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.

In a three-story building in Palo Alto, Calif. — formerly occupied by Danger, the developer behind the T-Mobile Sidekick — Groupon has been trying to build out a Silicon Valley technology center, one acquisition at a time.

The pursuit was kicked off two years ago with the purchase of mobile app development shop Mob.ly. Mihir Shah, the company’s CEO, started recruiting for the social buying company, and then became the Groupon’s VP of mobile.

Since then, there has been a hodgepodge of acquisitions, including Campfire, which builds chat, calendar and media-sharing tools, as well as Zappedy, which makes a platform for merchants to redeem Internet-based offers more easily.

Last week, it continued with Adku, a low-profile San Francisco start-up that helps e-commerce retailers fine-tune their recommendation engines using external factors, such as whether it is hot or cold outside.

None of the teams have been extremely big or expensive, but Groupon insists that they already are having a major impact on the company.

That may be hard to believe in a company of more than 10,000 employees, most of which are salespeople who are not working on technology.

But Adku’s co-founder Carlos Whitt, who is joining the company along with five others from his team, said the entrepreneurial vibe in the building is “ridiculously exciting.”

“The opportunity, the innovation and entrepreneurs are all there,” he said. “It’s a good intersection.”

Still, Groupon has not been able to attract every entrepreneur it pursues. It had been actively trying to buy other social start-ups, such as Gowalla. That particular deal went to Facebook. Another would-be Groupon acquisition target, Clever Sense, was won by Google.

No matter, according to Mob.ly’s Shah, who said Groupon is actively evolving beyond a daily deals service into a company that builds a set of key marketing tools for local merchants that increases sales, cuts costs and boosts productivity.

Some of the early tools include online calendars to make it easy for spas or gyms to book appointments online, and rewards programs that allow merchants to identify loyal customers who return and spend a lot of money.

Groupon also recently revamped its merchant center, where its customers can manage their daily deals and other programs in an online dashboard.

Shah said the idea is to create a marketing suite that makes small businesses more efficient and productive.

“We never want to stand still and be a big company,” he said.

But the big question is whether those tools will be sticky enough to keep merchants coming back to offer new deals, which is where Groupon gets all of its revenue from. That’s because most of the new tools are expected to be given away for free and not generate any additional income — at least for now.

It will also have to be enough to keep away other close competitors, such as LivingSocial, Google and Amazon.

The ability to spur innovation and keep ahead of rivals will be on the minds of analysts when Groupon reports its first financial results as a publicly held company this afternoon.

Wall Street is expecting the company to report three cents per share profit on revenue of $475 million in its fourth quarter earnings, according to Thomson Reuters.

That’s up from $430 million in revenues in the third quarter and will be Groupon’s first profitable quarter in nearly two years

In particular, analysts will be listening for updates on some of the company’s core programs, such as Groupon Now, which is its mobile product that allows consumers to purchase deals minutes or hours before redeeming them based on their location. Other metrics may be shared regarding loyalty and retention programs.

This is also Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s first big chance to speak to the investment community since the end of the company’s quiet period (which he wasn’t really good at keeping, anyway).

Groupon’s stock increased nearly three percent yesterday to close at $24.19, which is just above its IPO price of $20 a share.

“We run the iPhone and iPad teams separately from the Web team, and the Web team had fallen behind,” said Paul English, co-founder and CTO.

The goal with the site’s design has always been to provide a simple layout, so that users can easily sift through thousands of flights, hotels and car rentals to find what they are looking for quickly.

But up until now, the focus wasn’t really on being beautiful, English said. The new look tries to incorporate a clean and attractive design.

After eight years in business, English said this is the most significant redesign of the site (check out the gallery below to see how the site has changed over the years). But only the most die-hard users are likely to notice many differences. Rather, the larger significance is that mobile is influencing the Web, and not the other way around.

Increasingly, this may be the case in the travel industry as so much of the traffic now comes from phones and tablets. Kayak said more than five million applications were downloaded in the nine months ended in September, a 97 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

In early testing, English said conversion rates are higher and completion times are shorter as a result of incorporating mobile designs — which, by nature, are always built with speed and ease-of-use in mind. “They [customers] are more confident to compete the purchase because we haven’t worn them out.”

View the slideshow

Here’s some of the more notable changes:

The unibrow is gone: Internally, the company refers to “the unibrow” as the black bar that stretched across the the top of the page that said “Search One and Done.” Now at the top of the screen are several tabs, such as Flights, Hotels, Cars, etc.

Similar to iOS: The iPhone and iPad designers released a new iPad app about a month ago. In the new Web site design, they leaned on the design to bring a consistent typeface and coloring to the Web site.

Fewer ads on the site: When users are looking at photos of a hotel or viewing a map, they won’t see any ads. “Obviously, ads are an important part of the way we make money, but advertisers have gotten clever, and sometimes the ad is jarring and has animation,” English said. Kayak is issuing all-new guidelines that requires advertisements to blend with the site. “If you do a good job, it should be content. If we are showing you ads that are extremely related to what you are doing, it’s useful.”

Most of the changes will go live today, with some of the others — like the new ad guidelines — taking more time to implement.

English declined to provide an update on the company’s IPO. While it continues to file financial updates with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kayak told AllThingsD in September that it was putting its plans on hold.

The New York-based company, which sells travel deals and daily deals via email and from its Web site, said fourth-quarter revenues totaled $35.2 million, falling below analyst expectations of $38.7 million.

However, Travelzoo did manage to return a healthy profit of 40 cents a share, exceeding estimates of 35 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters, which conducted a survey of analysts.

The company is Groupon’s closest publicly held competitor, other than Google or Amazon, which don’t break out results from daily deals. Groupon was also trading lower today, falling about 3 percent, or 59 cents, to $19.49 a share. Groupon will report fourth-quarter earnings in two weeks on Feb. 8.

In a statement, CEO Chris Loughlin said despite a slower period for travel advertising in the fourth quarter, revenues in that period grew faster year over year than in any quarter in four years.

A majority of its revenues are still coming from travel. For instance, in 2011, Travelzoo reported that 57.8 percent of deals sold were for travel and only 26.7 percent came from local discounts. Search revenues coming from comparison shopping sites such as SuperSearch and Fly.com made up for the remainder.

Still, it is local that is growing the fastest. In North America, local deals grew 196 percent year over year.

The company ended the period with 21.5 million subscribers in North America and Europe, up 14 percent from the end of 2010.

Travelers have used Airbnb to book a total of five million guest nights in the past four years, staying in spare bedrooms and empty homes around the world.

Even more impressive is that a majority of those bookings — four million — occurred in 2011 alone, according to the San Francisco vacation-rentals company.

Today, the start-up provided a number of metrics for how the company performed last year, and in the months since it raised $112 million, which valued the company at more than $1 billion.

The one figure Airbnb neglected to provide, however, was the number of renters who have applied to receive a $50,000 Host Guarantee, which would reimburse them for the cost of property damage, theft or vandalism.

In August, the company initiated a number of security features, including the guarantee, after a host had a particularly horrible experience with guests who ransacked her apartment and stole her identity.

A spokesperson said Airbnb doesn’t disclose the number of claims that have been submitted, but said that the overall number is much lower than it originally anticipated. “We think this is a testament to the quality and caliber of our community,” she added.

In today’s release, Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, said that reaching five million bookings demonstrates the demand for people all over the world to monetize extra space in their homes.

The closest comparison to Airbnb is likely Austin, Texas-based HomeAway, which reports results because it is a public company, even though it focuses more on renting people’s vacation homes, not their primary residences.

HomeAway did not have a comparable figure for homes rented, but it did say the vacation property market is growing quickly. In a 2010 survey it commissioned from Radius Global Market Research, it found that there were more than six million vacation properties in the U.S. and Europe that are rented for a fee to travelers for at least two weeks of every year.

According to the same survey, these vacation rentals generated more than $85 billion of annual rental income in 2010, or nearly $14,000 per property.

HomeAway’s marketplace includes more than 500,000 paid listings of vacation rentals in more than 145 countries worldwide.

In comparison, Airbnb says it lists more than 100,000 properties in 192 countries. Instead of charging for listings, it collects 3 percent of each reservation, and guests are charged 6 to 12 percent of the booking fee.

Here are some of Airbnb’s other numbers:

• More than 75 percent of all reservations in 2011 were international, with either the guest, host, or both located outside the U.S.
• The number of available listings increased 166 percent in 2011, and 70 percent of all listings are now located outside the U.S.
• In 2011, Airbnb added 24-hour customer support in 16 languages through email, live chat, and seven global toll-free phone numbers.
• The company launched 40 features in 2011 to bulk up trust and safety.
• Airbnb has offices in San Francisco, Hamburg, Berlin, and London, with new offices opening in Barcelona, Copenhagen, Milan, Moscow, Paris and São Paulo, Brazil.

And if you’re more of a visual learner, here’s the story in a graphic almost big enough to rent out:

Rather than focusing on extreme discounts, the San Francisco company has decided to offer extreme adventures.

Today, it is launching Zozi Guru, which sells high-end adventures taught and organized by professional athletes.

For example, you can go skiing with Olympic gold-medal skier Jonny Moseley, or go running with barefoot runner Eric Orton, or learn to kayak with Tao Berman, a three-time world-record holder for extreme whitewater kayaking.

Unlike typical daily deals, these offers are full price, and the merchants and celebrities involved will surely make money, which is in steep contrast to lots of sites that blast emails out to a list of subscribers on a daily basis.

“We don’t want to be a deals site. You won’t hear us use the word ‘deal.’ It’s all about experiences. We try to offer the best prices, but it’s about the adventure and exploration component,” said TJ Sassani, Zozi’s CEO and founder.

That hasn’t always been the case for Zozi.

It started off as a daily deals site, selling international trips in 2008. But Sassani said the opportunity wasn’t as big as the company had hoped, and Zozi shifted to local adventures. Intially, it used the Groupon model to grow membership, but now that it has some scale, it is shifting to full price.

Typical offers on the site range from bungee-jumping sessions to kiteboarding lessons, but Sassani said the business won’t ever reach Groupon’s scale. He said he definitely doesn’t aspire to have an initial public offering; however, he does believe that it could be a $1 billion to $2 billion opportunity.

So far, Zozi has signed up close to one million subscribers and is in 20 cities, up from only one market in 2010. It has just started moving into Canada, and other locations are coming soon.

“Groupon is much more like Wal-Mart, where they offer low-cost, low-quality items to discount seekers,” Sassani said. “But our average purchase price ($60) is more than double Groupon’s, and we target someone who would shop at REI. It’s a sophisticated customer, who is less price-sensitive.”

To help with the rollout of Zozi Guru, the company raised a small undisclosed inside round with investors last week. Previously, it had raised $10 million from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Launch Capital, ZIG Capital and others.

This week, Zozi is launching the new service with six celebrity athletes, but Sassani said the company has signed deals with 20 to 30 people, who will do a combination of 100 programs over the next year.

Sticking with its goal of offering premium experiences, the programs start at $1,000, and can go as high as $10,000, depending on the celebrity’s status and the event, which could include luxurious accommodations — one example might be a five-night visit to Hawaii, where you would learn how to surf from a professional, and stay at the Four Seasons.

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.

The new campaign — set to the tune of “Let’s Stay Together,” by Al Green — is much more tame than last year’s ad. The 30-second spot focuses on creating family memories around campfires, swimming holes and hiking trails; memories that often can be made in or near homes — not in hotels.

HomeAway, which operates vacation-rentals marketplaces, including HomeAway.com, VRBO.com and VacationRentals.com, went out on a limb for its Super Bowl commercial last year. If the point was to generate buzz before filing for its initial public offering, it was a success.

But the Austin, Texas-based company ended up having to yank the ad after drawing criticism over a particularly disturbing image: In the commercial, a doll — which was obviously not a child — was thrown against a wall to demonstrate how cramped hotel rooms can be, compared to more spacious rental houses.

The updated — and more subtle — campaign will air in select markets during NBC’s broadcast of the 69th Golden Globe Awards. Following its debut, the spot will air on the Travel Channel, the Food Network, HGTV and other special promotions, including the Grammy Awards on Feb. 12, the Academy Awards on Feb. 26 and the “Survivor” finale.

Second time’s the charm?

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.

As the father of eight kids — now all between the ages of 12 and 21 — he knows a thing or two about the importance of finding the perfect place. (Note: Kaufer delicately calls family trips “adventures,” while getaways with his wife are “vacations.”)

Since then, TripAdvisor has become the online go-to destination for reviews of hotels from Barbados to bed-and-breakfasts in New York City.

In 2004, Kaufer sold the company to IAC for $210 million, setting off a somewhat complicated operating journey. A year later, TripAdvisor spun out of IAC as part of Expedia. It remained a division within the online travel agency until last month, when it broke off into an independent publicly held company.

Today, the Newton, Mass.-based company has 1,100 employees, attracts more than 50 million unique visitors and has published more than 60 million reviews. It trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TRIP,” while Expedia continues to trade under the symbol “EXPE.”

Kaufer talked to AllThingsD about being an independently traded company, and about the media company’s prospects for growth:

AllThingsD: What is it like to be out from under Expedia’s wing?

Stephen Kaufer: There was a joke when we were spun out as part of Expedia from IAC. People asked me, “What’s your vision for TripAdvisor?” I would always say, “I want to be bigger than Expedia,” and people’s response always was, “That’s what the little brother might say.”

A year or two ago, we passed Expedia in comScore metrics, and are still experiencing growth. It’s a free service that’s valuable. It’s worldwide. TripAdvisor is in 21 languages, and three-fourths of the traffic comes from outside of the U.S.

Now that you are out from under Expedia, do you have more flexibility on where you send leads that are generated from people reading reviews on TripAdvisor?

Under Expedia, we had no obligation to send traffic to them … That never happened, and we were allowed to run independently. But at the end of the day, they [competitors] knew their marketing spend was going into Expedia’s pocket. That’s the most exciting thing. We are now completely independent. Expedia now owns no stock, so when I talk to Orbitz or Priceline, these folks can now partner with TripAdvisor without any hint of helping to fuel the competitors.

Why the spinoff now?

It was announced back in April, but basically there was a view that there was a class of investors that liked a pure Internet category leader and a fast-growing media company like TripAdvisor, and there’s another class that appreciates Expedia, which is in the dominant online travel agency position.

We were blurring the two when they were together. It gives Wall Street the opportunity to invest in either, and each company will find its own set of investors.

Do you think Wall Street is correctly valuing TripAdvisor? (The stock failed to come roaring out of the gate.)

No. But I’m not complaining. I think Wall Street, over the next couple of quarters, will appreciate how both companies perform as independent companies. The numbers have been a little hidden because they were jumbled together. … They’ve never seen TripAdvisor operate independently. They ask, “What will you do differently? How will things be the same?” Watch us, and I think you’ll like what you see.

Will you grow mostly organically, or through M&A?

We have a good track record on acquisition and product innovation.

The last few acquisitions, you saw a focus on our strategic priorities: A mobile company, a social company, two vacation rental companies and a company in China. Our four key investment areas that we called out are vacation rentals, mobile, social and geographic expansion.

In many ways, TripAdvisor was one of the original social networks, where users shared information on their vacations. Now you see Facebook getting into the space with Facebook Connect and other initiatives, too.

Everyone feels like being able to get travel recommendations from their friends is a natural evolution for getting a better recommendation, period.

There’s a couple of different angles. Some social travel companies are focused on making planning a group trip easier. No site out there has scale and does that well, and we don’t do that now. Facebook is a great platform to do it on, and it may be interesting to us in the future.

Our focus is leveraging the friend graph on Facebook and our rich content to give someone the experience of seeing recommendations or ratings from friends.

We love the concept, and we are furiously building up our own product offering to make it more valuable. If it’s not too early to call someone a leader, we are clearly it, because we have the content and the friend graph. We aren’t a site that’s based on Facebook, which is an advantage, because you can do anyting you want to do on the Web or the tablet or mobile.

What about Google moving into travel?

They have a couple of different approaches. They have Google Places, which reviews everything; and they have Google Hotels, which is a hotel finder; and then Google Flights, to help you find the best fare.

With Google Places, they still can’t seem to generate enough high-quality reviews to be useful. They compete with Yelp and us, and I’ve yet to be concerned. I was concerned about Google Flights — a lot — before they launched, but you cannot book through an online travel agent like Expedia — only directly through the airlines for now.

It’s an incomplete product, so I still use TripAdvisor flights, or go to Expedia or Orbitz. They get better results, and maybe aren’t as fast, but more information is still better.

They say they want to include online travel agents, but the airlines won’t let them. … Don’t mistake my tone for being sympathetic to Google on this one.

What about vacation rentals? HomeAway went public last year.

After HomeAway, there’s not that much.

We agree it’s a great market, and it deserves to be online. It helps consumers and there’s a need to bring a trust element into the equation. Folks who have tried it have liked (renting homes), and a whole lot of people haven’t tried it, because a hotel is all they’ve ever tried.

If they are reading hotel reviews, but I see that you are trying to stay seven nights in Orlando, I might say, “Did you know that you might be able to save money and get a private swimming pool?” They never would have thought of that as an opportunity, but there’s lots of great opportunities in Orlando and tons of other cities.

HomeAway dominates the category, but there’s plenty of room for a second, third and fourth.

I’m surprised that already three-fourths of your traffic comes from outside the U.S.

Yes, and that portion is growing. We have offices all over the globe, and our biggest investment opportunity is in China. We purchased a metasearch site for air, hotel and train in China. We view international growth as a tailwind to the business.

So what’s your price target for the stock? It’s currently trading around $25 a share.

I’m looking at how I can grow the business over the long term, and that’s why we are making some of these investments. I might be ahead of it, or other folks ahead of me, but I’m a nuts-and-bolts operator. I like to build stuff, and getting TripAdvisor to the next level of functionality and awareness is my priority — not the stock price.

Competitors say Google is abusing its power in Web search to gain sway over the $110 billion online travel business.

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This time it’s GoGo Inc., maker of GoGo Inflight Internet service, which you’ve probably used at some point if you’ve ever accessed Wi-Fi during a flight.

The company is filing for an initial public offering that could raise as much as $100 million.

GoGo’s S-1 doesn’t say how many shares it plans to sell or at what price. But it does plan to trade under the stock symbol — you guessed it — GOGO.

There are currently 1,177 commercial airplanes offering Internet access through GoGo: That’s about 85 percent of North America’s Internet-enabled commercial aircraft.

According to the filing, GoGo’s consolidated revenue increased to $113.8 million from $60.1 million, a year-over-year increase of 89.3 percent in the nine-month period ending in September. Despite increasing revenue, the company still lost $25.8 million in the first nine months of 2011.

A large portion of GoGo’s revenue comes from its customers in the business aviation market, for which it provides both broadband connectivity and satellite-based communications systems. GoGo’s business aviation arm has sold approximately 6,000 ATG and satellite-based communications systems for private planes and has signed agreements with all of the largest fractional jet operators, according to the filing.

On the the commercial side, the company cites the emergence of the “connected lifestyle” for consumers, coupled with the projected growth of the worldwide travel market, as evidence of demand for its in-flight product. In 2010, there were approximately 2.7 billion scheduled passengers on commercial aircraft worldwide, with 630 million in the U.S. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the number of passengers worldwide is expected to grow to nearly 3 billion by 2012.

GoGo plans to expand internationally and to penetrate even more of the business aviation market, with the number of business jets in the North American and global business markets expected to grow by 8.3 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively, by 2015.

One of Gogo’s biggest risks is its dependence on partnerships with North American airline fleets for about half of its consolidated revenue. Approximately 45 percent of its commercial airline revenue — generated within a nine-month period ending September 30, 2011 — was acquired through Delta Air Lines; approximately 18 percent came via GoGo’s partnership with American Airlines, whose parent company, AMR Corp., recently filed for bankruptcy.

The company also cites as risks the increasing demand for in-flight WiFi, and the possible incapacity to meet that demand, as well as the need to keep up with rapidly advancing technologies in network infrastructure.

Low on the risk list, though still worth noting, is that in June of 2006, Gogo purchased at auction a $31 million, exclusive 10-year license for three megahertz, air-to-ground spectrum, outbidding at the time JetBlue LiveTV LLC and a company called Space Data Spectrum Holdings. GoGo expects to renew that license, but the FCC could, in the future, decide to auction additional spectrum for ATG use that is not currently designated for that purpose.

Illinois-based GoGo Inc. was originally incorporated in Texas in June of 1991 as Aircell Inc., and later became Aircell Holdings Inc. On June 15 of this year, Aircell Holdings Inc. officially changed its name to Gogo Inc.

Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, UBS, Allen & Company, Evercore Partners and William Blair & Company are listed as the underwriters on the IPO filing.

The company, which was officially spun out of Expedia yesterday, is trading down $1.24, or 4 percent, to $29.01 a share, under the ticker symbol TRIP.

Since Dec. 6, when Expedia shareholders approved the spinoff, the company had been trading temporarily under the symbol TRIPV.

While TripAdvisor’s stock price is lower today, it’s trading higher than Expedia’s, which was up 76 cents, or 2.8 percent, to only $27.61 a share.

The two companies picked a challenging time to conduct a split, with other recent IPOs, like Zynga, also struggling to trade higher. Kayak, a close competitor, has also decided to put its IPO plans on hold, however, that could change if the stocks perform well.

The breakup of Expedia and TripAdvisor creates two distinct companies.

Expedia, based in Bellevue, Wash., will be a travel agency focused on selling airline tickets and hotel and car rentals. TripAdvisor, based in Newton, Mass., will now serve as a travel-reviews site, operating in 27 countries and 19 languages. Without ties to Expedia, it can now solicit the highest referral fees from a number of travel agencies.

Much of the thought process behind the split has to do with what Expedia thinks its business is worth, compared to Wall Street’s valuation, and how much it will be valued on its own.

While Expedia’s travel agency business garners the most attention, it is TripAdvisor that has the bigger growth story.

Now that it is solo, it will be important to watch how its independent valuations evolve.

To celebrate the day, Stephen Kaufer, co-founder and chief executive officer of TripAdvisor, rang Nasdaq’s opening bell this morning — noticeably all by himself, without Expedia executives by his side.

After getting authorization, an app spins its wheels, hoovering up all the data it can and finally spitting out some pretty graph, friend-web, or stat sheet about which “Harry Potter” character a user is most like.

Not that I’d know anything about that.

But a new cadre of applications is rising above this fray and attempting to deliver a deeper set of services based on the data users so willingly fork over.

Jetpac, a new Web app from co-founders Pete Warden, Derek Dukes and Julian Green, is one such service.

What began life as a simple Facebook-connected Web application is quickly growing out of its Web-browser box and into something novel.

Jetpac’s initial user experience is simple: Connect a Facebook account and Jetpac will return a personalized visualization of where a user has traveled, where all of their friends have been and how much of the world they’ve collectively covered — all tidily bundled up in a vintage-travel-inspired Jetpac.com profile page.

To get the data, Jetpac crawls the captions of every image ever shared across a user’s entire Facebook friend group.

Warden said that translates to an average of 200,000 photos accessible to each Facebook profile, with slightly more than a quarter of those being geolocatable based on a word search of the captions.

“We realized that people do the work of telling us what photos are important and travel-oriented by choosing to take the time to name them,” Warden said.

“People don’t caption pictures from the local bar with the location, because their friends would know. They put the location in the caption when location is an important part of what they are sharing.”

But it’s a fine line between helpful serendipity and photo-stalking.

Warden knows better than most about the dangers of over-creepy geolocation. Back in April, he and a colleague uncovered the iPhone’s location-tracking “bug,” which made national tech news. Their discovery caused Apple, Warden’s former employer, to update its software and eliminate the location-storage issue.

But photo crawling is just the means to an end for Jetpac, which is aiming to launch its iPad app in late January.

The app, which is still in active development, is part photo viewer, part friend-powered travel magazine and part vacation-destination browser.

The app organizes all of the user’s friends’ photos into location-based albums, which can be searched and browsed based on various criteria.

The version I saw was unfinished, but the mixture of photos, friends and places that the app presented felt like a new kind of media experience — one where my friends were part of the story of a place. I was able to see who had only uploaded the requisite tourist shots, and who had spent more time in a given place.

As with many clever ideas, much stands in the way of a successful Jetpac takeoff.

Facebook users are accustomed to a certain kind of relationship with Facebook apps, and the thought of making one connection to the Jetpac Web service, then instantly getting a customized experience on the iPad, may be too foreign for some.

Cutting-edge media problems aside, the tech behind the app isn’t flawless, either. Identifying places by their name can be tricky.

Warden said: “We couldn’t figure out why we were seeing lots of pickup trucks in albums, and then we realized it was called the Chevy Tahoe.”

Apparently, Jetpac can have similar problems differentiating between people who’ve been to Chad and people who know a guy by that name.

Word-nerd jokes notwithstanding, the service’s eventual monetization strategy is also unclear — though it’s not hard to imagine how compelling a product like this could be for the travel industry.

But many start-ups in Silicon Valley don’t focus on making money from the earliest stages, and while Jetpac will eventually have to cross that bridge, the whole construct of a personalized media experience, based solely on the free content pulled from a user’s Facebook account, is a compelling idea — one that will likely be remixed and reissued by others before it finds the right niche.

I talked with Warden and Dukes in their San Francisco office, where they shared some of the big thoughts behind their fledgling app. Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111209/jetpac-transports-friends-photos-to-the-ipad-for-a-truly-personal-travel-magazine-video/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20111209/expedia-takes-stock-as-tripadvisor-gets-ready-to-fly-the-coop/ http://allthingsd.com/20111209/expedia-takes-stock-as-tripadvisor-gets-ready-to-fly-the-coop/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:44:32 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=152346 Now that Expedia’s spinoff of TripAdvisor is imminent, the online travel agency must explain to investors why they should stick with Expedia once its high-flying media business is gone.

In April, Expedia proposed a plan that would break the business into two public companies.

One would be a travel agency, focused on selling air, hotel and car rentals, and the other would be TripAdvisor, the travel reviews site that operates in 27 countries and 19 languages.

The deal is expected to close on or about Dec. 20, including a one-for-two reverse stock split immediately prior to the spin-off. Expedia will trade under the symbol EXPE and TripAdvisor will trade under TRIP.

Today, the company filed a presentation with the Securities & Exchange Commission detailing Expedia’s standalone growth prospects. The case will be an important one to make given that TripAdvisor is often seen as the more attractive of the two companies.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company plans to present the slides to various investors and analysts over the next two-and-a-half months.

In the presentation, Expedia lists three major growth opportunities: International expansion, especially in Asia; a greater concentration on hotel bookings, which have higher margins than airplane tickets; and new distribution platforms, such as cellphones and tablets.

Expedia is a traditional travel agency that collects fees when an airfare or hotel room is booked. Meanwhile, TripAdvisor, which aggregates user-generated reviews, produces revenue from advertising, as well as fees when users book through other sites, such as Priceline or Orbitz.

In the quarter ended in September, TripAdvisor’s revenue jumped by 30 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, Expedia’s revenues rose only 14 percent.

Additionally, the company is breaking up as it faces increasing competition from Google, which has started integrating the technology of ITA, a travel software company it acquired, into its search results.

Expedia’s stock today is trading at $28.65, up 61 cents.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111209/expedia-takes-stock-as-tripadvisor-gets-ready-to-fly-the-coop/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111206/o-co-partners-with-priceline-to-relaunch-shuttered-travel-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20111206/o-co-partners-with-priceline-to-relaunch-shuttered-travel-site/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:28:27 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=150897 O.co, the Salt Lake City-based company also known as Overstock.com, has partnered with Priceline.com’s partner network to provide deals on hotels, flights and car rentals. The retailer’s foray into travel is its second. In March, it launched a vacations tab, but put it on hold a few months later after a third-party relationship did not work out. The new site, called O.co Travel, will offer Priceline’s “Name Your Own Price” feature.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111206/o-co-partners-with-priceline-to-relaunch-shuttered-travel-site/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111129/hotel-booking-for-procrastinators-or-the-picky/ http://allthingsd.com/20111129/hotel-booking-for-procrastinators-or-the-picky/#comments Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:39:55 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=148324 After a long Thanksgiving weekend spent with family, the idea of booking a hotel for a Christmas and/or a New Year’s Eve getaway may sound better than ever.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been testing two digital tools that use distinct criteria for booking hotel rooms: HotelTonight and Room 77. HotelTonight aims to get people into rooms no matter how late they book, and Room 77 wants to get people into the specific room they want.

HotelTonight is a free app that works strictly for same-day hotel bookings. Once installed on an iPhone or Android smartphone, it will display about three steeply discounted hotel rooms per city after noon local time each day, when hotel representatives know what will be available that night.

Right now, the app can find hotels in some 28 cities, as well as several nearby getaway destinations (like Cape Cod for Boston). HotelTonight plans to add more cities like Tampa, Fla., and Palm Springs, Calif., and will expand in existing cities. An iPad app is planned for early next year.

HotelTonight’s deals for San Francisco hotels.

HotelTonight seems more serious about getting guests in beds than big-name rival sites. Many competitors, including Travelocity and Hotwire, offer same-day hotel bookings, but they don’t reveal the name of the hotel or its location until you book it. HotelTonight shows all information about a hotel. Another difference is HotelTonight lets people snag rooms until 2 a.m., instead of the usual cutoff time of 11 p.m.

But HotelTonight users can’t specify the type of room or bed they want. All rooms are just guaranteed to sleep two adults.

Using the HotelTonight app on an Android device and an iPhone, I found good hotel deals in my home city of Washington, D.C., as well as other cities like Boston. A categorization system labels each hotel as basic, hip, classic, boutique, elegant, luxe or solid.

Among the deals were the Washington Court (classic), very close to D.C.’s Union Station for $99 instead of $147; Chicago’s Wyndham Blake Hotel (solid) for $379 rather than $455; and the Langham (luxe) in Boston’s financial district for $199 rather than $275.

One getaway near Washington, D.C., was the famed Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels, Md. The deal offered rooms for $195 a night rather than $215, and guests could stay up to five nights starting on a Monday.

Room 77 is a free website and an app for iPhone and Android that gives guests the inside scoop on hotels and rooms before they book. It looks at some 750,000 rooms and offers details like size, views and which floors are the quietest.

The website’s “Heard in the Lobby” offers tips from the concierge and hotel staff. Having stayed at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto many times, I agreed with one tip for that hotel that said, “Light sleepers should request a room facing the Borders’ parking lot or Cowper Street to avoid any noise that might float up from the courtyard.”

Room 77 shows detailed information on hotels, including sample views, such as those from rooms in a hotel in Hawaii.

What I found most useful on Room 77 was that some hotels include floor maps that let you see more clearly how the hotel is laid out. By selecting a room on the floor map, you can see Google Earth images of the views from that room.

You can narrow room choices to floor (high or low), view (important or not important), elevator (near or far) and connecting room (yes or don’t care). A data sorter on the left of the screen lets you narrow hotels to those with free Wi-Fi, free parking (a big plus in cities), free breakfast or free hotel shuttles.

I used Room 77 to investigate the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans, where I’ll be staying for a wedding in March. I narrowed my search to rooms on high floors that had views of the Mississippi River and were far from the elevator.

Unfortunately, the wedding-party discount couldn’t apply on Room 77, so I couldn’t actually book through the site.

(While Room 77 doesn’t offer steep discounts on rooms, it displays beside each hotel prices offered at big-name sites like Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, Hotels.com, Booking.com and others.)

If you do use Room 77 to book, a feature called Room Concierge asks you to fill in your room preferences, including specific room numbers (if applicable). The largely automated service informs hotels of your request and follows up until a room that best matches your preferences is found, all the while sending you updates on the status of your request.

Room 77 is exploring ways people who book hotels elsewhere can use its room-finding service.

Email Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111129/hotel-booking-for-procrastinators-or-the-picky/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111123/tripadvisor-makes-itself-available-offline-to-help-travelers-avoid-roaming-charges/ http://allthingsd.com/20111123/tripadvisor-makes-itself-available-offline-to-help-travelers-avoid-roaming-charges/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:00:35 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=146999 For travelers who venture to faraway places and would rather not incur roaming charges, TripAdvisor this week launched an iPhone app called City Guides with a heavy offline component. The app hooks into 20 major cities’ worth of TripAdvisor user reviews, maps, self-guided tours and offline maps that tie into GPS and compass navigation. Users download the guides they need in advance.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111123/tripadvisor-makes-itself-available-offline-to-help-travelers-avoid-roaming-charges/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111109/uptake-travel-research-site-adds-social-qa-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20111109/uptake-travel-research-site-adds-social-qa-too/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:00:39 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=142129 Uptake, a three-year-old travel resource site with a respectable four million visitors per month, today adds tools to help users solicit travel advice from friends who have visited or lived in relevant locations. While Gogobot, Trippy and Gtrot do similar social stuff, Uptake says it’s different because it has honed techniques for discovering where people have been, using “unstructured” source data. So, instead of relying on explicit Foursquare and Facebook check-ins, for instance, Uptake would deduce where a person has been from her photos and status messages.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111109/uptake-travel-research-site-adds-social-qa-too/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111107/pricelines-friendly-take-on-google-entering-the-travel-market/ http://allthingsd.com/20111107/pricelines-friendly-take-on-google-entering-the-travel-market/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:20:56 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=141564 Online travel company Priceline says it’s going to try to make the most of Google’s recent entry into that market.

During the Norwalk, Conn.-based company’s third-quarter conference call today, it fielded questions about the impact of Google adding airfare and hotel information to its search results through its acquisition of ITA Software.

Priceline CEO Jeffery Boyd said that, so far, it looks like Google has created “platforms that can be operated as an efficient vehicle for advertisers to get qualified leads.” He added that his company’s approach is “as an advertiser, and to participate as effectively as we can.”

Some companies, including Kayak and Expedia, worried about Google’s market power if it was able to acquire ITA. But Priceline did not object, Boyd said.

“The transaction was approved and we think it’s incumbent upon our industry to find the best ways to integrate and advertise on it, and try to get the wealth of qualified customers that Google is trying to drive toward us,” he said.

The downside: If Google is able to send more qualified leads, it might be able to charge advertisers more.

Priceline beat analyst expectations in the third quarter. Revenue grew 45 percent, to $1.4 billion; net income doubled to $469.5 million, or $9.17 a share, compared to the year-ago period.

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