iPhone

  • The blogosphere has been awash with iPhone 3G talk for the last few weeks. No doubt one of the most exciting things to keep an eye on will be the travel applications and GPS tie ups. To date there are 139 apps listed on the Apple site, although this should increase quite quickly as I’ve read there is a backlog of apps waiting to be cleared. Plenty of releases from the usual suspects with some suffering from poor reviews, perhaps as a result of rushing them out.
  • Tim at Maastricht Hotel School is carrying out academic research on how the hospitality industry is using online marketing. As well as finding out what techniques are being used, he is trying to determine the perceived benefits of the different methods. You can complete the survey at www.rshotels.com/survey.

Visit London are rolling out a new identity.

Website banner

The new logo (’Visit London’ and the body’s website address in red type) will replace

Visit London logo

and the Totally London brand will be no longer.

Toally London logo

And I’m sure you’ll agree, a tad less polarising than the London 2012 logo. The official launch will coincide with the Olympic handover in August.

Oban Multilingual dropped me a line this morning about a short video they made.

They interviewed a number of overseas travellers in London to learn about their search habits. I’ve embedded the movie below.

The video focuses on the need to provide multilingual sites for international travellers.

Oban (who specialise in multilingual SEO and international SEM) are working with EyeforTravel researching online travel habits. Take part at www.faceofglobalsearch.com and win £250 of travel vouchers.

I’m going to be a tad critical on the quiz.

Oban has previewed in a blog post some of the results and indicated that so far, the three most popular sites for travel research are Google, TripAdvisor and Alibabuy. The question only presents these three sites to select from. Although there is a text field where the user can enter any site I’m not sure how often that would be used.

Perhaps a longer list or drop down of popular travel sites may lead to a more accurate cross section of preferred sites.

For the game itself I only got as far as Anchorage!