8 posts and columns on Hilton

News Byte

Six Major Hotel Companies Launch a Hotel Search Engine Called Room Key

in Commerce on January 11 at 4:15 pm PT

Here’s something novel: A new hotel search engine founded by companies that own hotels. The joint venture, called Room Key, is an effort to gain independence from some of the large online aggregators, like Priceline and Expedia or even Google. Room Key was founded by Choice Hotels, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott and Wyndham Hotel, and acquired its technology from hotelicopter in an asset deal last year.

Topguest Hustles Its Way into Making Travel Loyalty Pay (Video)

in Social on April 6, 2011 at 10:17 am PT

“Just hustling,” as CEO Geoff Lewis described it, has helped a small, less-than-a-year-old start-up with relatively few users score deals with the likes of Virgin America, Hilton and InterContinental Hotels Group to tie customers’ geo-located social media activity with existing loyalty rewards programs.

Snowpocalypse? Good Thing There’s an App for That.

in Mobile on December 27, 2010 at 10:18 pm PT

A smartphone won’t help de-ice the plane, but stranded travelers have been increasingly using their devices to cope with blizzard-related changes in travel plans. Traffic to the mobile Web sites of various travel companies is up 200 percent, according to Usablenet, which powers a number of airline and hotel Web sites.

Flipboard Partners With Web Publishers for Full Content (and Full Disclosure: Including ATD)

in Social on December 2, 2010 at 9:22 am PT

Yesterday, I wrote about Pulse, a news-reading app with innovative design, going social by integrating Facebook. Now Flipboard, a social news-reading app based around Twitter and Facebook, is adding publisher feeds. (Full disclosure: Including from All Things Digital.) One thing’s clear: There’s a lot of excitement and energy going into how the iPad can re-create content consumption.

Topguest Checks In With $2 Million Series A Round (And Peter Thiel as Adviser)

in News on November 15, 2010 at 7:33 am PT

Topguest, a check-in loyalty service that was founded just five months ago, has gotten $2 million in Series A funding, as well as nabbing well-known Facebook investor Peter Thiel as an adviser. Other investors in the round include: Thiel’s Founders Fund, as well as angels such as Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier and Naval Ravikant.

BoomTown Visits 4A's "Transformation 2010″ Confab and Finds Ad Agencies Unusually Social

in News on March 2, 2010 at 5:20 am PT

BoomTown hightailed it down to the Hilton in San Francisco yesterday for the 4A annual conference. 4A stands for the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and this year’s gathering is titled “Transformations 2010.” That meant about 1,000 people from the marketing communications industry converged to hear sessions that seemed to focus almost completely on what’s causing all the transforming, with the answer mostly being: Social media and the Web.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: Bing!

in D7 on May 28, 2009 at 8:10 am PT

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the software giant’s relaunch of its search offering, dubbed Bing, onstage at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference. Bing is Microsoft’s biggest and priciest attempt yet to catch archrival Google and Yahoo in the search business. It is a market where the typically dominant Microsoft is a mouse in comparison. But, no surprise, that did not stop Ballmer from doing some roaring about Bing.
Steve Ballmer at D7

Kara Visits CES: Jerry Yang Emails It In

in News on January 7, 2008 at 6:52 pm PT

How glad BoomTown was to finally see Jerry Yang up close and personal, after our valiant but futile efforts to get near the Yahoo co-founder and CEO in 2007. No, we’re not stalking him in a restraining-order kind of way, although I did stake a claim to a front row seat in the intimate theater at the Las Vegas Hilton for his keynote this morning at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Yang couldn’t help but see me. Like he cared!