text:
Many other exchanges, at least those with ties to the U.S., have similarly delisted (or never listed) those assets in recent times, and for the same reason. It's another sign that reality is finally sinking in to the digital asset community: governments will either find a way to trace previously "anonymous" digital transactions, or find ways to restrict access to them.
Multiple news outlets quoted ShapeShift's chief legal officer Veronica McGregor as confirming the delistings were due to regulatory concerns.
Remember when anonymity was a key selling point?
When ShapeShift launched in 2015, a large part of its appeal revolved around the fact it would swap digital assets directly to/from users' wallets. There was no need to create an account or supply any form of identification. As we mentioned the other day, this approach has mellowed out of legal necessity (and reality) over the years. ShapeShift began requiring users to provide KYC details to use the platform in 2018, and has restricted access to users in New York and Washington states rather than comply with their stricter local regulations.
DASH in recent years has sought to play down its status as a "privacy coin," its leaders even admitting in interviews that the project doesn't want be labeled as such. These days the community prefers to tout its economic and development model as key drawcards. It's a big leap from the coin originally named "XCoin" and "Darkcoin", the primary feature of which was near-anonymous transactions. Reality has set in for DASH and similar projects too over the years and it has distanced itself from its beginnings—though DASH does still offer the "PrivateSend" option which obfuscates transaction details using CoinJoin techniques.
Likewise, Monero and Zcash also launched with "privacy" as their raison d'etre. Indeed, any arguments over which coin is preferable to use are over which one is less traceable.
For a while it was well-known, even to the law-abiding and relative newcomers, that an effective way to break the visible ownership chain of a Bitcoin (or any other open blockchain asset) transaction was to swap it for a privacy coin on a direct-swap exchange like ShapeShift, then swap it back to Bitcoin again. Effectively washed of its history, that Bitcoin amount could be sent to a more compliant exchange for conversion into fiat. It was inevitable that this situation could not continue for long.
These projects now all find themselves in a difficult, yet entirely predictable, situation whereby their most prominent selling points have resulted in their marginalization. Governments and law enforcement agencies simply will not tolerate unregulated, anonymous digital transactions. And no matter how effective the technology, those organizations have many ways to sideline and restrict access to any platform offering them.
While Monero remains the #14 asset by market cap (US$2.12 billion), DASH and Zcash have slipped from the top screen in recent times, and now sit at #32 and #35 respectively.
That's just reality
Terms like "anonymity" and "censorship resistance" have their appeal on the surface, and everyone wants a degree of privacy. However, given the billions of dollars that circulate in the international criminal economy, it's foolish to think criminal money wouldn't immediately rush towards those coins—or that law enforcement wouldn't notice.
As Bitcoin creator Dr. Craig S. Wright has often said, there's no way to flaunt regulations and there are many ways governments can put pressure on identifiable, human participants in an ecosystem such as developers, miners with large investments to safeguard, and exchange gateways. He has also explained why society cannot function in an environment where full anonymity exists.
It is for this reason that Bitcoin BSV promotes KYC compliance and the community supports only projects that abide by local and international financial regulations. While Bitcoin addresses remain identifiable mainly by strings of numbers, users must know that determined analysts are always getting better at unmasking their real-life identities. It has always been this way, even on BTC, BCH, LTC, ETH or most others. And blockchain records are public forever.
This is the reality, and though it has taken some longer to accept it than others, it's not going away. Private but ultimately traceable transactions with global adoption, or anonymity (for now) and obscurity—that's the choice.
Follow CoinGeek's Crypto Crime Cartel series, which delves into the stream of groups—from BitMEX to Binance, Bitcoin.com, Blockstream, ShapeShift and Ethereum—who have co-opted the digital asset revolution and turned the industry into a minefield for naïve (and even experienced) players in the market.
Crypte Crime Cartel
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A recent announcement from the bank Tether uses (Deltec Bank) has once again called the amount of reserves Tether has into question.
Craig Wright wins landmark case in English Court of Appeal; defamation claim vs Hodlonaut to proceed in England
The ruling concerns an appeal by Dr. Wright to overturn an earlier decision in which a High Court judge declined jurisdiction to hear his defamation case against Norway-based Twitter user Magnus Granath.
The CoinGeek Pulse Episode 27: Bitcoin Birthday, Middle East digital payments boom, The Bitcoin Bridge
As the world pays attention and some celebrate Bitcoin, this week we look back at the very beginning of the 21st century's most disruptive technology.
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Crypto Crime Cartel: The end is nigh for Tether
Whenever the curtain is pulled back on the operations of Tether, the representations made by its executives change dramatically.


text:
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New Obstacles Are Raised to Protecting Computer-Related Inventions
Bruce D. Sunstein | Founder, Partner View more articles
Bruce is a member of our Litigation Practice Group, Patent Practice Group, Trademark Practice Group and Business Practice Group
Recent court decisions make it more challenging to protect computer-related inventions with patents. On September 5, in the case of Accenture v. Guidewire,[1] the Federal Circuit issued a split decision holding that a computer-related invention was not eligible to be patented.
At issue in Accenture was the validity of an already issued patent having claims directed to a system, and to a method, for generating tasks to be performed in an insurance organization. The system claims required an "insurance transaction database," a "task library database," a "client component," and a "server component." These items, which have sub-items that also appear in the claim, cooperate with each other to generate the tasks to be performed.
The patent also included a method claim that recited steps in a computer environment involving an event processor that interacts with an insurance transaction database, a task assistant, and a storing step.
In the past, this kind of structural detail in a computer-implemented system claim and a computer-implemented method claim would be sufficient to support a determination that the subject matter would be eligible for a patent, and, indeed, a patent with such claims was issued by the Patent and Trademark Office. Illustrating the structural detail in the system claim, the last subparagraph of the claim reads this way:
. . . wherein the event processor is triggered by application events associated with a change in the information, and sends an event trigger to the task engine; wherein in response to the event trigger, the task engine identifies rules in the task library database associated with the event and applies the information to the identified rules to determine the tasks to be completed, and populates on a task assistant the determined tasks to be completed, wherein the task assistant transmits the determined tasks to the client component.
Accenture put considerable additional detail into its patent, which has 15 figures, and occupies 110 columns of print. The patent is loaded with examples, including numerous excerpts of actual programming code, showing how Object Oriented Programming structures implement the invention.
Yet the Federal Circuit held that the subject matter defined by the system claims is not patent-eligible, relying on the court's own non-precedential opinion in CLS Bank Int'l v. Alice Corp., decided in May 2013 .[2] The plurality opinion inAlice Corp. in turn relied principally on the Supreme Court's 2012 decision in Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc.[3]
Determining that subject matter defined by a patent claim is eligible for a patent does not mean that the owner of such a patent claim deserves a patent, because the patent law also requires that the subject matter must be new and must not have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field of the invention. These last two requirements correspond to sections 102 and 103 of the patent law.[4]
The patent eligibility requirement comes from a different part of the patent law, section 101: "Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title."[5]
Section 101 seems simple enough. Historically, courts have said that this provision should be interpreted broadly. For example, in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the Supreme Court held that a new bacterium, engineered to degrade hydrocarbons, was eligible to be patented.
Recently, however, the Supreme Court, while giving lip service to these principles, is ratcheting back on patent eligibility. The court's unanimous decision in Prometheus, about which we have written previously, started the new trend. In that case, the claims were directed to administering a thiopurine drug to a subject with a gastrointestinal disorder, determining the level of a specific metabolite in the subject, wherein a level below a first threshold indicates a need to increase drug dosage and wherein a level above a second threshold indicates a need to decrease drug dosage.[6]
In evaluating patent eligibility, the Prometheus court simplified the patent claims, choosing to generalize the claim limitations and to ignore their specific provisions. Where the claims require administering a thiopurine drug to a subject with a gastrointestinal disorder, a step requiring a human intervention in which a drug is administered to the patient, the court says that "the 'administering' step simply refers to the relevant audience, namely doctors who treat patients with certain diseases with thiopurine drugs."
Where the claims similarly require determining the level of a specific metabolite in the subject, thus specifying a second human intervention typically requiring getting a blood sample from the subject and analyzing the blood sample, the court characterizes this determining step as one that "tells doctors to engage in well-understood, routine, conventional activity previously engaged in by scientists who work in the field". Finally, where the "wherein" clauses involve making inferences that are rooted in the context of these human interventions, the court waves them off as language to "simply tell a doctor about the relevant natural laws."
Although the Prometheus court might have chosen to invalidate the patent on the grounds that the claims cover subject matter that would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art (using the provisions of section 103 of the patent law), the court instead went out of its way to say that the claimed subject matter was not eligible to be patented (using the provisions of section 101 of the patent law). The court's theory was that "the patent claims at issue here effectively claim the underlying laws of nature themselves." [7]
The court relied on such of its precedents as Gottschalk v. Benson (1972), which held that "the claim (like the claims before us) was overly broad; it did not differ significantly from a claim that just said 'apply the algorithm.'" [8]Bensonheld that a computerized method for converting signals from binary coded decimal form into binary form was not patent eligible. Justice Douglas wrote for the court that "[t]he mathematical formula involved here has no substantial practical application except in connection with a digital computer, which means that if the judgment below is affirmed, the patent would wholly pre-empt the mathematical formula and in practical effect would be a patent on the algorithm itself."[9]
Most patent practitioners had regarded the Benson decision as effectively overruled by later decisions of the Supreme Court, but the Prometheus decision, in giving new life to Benson, now threatens not just patents for diagnostics like those involved in Prometheus, but also patents for other kinds of inventions, including computer-related inventions.
Because the Prometheus court's analysis, such as it is, of the patent claims slights the actual wording of the claims, the decision fails to provide any reasonable guidance to users of the patent system as to what subject matter is eligible to be patented. Indeed, in ruling that the claimed activities, involving a minimum of two human interventions relating to a patient with a gastrointestinal disorder, are too abstractly specified, the court provokes great uncertainty as to the patent eligibility of many kinds – and perhaps all kinds – of patent claims.
A similar pattern of analysis drives the Federal Circuit's decision in Accenture v. Guidewire. The majority opinion was authored by Judge Lourie, who also wrote the plurality opinion in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp. that was followed in Accenture. According to Judge Lourie in Accenture, the Prometheus decision specifies a procedure to determine whether a claim is too abstract to be eligible for a patent:
In the case of abstractness, the court must determine whether the claim poses any risk of preempting an abstract idea. To do so the court must first identify and define whatever fundamental concept appears wrapped up in the claim. Then, proceeding with the preemption analysis, the balance of the claim is evaluated to determine whether additional substantive limitations narrow, confine, or otherwise tie down the claim so that, in practical terms, it does not cover the full abstract idea itself.[10]
Judge Lourie first states that the trial court correctly found the method claim ineligible for a patent. He then evaluates the system claim in light of the method claim:
Because the '284 patent's method claims have been found to be patent ineligible, we first compare the substantive limitations of the method claim and the system claim to see if the system claim offers a 'meaningful limitation' to the abstract method claim, which has already been adjudicated to be patent-ineligible.[11]
Judge Lourie finds that the system claim does not offer such a "meaningful limitation," and therefore is patent-ineligible. Moreover, he says that even considered on their own, the system claims "fail to include limitations that set them apart from the abstract idea of handling insurance-related information."[12]
Judge Rader, in a vigorous dissent, said that "any claim can be stripped down, simplified, generalized, or paraphrased to remove all of its concrete limitations, until at its core, something that could be characterized as an abstract idea is revealed. A court cannot go hunting for abstractions by ignoring the concrete, palpable, tangible limitations of the invention the patentee actually claims."[13]
It will be apparent that Judge Rader's criticism of Judge Lourie's opinion applies equally to the Prometheus decision itself, which spawned the patent eligibility analysis of Judge Lourie in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp. as well as in Accenture. The case of Alice Corp., the first time that Judge Lourie advanced his interpretation of Prometheus, produced an unusually splintered court: separate opinions by Judge Lourie (for himself and Judges Dyk, Prost, Reyna, and Wallach), Judge Rader (for himself and Judge Moore, and in some aspects, for Judges Linn and O'Malley), Judge Moore (for herself and Judge Rader, and, in some aspects, for Judges Linn and O'Malley), Judges Linn and O'Malley, Judge Newman, and Judge Rader (again).
The final vote tally in Alice Corp. shows Judge Lourie aligned with Judges Dyk, Prost, Reyna, and Wallach, to deny patent eligibility for all of the patent claims including the system claims, and Judge Rader with Judges Linn, Moore, O'Malley, and Newman to find the system claims patent-eligible. Judges Linn, O'Malley, and Newman would find both the system claims and the method claims patent-eligible.
With the present makeup of the Federal Circuit, one can predict fairly well how a computer-related patent will be treated according to which judges are on the panel hearing the appeal. In Accenture, the panel included Judges Lourie, Rader, and Reyna. Because Judge Reyna sided with Judge Lourie in Alice Corp., he also sided with him in Accenture. Therefore the vote in Accenture was 2-1 in favor of finding that the system claims were not eligible for a patent.
Surprisingly, in another recent case, decided in June 2013, Ultramercial v. Hulu,[14] Judge Lourie voted with Judges Rader and O'Malley to uphold patent eligibility of a computer-related method. The method claim required these steps, as summarized by Judge Rader:
(1) receiving media products from a copyright holder, (2) selecting an advertisement to be associated with each media product, (3) providing said media products for sale on an Internet website, (4) restricting general public access to the media products, (5) offering free access to said media products on the condition that the consumer view the advertising, (6) receiving a request from a consumer to view the advertising, (7) facilitating the display of advertising and any required interaction with the advertising, (8) allowing the consumer access to the associated media product after such display and interaction, if any, (9) recording this transaction in an activity log, and (10) receiving payment from the advertiser.[15]
In this instance, the method limitations were sufficiently specific and sufficiently tied to the operation of a computer that Judge Lourie did not find the claim patent-ineligible.
The uncertainty of the law relating to patent eligibility, introduced by Prometheus, and now manifested in Alice Corp. and Accenture, is a serious problem. We can expect that one or more of these cases will reach the Supreme Court.[16]However, it is the Supreme Court's decision in Prometheus that has caused the problem, and it cannot be counted on to fix it.
In the meantime, if the judges who sided with Judge Lourie in Alice Corp. dominate a panel for an appeal, any patent claims to a computer-related invention will survive only if they are extremely specific, as they were in Ultramercial v. Hulu. On the other hand, even an extremely specific claim might still be shredded and denied patent-eligibility by Judge Lourie's abstraction engine, depending on how the analysis is conducted, because the analytical method he advances—as Judge Rader rightly points out in the same case—can be used to deny eligibility to any patent claim.
This author believes that a legislative solution could usefully bring the law of patent eligibility back to where it stood before the Prometheus decision. He therefore suggests a one-sentence legislative amendment:
Section 101 of Title 35 of the United States Code shall be amended by adding the following sentence at the end thereof:
An invention that produces a useful, concrete, and tangible result shall not be denied eligibility for a patent on the ground that it is directed to a law of nature, natural phenomenon, or abstract idea.
The rationale for this legislative proposal is to provide a surgical solution to nullify the effect and rationale of Prometheus while otherwise leaving the law of section 101 intact.[17] The phrase "a useful, concrete and tangible result" appeared in a 1981 Supreme Court decision, Diamond v. Diehr, [18] that until Prometheus many thought had the effect of overruling the court's decision in Gottschalk v. Benson.
The point is not that all computer-related inventions (of the type in Alice Corp.) or all diagnostics inventions (of the type in Prometheus) should be granted patents. Rather, the point is that they should not be summarily denied eligibility to be considered for a patent. All inventions must clear the hurdles of being new and non-obvious. What is happening in the world since Prometheus is that many inventions now risk being denied the chance to get in line to be examined for these things. That state of affairs speaks poorly for the patent system.
[1]Accenture v. Guidewire, No. 2011-1486 (Fed. Cir. 9/5/13)(slip opinion).
[2]Accenture v. Guidewire, slip opinion, page 8 et seq., citing CLS Bank Int'l v. Alice Corp., 717 F.3d 1269 (Fed. Cir. 2013) (en banc). Accenture had not appealed invalidation of the method claims.
[3]Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289 (2013), cited in CLS Bank Int'l v. Alice Corp., 717 F.3d 1269 at 1279.
[4] 35 U.S.C. §§ 102 and 103.
[5] 35 U.S.C. § 101.
[6] 132 S. Ct. at 1295.
[7]132 S. Ct. at 1305.
[8] 132 S. Ct. at 1301. In fact, the claim in Gottschalk v. Benson was specifically limited to the hardware environment of a shift register and was quite precise as to how the shift register is used in carrying out the claimed process.
[9] 409 U.S. at 71-72.
[10]Accenture, slip opinion, page 8. Interior quotation marks, ellipses, and case citations have been omitted for clarity.
[11] Slip opinion, page 10.
[13] Dissenting slip opinion, page 1. Interior quotation marks and brackets have been omitted.
[14]Ultramercial v. Hulu, 722 F.3d 1335 (Fed. Cir. 6/21/13).
[15] 722 F.3d at 1350.
[16] A petition for certiorari has been filed in WildTangent Inc. v. Ultramercial, LLC, another case raising similar issues.
[17] Such an amendment to section 101 to override the Supreme Court ruling in Prometheus would parallel the change by the 1952 Patent Act in section 103 to override the Supreme Court ruling in Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84, 90, 91 (1941)("flash of creative genius") with respect to what constitutes an "invention". This latter story is recounted in Judge Rader's opinion in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp., 717 F.3d at 1295 et seq. See also Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 15 (1966).
[18]Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981).
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


>For PCI-Express, the TerraTec Cinergy 2400 will be a dual tuner DVB-T card.
Is there a website with information about that?
save my 2nd PCIe port for later use with a videocard).
radio, multilingual audio (arte is not that bad at all ;-) )?
>However, there likely won't be any Linux drivers for either initially.
Hmm bad,... how long do you think will this take?


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text:
Q: Event Sourcing and dealing with data dependencies Given a REST API with the following operations resulting in events posted to Kafka:

*

*AddCategory

*UpdateCategory

*RemoveCategory

*AddItem (refers to a category by some identifier)

*UpdateItem

*RemoveItem

And an environment where multiple users may use the REST API at the same time, and the consumers must all get the same events. The consumers may be offline for an extended period of time (more than a day). New consumers may be added, and others removed.
The problems:

*

*Event ordering (only workaround single topic/partition?)

*

*AddItem before AddCategory, invalid category reference.

*UpdateItem before AddCategory, used to be a valid reference, now invalid.

*RemoveCategory before AddItem, category reference invalid.

*....infinite list of other concurrency issues.

*Event Store snapshots for fast resync of restarted consumers

*

*Should there be a compacted log topic for both categories and items, each entity keyed by its identifier?

*Can the whole compacted log topic be somehow identified as an offset?

*Should there only be one one entry in the compacted log topic, and the data of it contain a serialized blob of all categories and items given an offset (would require single topic/partition).

*How to deal with the handover from replaying the rendered entities event store to the "live stream" of commands/events? Encode offset in each item in the compacted log view, and pass that to replay from the live event log?

Are there other systems that fit this problem better?

A: I will give you a partial answer based on my experience in Event sourcing.

Event ordering (only workaround single topic/partition?)

*

*AddItem before AddCategory, invalid category reference.

*UpdateItem before AddCategory, used to be a valid reference, now invalid.

*RemoveCategory before AddItem, category reference invalid.

*....infinite list of other concurrency issues.

All scalable Event stores that I know of guaranty events ordering inside a partition only. In DDD terms, the Event store ensure that the Aggregate is rehydrated correctly by replaying the events in the order they were generated. The Apache-kafka topic seems to be a good choice for that. While this is sufficient for the Write side of an application, it is harder for the Read side to use it. Harder but not impossible.
Given that the events are already validated by the Write side (because they represent facts that already happened) we can be sure that any inconsistency that appears in the system is due to the wrong ordering of events. Also, given that the Read side is eventually consistent with the Write side, the missing events will eventually reach our Read models.
So, first thing, in your case AddItem before AddCategory, invalid category reference, should be in fact ItemAdded before CategoryAdded (terms are in the past).
Second, when ItemAdded arrives, you try to load the Category by ID and if it fails (because of the delayed CategoryAdded event) then you can create a NotYetAvailableCategory having the ID equal to the referenced ID in the ItemAdded event and a title of "Not Yet Available Please Wait a few miliseconds". Then, when the CategoryAdded event arrives, you just update all the Items that reference that category ID. So, the main idea is that you create temporary entities that will be finalized when their events eventually arrive.
In the case of CategoryRemoved before ItemAdded, category reference invalid, when the ItemAdded event arrives, you could check that the category was deleted (by havind a ListOfCategoriesThatWereDeleted read model) and then take the appropriate actions in your Item entity - what depends on you business.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


This version of the E6s is black and comes with a 2mm diameter Duramax cable. It terminates to a 4-Pin Hirose connector for use with specific* Sony wireless transmitters.
Note: *This unit features a connector that is wired specifically for use with the Sony WRT-822 and WRT-420 transmitters only.


When we gathered the top travel data professionals in Europe and asked them what they thought would change the face of our industry, they overwhelmingly answered that data-driven personalization would be the game changer.
Some 78% of the attendees at our Smart Travel Data Summit 2016 believed that personalization would be critical in the future, far ahead of any other category, and it was a topic that came up time and again at the conference.
You can download the full conference report here, which covers all the major themes, surveys and presentations from the conference.
EyeforTravel have an attendee list for the digital travel elite that you need to see!
EyeforTravel have just released their attendee list for the San Francisco Summit 2017 (April 24-25). Don't miss your chance to join the west coast's largest digital travel conference.
The focus of this event is mobile, social media and tech innovation. With more travelers turning to the internet and mobile to get ideas, inspiration, and options for their trips. Mobile has made the journey more spontaneous with 'on the go' research tools.
Research shows that 85% of leisure travelers decide on activities only after having arrived at their destination.
With mobile playing such a key role we see platforms like Facebook, Lola, Instagram, Hopper, Lyft, YouTube (travel hack videos) SnapChat, and travel supplier's bespoke apps like Hilton and KLM becoming the starting block of a traveler's journey.
EyeforTravel are excited about this shift and have positioned their EyeForTravel San Francisco Summit (April 24-25) to focus on the digital big bang in travel.
The event will have 350 travel decision makers to help you identify the data, technology, partners and strategies that you need to grow revenues in the mobile-first world! They are even offering a sneak peak of their attendee list 2 months before the event.
Want to see who you might be sitting next to?
This year's conference will be 3 in-depth travel conferences all in one!
If this appeals to you, get involved either as an attendee, a speaker or an exhibitor.
Is Cuba's US tourist boom over before it begins?
One of Obama's major foreign policy objectives was rapprochement with Cuba, leading to a relaxation in travel restrictions between the two countries through a process known as 'normalization'.
This has led to a huge jump in US tourists to Cuba, with the island's already growing tourism entering a full-blown boom in 2016. The Miami Herald reported that "visits by Cuban Americans and other US travelers last year was 614,433, a 34% increase," making them the second biggest visiting nationality. American Airlines has even opened a Havana office in a sign of the changing times.
However, President Trump is furiously signing in executive orders, overturning many of the key initiatives of the Obama administration. President Trump has threatened to halt the process of normalization "unless the Castro regime meets our demands", so if you are an American looking at Cuba, now might be the time to go before it's too late.
Technology with a human touch: travel's new super power?
Pamela Whitby has been finding out if the days of purely self-serve online travel are over.
"Metasearch on steroids," is how industry veteran Krista Pappas, the vice president of Lola, describes the firm's new agent console, a state-of-the-art piece of kit that delivers "super powers" to the group's living-breathing travel agents.
The console, which communicates back and forth with Harrison, Lola's artificial intelligence (AI) engine – its answer to IBM Watson – gives the firm's 20-strong travel agent team "all these new, amazing and efficient tools". Tools that will help Lola, a startup leading the charge away from purely self-serve online travel, to deliver a truly personalised experience.
Though she isn't naming or shaming anybody, the travel industry veteran's argument goes that whether you like it or not, the results of the agencies are influenced by who pays the highest commission.
This isn't easy but with a further $15 million awarded in recent Series B funding, taking Lola's total investment to just under $35 million, the tech-driven vision seems within reach.
As a quick recap, Lola launched its limited beta version in the app store in May 2016. Led by former Kayak co-founder Paul English, Lola's target audience is the tech-savvy frequent traveller, fed up with having to sort through the thousands of generic search results spat out by well-established OTAs. Though everybody in travel is talking about 'personalisation' more often the results don't deliver, and end up costing travellers time and productivity.
Following feedback, the next iteration will also include significant changes to the user experience. "It's truly a mobile-first user experience versus just a mobile-adaptation of a 20-year-old idea of search," she continues.
Of course, there are some simple, easy-to-complete tasks, such as booking a regular weekly business trip from Boston to JFK, but there are still enough times when things go awry. "When a flight is cancelled, and you're stuck in a cab, or there is a problem with hotel check-in, people absolutely do want to talk to an agent and with Lola, 24/7 service is always one touch away," Pappas insists.
In essence then, Lola is now set on building a true personalisation engine for hotels, flights and other travel components that will deliver a "self-service travel plus agent" model.
This trend away from pure self-serve travel is one that Jared Alster, VP and co-founder of San Francisco-based startup Stride Travel, a go-to market place for baby boomers, sees playing out in 2017.
Lola's investors also seem convinced. In the latest funding round, led by Charles River Ventures, previous investors General Catalyst and Accel both came back to the table.
Want to learn more about AI in travel then join our EyeforTravel San Francisco Summit this April - Click here to learn more.
The numbers seem to back this up. According to Statista, by August 2015 at least 2.5 billion people were using at least one messaging app, a number that's expected to grow to 3.6 billion by 2018.
The real test now, however, will be how this upstart tech company harnesses AI, machine learning and natural language processing to perfect the messaging experience.
Lola is definitely "the real deal", insists Pappas who says we can expect to see a lot more than talk in 2017. To advance the firm's AI ambitions, last September last year came another "best-of-breed appointment" to the executive team in the form of Bryan Healey, a former Amazon Echo technology leader.
"Our AI team's ability to help with personalisation and natural language processing for a better messaging experience will be paramount," Pappas says.
While some industry players are calling 2017 as the year that the mobile native app dies out, Lola doesn't buy into this view. "The other part of our tech vision is the mobile app – so it's Harrison, agent, console, mobile app," Pappas says. Importantly though, the human agent will always be there to "ensure that Harrison is getting it right".
To ensure this happens, Lola has adopted an approach which helped Kayak to take the tech lead – insisting that engineers sit with the agents to hear first hand the customer's pain points in order to build the most effective solutions.
That humans will remain central to this fledgling business is an important one in the current climate. Recently the Financial Times reported on the pressure being felt by senior Silicon Valley executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos. With Brexit and the election of Trump, here executives including the chiefs of IBM, Salesforce.com and Microsoft were anxious to present themselves as more responsible and sympathetic to the potential impact of AI. Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff is quoted saying that "advances in AI are beyond what we had expected," and the concern is that it could lead to job losses.
In travel, however, Pappas argues that this is less of a problem. "Booking travel is inherently complex and we believe there are always going to be things that humans are better at doing than the engine," she says.
Yes, lots of tedious tasks that agents have been doing manually can be automated, but that gives them the flexibility to handle the more complex problems."The agent remains integral to this; we are a long way from the idea that this doesn't require an agent to be involved," she says.
Like all consumer-facing brands Lola is keen to show that it's all about putting the customer first but as a commercial organisation, whose first stage investors have come back to the table in round 1, it must also deliver returns.
"The team has raised a tonne of money and we have a lot of work to do, so pressure is on," Pappas admits.
While positive feedback from users is the end game, like other agencies its business model is commission-based so it cannot ignore the importance of building the right partnerships. Lola's promise to the travel suppliers it chooses to work with is "to complement their own marketing programme".
Already it is working directly with hotels, as well as other third-party suppliers and global distribution systems Amadeus and Sabre.
Pappas is clear that Lola is not trying to take control of hotel loyalty data, which it could be argued is Expedia's goal for its relationship with Red Lion, and ultimately other smaller chains. Last year, the online travel giant convinced Red Lion to allow it to auto-enroll guests to its hotel loyalty programme, in a move some commentators have called shortsighted.
Not so for Lola. "We want to ensure our customers are getting the best rate from hotels, that their loyalty is in check and that hotel recognises them when they arrive," she explains.
Next steps for the firm are to "use the dough from the Series B funding round to for continued product development and marketing"; to date marketing efforts have been largely word-of-mouth.
Though the idea is still germinating, a longer-term vision is to become the Uber of the travel agency world, with Lola talking through the idea with prospective partners.
English and Pappas have been in the business long enough to know that it is trust too that will set them apart. "It's truly amazing when you know you can trust somebody to book travel for you," says Pappas.
As Lola ramps up to deliver on this vision, the industry will be watching closely.
Krista Pappas, Daniel Houghton and Bobby Healy will be speaking alongside other online travel industry innovators at EyeforTravel's San Francisco Summit (April 24-25). Click here for details.
Are Travel Brands Failing to Capitalize on Own-Brand Traffic?
For every customer that makes a booking on your site, it is highly likely you have already digitally encountered them. That's the conclusion of EyeforTravel's new Understanding the Travel Consumer's Path to Purchase white paper. It looks at real purchase data from more than a quarter of a million consumers across five countries and found that three quarters of consumers will visit and then leave a travel site, before coming back to it to complete their purchase.
The research looked at Online Travel Agency (OTA), airline and hotel verticals, tracking the 15 sites a consumer looks at before they make a purchase. OTA sites were visited between 73% and 78% of the time before conversion, airlines between 69% and 84%, and hotels between 69% and 70%. This suggests that all types of travel brands should aim to convert these visitors first time and optimizing their sites so that consumers don't feel the need to shop around.
This is particularly the case for hotel brands, as the white paper finds that their conversion rates lag noticeably behind airline and OTA desktop conversion rates in Brazil, India and Germany. Furthermore, across all geographies both airline and hotel brands have substantially lower conversion rates for mobile bookings in comparison with OTAs.
EyeforTravel and Jumpshot tracked more than a quarter of a million travel purchasers across five countries through clickstream data and consumer surveys to build a picture of the path to purchase. The white paper details the how, where and why of the decisions people make before they book, and identifies what travel brands should be doing to capture market share.
To download the complete white paper and find all the research click here.
More than half of visitors to travel websites are now using mobile devices in Brazil, India, the UK and the US reports EyeforTravel's Understanding the Travel Consumer's Path to Purchase white paper. This rises to two thirds of consumers in India, where smartphones are more important for accessing the internet.
In Brazil and the US 54% of daily visitors to travel sites used mobile devices, with a slightly higher 57% doing so in the UK. The data was captured using clickstream data from white paper partner Jumpshot's panel of more than 100 million consumers, which tracked visitors across major travel sites in each country.
However, the paper notes that travel brands cannot increase focus on one channel at the expense of another, as consumers are largely adopting a multichannel approach to researching and then purchasing travel, with different devices more important at different stages of the process. Data presented in the paper shows that consumers frequently cross over from primarily using mobile devices to research their travel options, to desktops and laptops in the purchase phase. Desktop conversion rates are also considerably higher than for mobile in all the countries studied, further demonstrating that, for the time being, desktops and laptops remain the primary booking devices, if not the main drivers for research.
To download the complete white paper and read all the research click here.
Are air fares on the up in 2017?
Last year was a good one all round for air travel. Consumers were able to benefit from declines in prices whilst airlines reported excellent profits. However, has this trend now flipped around?
It seems like prices may now be on the up. Underlying this is the rising cost of jet fuel kerosene. Prices plummeted in 2014 and remained through 2015, allowing consumers and the industry to profit. However, in 2016 fuel prices have turned around and look set to continue on an upward trend. Year-on-year from mid-January 2016 to the same point in 2017, kerosene spot prices rose 68%.
This, along with higher labour costs, is cutting into airline profits. IATA expects 2016 to have been the high point for airline profits and several major airlines, including Delta, United, Emirates and Easyjet all reported declining profits in the latter half of 2016.
Already, Hopper reported in January that US flight prices were up 8% on the previous year and CWT and the GBTA expect global rises of 2.5% in 2017.
On average, a fifth of travel consumers visit a social media site immediately before purchasing a vacation according to new research from EyeforTravel and Jumpshot.
Social media domains continue to be visited late into the travel funnel, with users regularly connecting with a social media site within 15 sites of their final purchase destination. This was one of the findings from EyeforTravel's Understanding the Travel Consumer's Path to Purchase white paper. This used clickstream data gathered through research partner Jumpshot's panel of more than 100 million customers, tracking consumers who made a purchase on an airline, hotel or Online Travel Agency (OTA) brand in Brazil, Germany, India, the UK and US.
In all countries and purchase paths measured, social media sites were visited in at least 15% of the cases, rising to just under a quarter of those booking on OTAs in the UK and US.
Additionally, 6% to 12% of consumers visited YouTube in their pre-purchase path, pushing the usage of social media up further.
The white paper details the how, where and why of the decisions people make before they book, and identifies what travel brands should be doing to capture market share.
Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) are leading the competition when it comes to online engagement, particularly with regards to mobile traffic, according to new research from EyeforTravel and Jumpshot.
Over the last 18 months, hotels and airlines have been on a drive to win customer loyalty, but EyeforTravel and Jumpshot's new Understanding the Travel Consumer's Path to Purchase white paper shows they still have a long way to go. According to both clickstream data gathered by Jumpshot from more than a quarter of a million travel purchases and EyeforTravel consumer surveys, OTAs are winning more bookings than travel suppliers, and by a noticeable margin.
In Germany, the UK and the US OTAs represent the largest vertical, taking a greater number of bookings than airline and accommodation brands. In the US, the paper compared clickstream data tracking purchases made on Booking.com, Expedia.com, Airbnb.com, Hotels.com, Delta, Southwest, United, Ryanair, Easyjet, Lufthansa, Emirates, Marriott, Hilton IHG and Wyndham. It found that OTAs were responsible for 42% of the bookings made in the period measured, against 39% for airlines and just 19% for hotel brands.
In the UK and Germany, consumer surveys of nearly 4,500 travellers presented in the paper revealed that OTAs controlled 46.5% and 47.1% of the bookings made on web browsers across all devices in the two countries.
Even when consumers finished their purchase on a hotel or airline site, they were more likely to have visited an OTA site along the way than a hotel or airline site. For example, 33% of German consumers who bought a flight through an airline also visited an OTA along the way but just 13% also went via a competitor airline brand.


Williams students participating in the senior class fundraiser on Sept. 29, show off their colors after being doused with powder.
About 30 students ran through a gauntlet of assorted colored powder on Saturday to support the Class of 2019.
The Sept. 29 Color Run was a fundraiser for the senior class trip.
Each year the senior class hosts the event as one of their fundraisers, and senior advisor Michelle Hall and her dog Rain never miss a chance to get their color on.
"Rain always comes out looking like a rainbow," Hale said.
The Color Run on Saturday was just one of several events the senior class will have this year to raise money. The class will also host concessions at basketball games and hopefully soccer, they said.
The senior trip will be the last big adventure the Class of 2019 will have to memorialize their graduation and put all their hard work behind them.
The group raised about $300 on Saturday. Before June, they will need to raise at least $12,000 to cover travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and Disneyland admission for the entire class of about 80 seniors, Jauregui said.


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