The 17-member Fairsearch.org coalition, which includes Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, TripAdvisor and Expedia, said that Google “uses deceptive conduct to lockout competition in mobile.”

The organization complains that Google gives away Android for free, but then forces those who want its maps or YouTube or the Google Play store to then preload other Google services.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” coalition lawyer Thomas Vinje said in a statement. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market.”

Google representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Today, the company is announcing its third funding round, totaling $30.3 million, with Expedia as the notable headline investor.

Others participating include Sutter Hill Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Concur Technologies and Felicis Ventures, as well as a number of travel industry vets, including Expedia’s founder Rich Barton, former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford and Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff.

The Mountain View, Calif., company first launched in 2010 as a way for travelers to see the actual view from a hotel room, but in late 2011, it rolled out hotel searching capabilities, which work like searches conducted on Kayak.com. Consumers visiting Room 77 can search across several travel sites, including Expedia, Booking.com and Orbitz, to compare prices.

The investment comes at a time when the travel industry is clearly heating up.

Over the past couple of months, Expedia acquired a 62 percent stake in a German travel site, Trivago, for $632 million; Liberty Interactive bought most of Barry Diller’s stake in TripAdvisor for $300 million; and Priceline acquired Kayak for $1.8 billion, shortly after the hotel-and-flight search site went public.

Room 77 allows U.S. consumers to book hotels all over the world, but the company plans to use the funding to expand globally, including to other English-speaking countries. To date it has raised $43.8 million.

In a release, Expedia’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, “We believe metasearch is an increasingly important model and complementary to our travel transaction businesses. The level of innovation and depth of content at Room 77 excites us about its future role in this important customer acquisition channel.”

Since Room 77 launched its hotel-search platform a year ago, it said its bookings and revenue have accelerated dramatically. Although it wouldn’t provide specific numbers, the company said that over the past nine months alone it has booked “hundreds of thousands of room nights,” which has resulted in significant month-over-month growth.

The company said it would also use the funding to expand its team of 25 employees, continue investing in product development and step up its marketing efforts.

Expedia buys German-based Trivago.

“The trivago team built one of the largest, fastest growing and most well known travel sites in Europe conducting more than 100 million hotel searches annually,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia’s President and CEO, in a release.

Investors have been eager for Expedia to expand internationally, especially since the strategy has worked so well for Priceline, which owns Booking.com in Europe and Agoda.com in Asia. This acquisition could help check that box; however, this morning, Expedia’s shares are trading lower, falling two percent to $59.44 a share.

Trivago is a search company, like Kayak in the U.S. (recently purchased by Priceline). It compares more than 600,000 hotels across 140 booking sites in more than 30 countries and 23 languages. Expedia said it expects Trivago, which is on track to record close to $132 million in revenue this year, to be accretive to adjusted earnings per share in 2013.

Pending regulatory approvala, the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of next year. Expedia said Trivago’s co-founders and its management team will operate independently at its headquarters in Dusseldorf, Germany.

As the new head of Best Buy’s online business, Durchslag couldn’t be joining the largest U.S. electronics retailer at a messier time.

Over the past year, Best Buy has faced enormous pressure from online competitors, which can often accept lower margins because they lack the expense of operating physical locations. To deal with those challenges, the company is undergoing a massive period of disruption that has included the resignation of its CEO and an unsolicited bid from its founder.

In an interview with AllThingsD, Durchslag acknowledged the challenges ahead: “You know me — if it isn’t hard, it isn’t worth doing,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to be done, but I think it’s also doable.”

Durchslag, who officially started Monday, is the president of Best Buy Online and a company senior vice president in charge of Best Buy’s online and mobile commerce businesses. He joins from Expedia, where he was president for 14 months. During his time there, he was responsible for managing the company’s strategy, including product development, marketing and operations for its 27 sites around the world. While he was president, Expedia made some fairly drastic changes to its platform: It spun off TripAdvisor to become a separate publicly traded company, and it formed a partnership with Groupon to create a travel-focused daily deals business.

Before that, Durchslag worked at Skype — before eBay purchased it — and Motorola.

He said one main reason he decided to take on this task was because he believes it is a cause worth fighting for: Best Buy employs roughly 170,000 workers, which represents a significant number of U.S. jobs. He said those people are playing a valuable role in “helping customers figure out how to use all the products and technologies available to them.”

And he believes things can be fixed. “I think that with so much going on at Best Buy, there’s never been a bigger felt need for change,” he said. “All parts of the company are recognizing that things need to change. … My inclination is to strike while the iron is hot. And it’s hot.”

Indeed, there better be a fire burning under management’s seats. In August, Best Buy reported one of its worst quarters ever. Revenue, gross profit margins and same-store sales all eroded, with earnings falling to $12 million from $128 million a year earlier. And now it’s confronted with the need to make changes just as it heads into the busiest retail season of the year.

One of the opportunities that Durchslag is excited to explore is the company’s overall strategy for creating a multi-channel experience, which is one of the industry’s big buzzwords right now. It means creating a closer connection between its online and bricks and mortar experiences, so that customers can be recognized seamlessly across both. Durchslag believes that Best Buy, as the largest electronics retailer and the world’s 11th largest online retailer, has a special opportunity to leverage those assets. “I see that this bricks and clicks model is going to be the key to consumer delight — you have to be able to do both well,” he said.

While many big box retailers have considered e-commerce sites the enemy, clearly Best Buy has decided it is better to embrace it than to fight it. Durchslag said it has one thing going for it that the travel industry did not. About half of travel purchases have already shifted online, whereas the electronics category is seeing less than half that rate. “Consumers want to touch and feel the products and make sure they meet the expectations,” he said. “They want to be comfortable that it’s going to work in the home.”

He’s also not entirely sold that Best Buy has a “showrooming” problem, where customers walk in to touch and feel the products but then order them somewhere else, like Amazon. “I think that consumers do that, but it’s too soon for me to have a fact-based answer. But the question is, how many consumers are actually doing that? To some extent I see that as an opportunity. If they are in our store, they are our customer to lose.”

The appointment is effective Monday.

Mr. Durchslag, who has more than 25 years in the technology industry, resigned from Expedia in January after a little more than a year at the online travel company.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Sam Shank, HotelTonight’s CEO, said what interested him about the company was the team and the technology. He added that HotelTonight does not have immediate plans to get into the restaurant business. At least, not initially. “The platform that we’ve built is category agnostic,” he said.

The company’s first acquisition, though small, comes at a time when other large travel agencies are getting into the last-minute booking space by launching competing standalone hotel apps. Hotels.com, Priceline, Expedia, Orbitz and other large players have launched their own mobile applications that present special offers and deals to those booking rooms on the same day of travel.

Shank said he’s not particularly concerned about all the competition crowding the space, because his company has a lot of technology running behind the scenes that makes it all work. He said its tools help hotels determine how to price their rooms in order to fill their vacancies at the last minute. He’s particularly interested in PrimaTable’s forecasting and pricing technology. Three of the company’s employees will be joining HotelTonight, including the founders.

“Our platform runs a lot more like Google AdWords than Groupon, so our sales team isn’t calling hotels everyday. They are signing up new hotels and getting feedback on how to make tools better, but they aren’t dealing with daily inventory — that’s entered by the hotel,” he said.

The hotels that offer the lowest-priced rooms are the ones that get a chance to fill up three of the six slots that HotelTonight offers every day in each market — it does not offer hundreds of selections, like many of the competing apps, which often just copy their online experiences.

Since launching in January 2011, HotelTonight has been downloaded more than three million times — and it has no online presence. It is available in more than 60 destinations in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. It has 75 employees.

PrimaTable co-founder and CEO Jamie Davidson will become HotelTonight’s VP of Product. Before launching PrimaTable in 2012, Davidson worked at Google as a quantitative expert focused on optimizing the company’s display algorithm. PrimaTable co-founder Colin Zima will join as HotelTonight’s data scientist. Previously, Zima worked on Google’s search-ranking algorithms.

Matrix Partners has added Hotwire co-founder and former TaskRabbit CEO Eric Grosse and former Yahoo advertising exec Jeff James Beriker as entrepreneurs in residence at the Silicon Valley venture firm.

After discount travel site Hotwire was acquired by Expedia, Grosse became president of Expedia Worldwide and, after that, headed TaskRabbit. He stepped down from the personal projects and services site when founder Leah Busque reclaimed the CEO title in June.

Beriker had been a VP of display advertising at Yahoo, coming there after its acquisition of Dapper in 2011. Before that, he served as president and CEO of Efficient Frontier and also was an exec at ValueClick, which bought Search123, a company Beriker co-founded.

While that pretty much makes it the go-to mapping service on phones, the search giant did not score as high when it came to providing other travel services, such as information about flights and reviews.

Those categories, which people typically find handy to access while on vacation, were dominated by other providers, according to a study conducted by Nielsen, which tracked usage data from 5,000 U.S. smartphone owners.

Nielsen said when it came to other services, consumers were more likely to visit single-purpose apps, such as GasBuddy, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor or Expedia.

Even though the study was limited to mobile behaviors, the findings suggest the exact opposite of what some feared just months ago — that Google would dominate flight bookings and local search after spending big bucks to acquire ITA Software, the airline data company, and, to a lesser extent, Zagat, the reviews company.

The U.S. Department of Justice ultimately gave Google permission to acquire ITA for $700 million, but the search giant had to agree to a set of concessions designed to minimize the impact to competition.

Google continues to integrate the data it has acquired, so it is still too early to make any final judgments about the potential impact it could have. But if it can successfully leverage its mapping services, it will obviously have a powerful launching pad to reach millions of customers for other services.

For example, in June, 77.8 million U.S. smartphone owners used Google’s maps applications across both Android and iPhone. The second-most popular app was GasBuddy, which attracted 8.9 million users looking for the nearest gas station offering the lowest prices. The third most popular app was also a Google mapping property called Street View, which is available on Android. However, the only content application to make it was IAC-owned Urbanspoon, which provides recommendations for nearby restaurants — similar to Google-owned Zagat.

Nielsen also broke out the most used travel sites. The list provided a much wider variety of services, maybe because people are more likely to need the information at least once, but don’t need ongoing access to the application for future reference. Again, Google Maps was dominant, but many other service providers made the rankings.

Here’s that list:

Priceline’s stock was tanking this morning, down more than $100 a share, representing more than 16 percent of the company’s market value. In mid-session trading, the stock was at $567 a share, still safely above its 52-week low of $411.

Orbitz shares were trading around $3.48, down only $1.18 but representing a 25 percent drop.

Both companies said they are feeling a chill from Europe as currency fluctuations and economic troubles continue to plague the region.

This morning, Orbitz reported lower than expected second-quarter results and cut its forecast for the year. Gross bookings for the Chicago travel site declined 1 percent year over year to $2.97 billion. The company said net income was also cut in half to $4.6 million.

Yesterday, Priceline said it, too, was not able to negotiate the headwinds. Where’s William Shatner when you really need him?

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company, which operates as Booking.com in Europe, said it believes Europe’s economic conditions will further deteriorate and that it will likely impact the company’s future results. Priceline is now forecasting that revenue will fall between $1.58 billion and $1.67 billion in the third quarter, short of analysts expectations for sales of $1.8 billion.

Citi’s Mark Mahaney said there are three reasons why Priceline stock is down so drastically: It missed its international bookings estimates for the first time since 2009; its third-quarter guidances suggests a decline in international bookings; and its bookings in the U.S. underperformed compared to Expedia for the second consecutive quarter.

Comparatively, other travel stocks were holding up fairly well today.

Kayak, which went public last month, was down 3 percent to trade at $31.20 a share — a healthy margin above its IPO price of $26 a share. TripAdvisor was off 5.4 percent to trade at $36.59; its former parent company, Expedia, was similarly down 5.5 percent to $55.66 a share.

Later this afternoon, Kayak is planning to sell 3.5 million shares at $22 to $25 each, to raise as much as $100 million, according to its latest document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But based on strong demand, the company could end up pricing its shares even higher, reports CNBC.

At the top of its current range, the company would be valued at nearly $1 billion.

Starting tomorrow, the online travel company will trade under the ticker symbol KYAK on the Nasdaq exchange.

Since the company first filed to go public last year, a lot has happened, making it difficult to gauge how it will be received by investors.

Across the broader technology sector, several tech companies have gone public in recent months, some faring better than others, like LinkedIn and Yelp versus Zynga and Groupon.

In the online travel business specifically, several big moves could value the company higher.

Google acquired ITA Software for $700 million to add travel airline information to its search results, and TripAdvisor spun off from Expedia to create two separately traded companies. Since then, both are trading at almost $48 a share, up from $27 at the time of the split.

As for Kayak, the wait also gave it the time to report four consecutive quarters of profitable growth.

In the first quarter, it reported a profit of $8.1 million, reversing a loss of $12 million in the same period a year earlier. (The loss was mostly attributable to a $15 million impairment charge related to the discontinuation of the SideStep brand name.) Revenue in the first quarter totaled $73.3 million, compared to $52.7 million a year earlier.

In Kayak’s online road show video, the company stressed that it’s not just another online travel agency, but a technology company. It believes it can out-innovate many other companies, because it isn’t busy managing call centers or flying planes.

But as a customer-facing service, why doesn’t it need call centers?

Kayak CTO and co-founder Paul English explained that customer inquiries are handled by engineers, connecting a very close bond between what they are creating and what the customers are saying about it. The complaints aren’t considered resolved until the bug is fixed on the site.

Maybe now that the company is going public, that’s how Kayak will take calls from shareholders, too?

That’s just one of the offers being pitched on Hotel.com’s new Facebook application called “Deals.”

In the race to be more social and compete against discount daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, or mobile apps like HotelTonight, there’s more than one example of traditional travel sites having a hard time getting it right.

Yesterday, Hotels.com, an affiliate site of Expedia, threw its hat into the ring with its own Deals Facebook application, which claims to deliver “tailored deals that are informed through user preferences and friend activity.”

But not only is it difficult to understand how to apply a discount, sometimes the app even spells it out in black and white that there is not a discount at all.

For example, the offer for a downtown Seattle hotel listed at the very top of my results offers: “Stay 2 nights and save 0% off your stay!” At a Hilton in San Francisco, it offered rooms from $161, but when specific travel dates were entered into the search bar, the room rate jumped to $237 — the same amount offered on the Hotels.com site. Additionally, a summer sale was offering 20 percent off the stay at the Hilton, but it was not at all clear how to redeem that offer, and the prices never changed.

A spokesperson did not immediately reply to emails seeking comment.

Besides providing deals, the application also taps into your social network to make booking rooms more informed by people you know. After connecting to Hotels.com through my Facebook account, I was able to add destinations such as Honolulu, London, Paris, Rome and others to my wish list.

I was also able to see that 61 of my friends have visited San Francisco, 19 friends had visited Sea-Tac (as in, the Seattle airport), and 17 friends had visited San Jose. Unfortunately, none of my friends have been to Rome, although I don’t believe that could possibly be the case.

After clicking around on a number of features, I never saw specific hotel recommendations from a friend — and I’m not entirely sure if that will be a feature. But pulling off a clever social integration is difficult because of the magnitude of places to visit and hotel rooms to stay in. As an example, TripAdvisor launched a Friend-of-a-Friend feature in April, which allows users to see if a hotel has been reviewed by Facebook friends and their immediate friends. Before extending it beyond immediate friends, it was always hit or miss, but now connections are frequent.

Providing meaningful connections is difficult, so getting the discounts right would seem like the easy part. But apparently it’s not. I noticed that when Priceline released a new mobile phone app in April, it also struggled to make the promotions clear and meaningful enough to make it worthwhile to continue coming back to use it again.

The app, which launched under its Booking.com subsidiary, pitched last-minute hotel deals at up to 50 percent off. But from what I could tell, Booking Tonight was a replica of its online site, offering the same selection of hotel rooms at the same price.

By offering social and mobile applications without a clear value to the consumer, it’s like leaving a placard hanging on the knob telling start-ups to come in and clean house.

In updated filings with the SEC, Kayak said it will offer four million million shares and seek to raise a maximum of $100.6 million, or about twice as much as in its initial filings, when it sought to raise $50 million.

The deal will be led by Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank Securities, with Piper Jaffray, Stifel Nicolaus and Pacific Crest participating as additional underwriters.

In the filing, Kayak also disclosed new financials for its most recent quarter. In the quarter ending March 31, it made a $4.15 million profit on sales of $73.3 million. That would translate into per-share earnings of 17 cents, or 11 cents on a diluted basis. That compares to a $6.9 million loss on $52.6 million in sales in the same quarter in 2011.

For the quarter ahead, Kayak said it expects to report sales of $74.5 million to $76 million, which would amount to growth of 31 to 34 percent. It said it expects to earn between $13 million and $14 million on an operating basis, which would amount to growth of between 133 percent and 151 percent.

The company posted a video and new prospectus on the site Retail Roadshow.

Today’s offering caps a process that began nearly 21 months ago when Kayak, based in Norwalk, Conn. filed its first S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in November of 2010. Last September, it put its plans on hold, at a time when the market seemed too volatile. It also found itself in an increasingly competitive market, particularly following Google’s $700 million acquisition of travel software giant ITA. Then came Facebook’s bungled IPO, and another delay.

The IPO will be a sweet payoff for Kayak’s many venture capital backers. It had raised a combined $223 million over four rounds, including a mammoth $196 million round in 2007 from Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners, most of which was used to acquire rival SideStep for about $200 million in cash and stock. TechCrunch covered the complicated deal at the time. AOL had been an early investor and led its Series A in 2004, also contributing to a subsequent B round that same year, but sold off its shares for about $19 million in 2010.

General Catalyst is Kayak’s biggest shareholder, with a pre-offering stake amounting to 10.15 million shares that — assuming a $25 offering price — would be worth almost $254 million. Sequoia Capital has six million shares, for a stake amounting to $150 million. Accel has 4.8 million shares, worth $120 million; and Oak Investment Partners has 3.6 million shares, worth about $90 million.

Hipmunk, the offbeat travel site that has made “taking the agony out of travel planning” its tagline, tells AllThingsD that it has raised $15 million in a second round of funding.

The financing will enable the team to double — to 32 employees — in the next six months, and to accelerate its product plans going forward.

Hipmunk is different from other travel services because it displays search results visually. Instead of seeing a list of flights, the user can easily scan flights by price, duration, and departure and arrival time in a grid layout. Users also can sort by “agony,” which is a combination of price, number of stops and duration.

Since launching in 2010, the company has created a mobile application that has been downloaded more than one million times; the app recently added hotel search. In the future, Hipmunk plans to continue improving flight and hotel search on both the Web and mobile, while also expanding internationally.

“We want to be the de facto travel tool,” said Hipmunk CEO and co-founder Adam Goldstein. “We have a great user interface that helps people find the best options, but we knew our ability to ramp would be easier with additional funding. The fact is that now, instead of building one thing at a time, we can build multiple things at once.”

The company’s second round was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) with investors from the company’s first round, including angels and Ignition Partners, also participating. In total, Hipmunk has raised $20 million.

IVP’s General Partner Todd Chaffee, who previously invested in Kayak and HomeAway, will join Hipmunk’s board.

Goldstein said that Hipmunk is not just about creating a better user interface, it’s about creating new experiences.

“Hipmunk is a different place to shop, with alternate sources of inventory,” he said.

For example, when searching flights, it features private jets alongside traditonal flights; when searching for hotels, it displays apartments for rent on HomeAway and Airbnb.

As with other travel sites, like Kayak, Hipmunk earns a commission from traffic it sends to aggregators such as Orbitz or Expedia. He declined to disclose the agreement it has with HomeAway, Airbnb and less-traditional sites.

Chaffee said that even though Goldstein is only 24 years old, he feels like he’s talking to a veteran CEO.

“He’s incredibly well versed on how to run a business that’s way beyond his years,” he said of Goldstein.

Hipmunk is just one of a few companies that are trying to upset the status quo by trying to make booking travel less painful. Google recently purchased ITA Software to integrate flight information into its search results, and other start-ups, like HotelTonight, allow you to find a hotel room on your mobile phone for the same day.

“People woke up and finally realized that the travel companies haven’t meaningfully innovated in a decade,” Goldstein said. ”The travel start-ups don’t have entrenched financial interest in the status quo, but the big ones are global distribution systems who are unwilling to experiment with new experiences, that don’t want to risk losing customers who have been using them for 10 years.”

Chaffee said the opportunity to build another massive company like Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz or Kayak still exists. The game isn’t over yet.

“The real story here is, if you look at the overall share of purchases going through Kayak and Hipmunk, it’s unbelievably small,” he said. “The bulk of the average U.S. citizens don’t know about these services, and they are still trying to call the airline, or fumble through some airline Web site, or surf hotel Web sites. They are terrible, and you don’t have to suffer.”

That’s an easy one: Kayak.com.

The travel search company, which has been putting off its plans to go public for more than a year and a half, is now getting ready to pull the trigger, according to sources.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company is by default one of the prime candidates to go public because it has already filed its paperwork and has been dutifully updating its financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission every quarter.

A Kayak spokesperson declined to comment, but the timing is good for a number of reasons.

Not only has Facebook priced at the high end of its range, which makes investors a bit more hungry for tech stocks, but other travel companies have been warmly received by the markets over the past few months.

In December, TripAdvisor spun off from Expedia to become an independently held public company. Since then, the company’s stock has soared, trading at $41 a share, up from $27 a share. Expedia is also trading higher, up 50 percent to $41.10 a share.

Kayak could begin its roadshow as soon as Monday and may be seeking as much as $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to CNBC. In its original documents, it said it would raise a minimum of $50 million, which served more as a placeholder than what it was intending on raising.

As recently as last week, it updated its filing to report its first quarter earnings, announcing that it earned $4.1 million on $73.3 million. In the year-ago period, it recorded a lost of $6.9 million on revenues of $52.7 million.

In a report released today, eMarketer estimates that 16 million Americans will book travel from their mobile devices this year, increasing 33 percent from 12 million in 2011. Even more people — roughly 37.8 million — will use their phones to research travel this year.

It’s no wonder that big online travel agencies, like Priceline and Expedia, are quickly expanding into mobile. One common mobile strategy is to build an app that gives deep discounts to people who book a hotel room from their phone for the same night.

Travelers who may not have access to a computer are an obvious market for hotel information, flights, maps, reviews and other services.

EMarketer said despite mobile’s rapid growth, total spending on online travel is growing more slowly than overall online retail sales. This year, online travel spending is set to increase 11 percent to $120 billion in the U.S.

But clearly all the trends spell bad news for travel agents and physical travel agencies. EMarketer expects a majority of Internet users to research and book via the Web.

Shares of the New York-based company gained $6 to close at $27.06 today after Reuters reported that the company was in the process of hiring a financial adviser after it received takeover interest from private equity firms.

Travelzoo spokeswoman Lisa Moore declined to comment on whether the company was for sale.

Travelzoo is one of the pioneers in the daily deals business. For more than a decade, it has been sending subscribers a weekly email highlighting what it calls the top 20 travel deals.

A list of obvious acquirers for Travelzoo includes Google, which famously failed to buy Groupon for $6 billion. More recently, Google bought travel company ITA Software. Amazon could also be interested as it pushes AmazonLocal, its daily deals business; however, it already owns a percentage of LivingSocial, the second-largest deals company after Groupon.

A host of other companies could also take a look at the deal, including its travel competitors, such as Expedia or Priceline, or several international providers.

Unlike Groupon, which takes a cut of the revenue when a deal is sold, Travelzoo uses an advertising model where companies pay a fee to get in front of its large email audience. More recently, the company shifted gears to enter the local deals space, offering discounts on restaurants and other local services. In those deals, it charges the merchant a percentage of each transaction.

Today, the company’s market value hovers around $300 million, falling way short of Groupon’s $9 billion valuation and making it a prime acquisition target.

The company’s main assets are its sales team and its list of subscribers, but generally, it is not known as a technology leader. The company’s Web site is still fairly basic with a red, white and blue theme and has very few pictures, which the company says is on purpose. Before any acquisition closes, the potential acquirer would want to know how much the two companies’ subscriber bases overlapped.

In 2011, the company reported revenues of $148 million, up from $112 million over the same period during the previous year.

The online travel agency’s app, called Booking.com Tonight, is the latest to tap into the market of procrastinating travelers who begin looking for accommodations only after the plane’s wheels touch down.

Many of Priceline’s direct competitors, including Travelocity and Hotwire, offer same-day hotel bookings online. And perhaps the most comparable service is HotelTonight, an app developed by a venture-backed San Francisco start-up. Expedia also has a service called Last-Minute Deals that taps user-generated content so that customers can share deals they’ve found with each other, not using any identifying information.

From what I can tell, however, Priceline’s app is a replica of its online site, offering the same selection of hotel rooms at the same price — where’s the Negotiator now?

Still, the app could be helpful in a pinch, because it has a large inventory of rooms, covering 165 countries. The app also lets you search for rooms based on your location and other filters, such as price, star rating or most popular.

In comparison, the HotelTonight app offers a more boutique experience. It features inventory in only a couple dozen U.S. cities and doesn’t have a huge selection of rooms. In a review, my colleague Katherine Boehret found deals at significant cost savings, including a luxury stay at Langham in Boston’s financial district for $199 rather than $275.

One downside of HotelTonight is that you can’t search for nearby rooms until the afternoon, but if you’ve waited until the day of your stay, then I suppose you can wait a little longer.

Earlier today, Priceline’s stock hit a new 52-week high of $775 a share before pulling back to $753.41. Over the past few years, the stock has soared based on strong international growth.

Of course, you knew at least a little bit would slip through.

In response to an analyst who asked about the company’s ability to tailor deals to a person’s interests, Mason hinted at new products coming in the first or second quarter.

In addition to being able to get deals based on multiple locations, gender and past buying behaviors, he said, users will be able to vote down deals if they don’t want to receive similar ones again.

So, if you are male, you won’t have to see offers for bikini waxes, or if you are bald, you won’t have to see offers for barber shops.

Mason said, “It allows us to say, ‘Please stop sending me pole-dancing lessons.’ … That’s been a much requested feature.”

Otherwise, Mason quickly and confidently answered inquiries throughout the call.

But he didn’t talk much about future financial expectations, instead emphasizing the company’s merchant services, new investments (such as its mobile products) and new categories (like products and travel).

So far, few details have been shared on the impact of those offerings, including Groupon Now, which is available in 31 U.S. markets and allows customers to purchase deals that can be redeemed in a short time window. Groupon’s travel site has also gotten quite big through the help of its partner Expedia.

Groupon CFO Jason Child explained that all of the investments are really at an early stage, and it’s uncertain how they will be impacted by seasonality or other economic factors.

The strategy remains to invest in the future, Mason said. “The Groupon of five years from now will require investments in technology and innovations. Despite rapid growth, we estimate that we participate in less than 1 percent of all local transactions.”

Still, the forward-looking statements weren’t enough to satisfy investors who were looking for the company to show a small profit.

For the fourth quarter, Groupon reported a net loss of $42.7 million, or 8 cents a share, compared to a net loss of $378.6 million, or $1.08 a share for the same period in 2010.

Mason concluded his first earnings call by saying: “Thanks, guys, this was a lot of fun, and I look forward to many more of these.”

And then the stock was clobbered in after-hours trading, falling nearly 15 percent, or $3.68 a share, to $20.90.

For the past 14 years, Shatner has been the company’s celebrity spokesperson, and for the past five years he has played the role of the “Priceline Negotiator,” a James Bond-like character who stops at nothing to help people find the best travel deals. The latest ad is a cliff-hanger, with Shatner apparently blown to smithereens aboard a plunging bus after giving the escaping passengers some quick travel booking tips.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based company said Shatner will remain under contract, but it’s unclear what will happen to him after his last deal.

Priceline said it decided to kill off the Negotiator character in order to focus on its fixed-price hotel inventory, which is its fastest-growing segment. It will continue to offer its Name Your Own Price hotel service.

The hotel-booking industry is constantly getting more competitive, with several new players, including Kayak, Google and a hotel-backed search service called Room Key.

While Priceline’s future commercials are expected to explore the aftermath of the bus crash, we’ll see if it gets that far. Right after the new ad started airing, the American Bus Association asked Priceline to pull the ad because it “damages the reputation of our industry.” And as for Shatner — well, maybe he transported off the bus just in time, or there was a rift in the time-space continuum, or somehow he managed the kind of escape that kept James T. Kirk going through umpteen shows and movies. Or maybe not.

Priceline’s stock fell 56 cents today to close at $518 a share.

Here’s a look at the new commercial:

But it doesn’t use Facebook or any identifying information. Instead, Expedia surfaces the best deals found by other travelers, anonymously, for flights and hotel rooms, based on your location.

The site will list the best deals for three time periods: tonight, this weekend or next weekend. Customers can search for hotels or flights based on a couple dozen destinations.

For example, this weekend, nights at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers cost $113 and the cheapest flight out of Los Angeles tonight is to Seattle for $252 roundtrip.

The process is similar to other flash sales sites that sell apparel or other items at a discount based on inventory. Many other flash sales sites focus on travel, too, such as Gilt Groupe’s Jetsetter. However, there’s one big difference with this service. The deals are being found by other customers searching the site. The service is not being driven by a special sales relationship between Expedia and the suppliers.

That probably means the deals are not unique to Expedia and can be found on other travel aggregation sites, but at the same time, Expedia didn’t have to hire a sales team or build out a lot of infrastructure to support the feature.

“In a sense, the millions of people who come to Expedia are now serving as your own personal travel agent, helping you find the best and most popular deals from your home city,” said Joe Megibow, VP and GM of Expedia, in a statement.

The Web site is very simple to navigate and takes out a lot of the headaches of searching millions of listings. That also means that the selection is limited to around six results for each time period — in other words, not a ton of destinations or hotels to pick from. Cancun was offering six hotel rooms — some for as low as $40 a night — for this weekend. Orlando also listed six hotel rooms, all under $100 a night.

This is not Expedia’s first experiment in the deals space.

Last summer, it launched a partnership with Groupon that sells vouchers for vacations around the world. It said it successfully sold 15,000 travel deals in the first three days of launching that partnership, but wasn’t entirely satisfied with the model yet. It also launched a program called ASAP (A Sudden Amazing Price), which lists deals at 9 am PT and is bookable for 12 hours only.

We confirmed his resignation with a spokesperson, but it was first reported by Geekwire’s John Cook this morning.

The spokesperson did not provide a reason for Durchslag’s departure, adding that the role would now be filled by Expedia’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.

Before Durchslag’s 14-month stint at Expedia, he was the COO at Skype and a corporate VP at Motorola. As seen in the photo on the right, Durchslag attended the  D conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., last June to announce a travel partnership with Groupon before Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed on stage.

Expedia’s stock was trading down about 1 percent, or 40 cents, today to $28.91 a share.