well I don't want to, because we haven't launched it publicly yet, I don't want to, to talk too much about it. But it's really about using maps and using content and really being able to provide our customers more capability in terms of where they're going and the destination and what they, they can see, so.

>> Yeah it would be kind of interesting to be able to have a map and then just pinpoint on the map where you want to go and then have the software just bring you back results.

>> Absolutely and we do have the ability. We have a lot of mapping capability already on Travelocity. But absolutely, that's something we'll continue to focus on.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====

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