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Amazon's net income was US$177 million, or 38 cents per share, a 57 percent percent drop from a year ago.

Sales for the three months before Dec. 31 came out to $17.4 billion, lower than Wall Street expected over the traditionally busy holiday season.

Flooding in Thailand slowed down production for many tech companies this year

The Keys to Marriott's Success Long before the economy went south, Marriott had a reputation for finding creative ways to wrest the most value from every IT dollar.

The devil is in the details—success is in the system.-The Spirit to Serve Metrics drive Marriott. Talk to an IT associate on any given day, and he can tell you exactly how much business the company processed via its systems that week per second ($3,568 when this reporter visited).When implementing the PeopleSoft enterprise service automation module for project tracking and time reporting within IT, for example, programmers developed a tool so that project and productivity metrics are automatically computed after time is entered. Another rule for metrics is to make sure that the right people get the right data in a form that’s meaningful to them. "You need to measure a lot of things, but the trick is to publish the right information to the relevant audience," says Melnick. "Having Marriott.com up and running is not as important as the dollars running through it," explains Keppler. Melnick adds, "For each system we try to focus on the core metrics. And that changes. What might have been important the day you go live becomes a nonevent a few weeks in." For example, five years ago the critical metric for Marriott.com was uptime. Today, it’s how much business the website books. Last year, metrics fueled the IT department’s decision to invest in an upgrade to the site that would make it easier to reserve rooms. Today, more than 75 percent of rooms booked online come through Marriott.com, saving the company $12 million annually.Keeping its eye on the numbers lets Marriott revisit business cases for IT projects each quarter. "The project itself may not change that much, but something external may happen—something like SARS, something from the competition," Melnick explains. "Just because you start a project and it’s on track doesn’t mean you want to keep the same pace. There may be something that comes up that’s even better." Success is never final.-The Spirit to Serve Though the IT department’s resourcefulness is helping keep Marriott afloat during hard times, Wilson and his peers aren’t taking anything for granted. They say they can’t let their culture of resourcefulness wither away when the economy turns around. They’re reminded of how easy it could be to let their guard down each time they flip through Mr. Marriott’s book in which he quotes Somerset Maugham: "The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones."But Wilson believes the principles and procedures put in place for prudent and resourceful IT decision making should keep the company on the straight and narrow and ahead of the competition."I have a firm belief that the only real sustainable competitive advantage we can get with IT is making sure our people understand conceptually what IT can and can’t do and apply it better than competitors," Wilson says. "Anything we do in IT, a competitor can install. What they can’t capture that quickly is having a team of people throughout the company that really gets this and follows it all the way through. That’s sustainable."Marriott has valued resourcefulness—on paper if not always in practice—for decades. But resourcefulness is not an end in itself. It’s a tool one uses in the ongoing construction of value, a project that’s never finished. Or, as Mr. Marriott says succinctly in his book, "Success is never final."

Address negativity and remove barriers swiftly to send a strong message of behaviour expectations.

Use the 80/20 Principles to guide you to faster decision–making (gather 80% of the relevant bits of information in the first 20% of available time. The remaining 20% of the data (which would take the remaining 80% of your time to obtain) typically does not substantially improve the quality of your decision.

Look for learning in post-project reviews, customer meetings, changes in priorities and mistakes. Learn from these experiences to build flexibility into future approaches.

In 2008, Bank of America became one of the first organizations to test electronic badges that tracked and analyzed employee behavior. The experiment, in which call-center workers agreed to be followed electronically for a month, found that groups of employees who spent time together were more productive.

The tracking-badge technology used in the Bank of America tests, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab

“Human social interaction is rapidly becoming more measurable at a large scale, thanks to always-on sensors like cellphones. The next challenge is to use what we learn from this behavioral data to influence or enhance how people work with each other,”

What’s more, we found something very surprising: Investment in IT had a greater impact on a company’s profits than comparable spending on either advertising or R&D.

creativity and innovation.

enhance profitability more than others.

Influencers have been a part of modern hotel marketing strategies for several years now, and it could be argued that influencers have played a key role in traditional hotel marketing for many decades

Think of how The Ritz in Paris became synonymous with icons like Coco Chanel and Ernest Hemingway - who they've named their old world cocktail bar after.

Inspire an Established Audience

Going digital with your menu is inevitable. Plus, it is more convenient for you and your customers. It elevates the customer experience and helps you reduce costs, boost sales, and promote your items in the best ways possible.  When it comes to the digital world, the sky is your limit, so get creative and make your menu more irresistible than ever!

Mayakoba, Riviera Maya

uses no motorized vehicles throughout the entire property. Instead, guests can ride electric golf carts, bicycles, or electric boats on more than nine miles of canals.

Palmer House Hilton in Chicago

Tumblr is a fast growing social blogging platform

a cross between WordPress,

Twitter and Pinterest.

Extending the Hilton brand's commitment to well-designed and thoughtful spaces, HDS provides a cost-effective and time-saving solution for Hilton owners, operators and design consultant teams.

Not only does HDS represent a design solution, it is developed in a way that allows Hilton to closely monitor user behavior and anticipate emerging trends in each region of the world. Analytics provided by HDS enable Hilton to easily and quickly update brand-approved options that respond to the needs of owners and guests.

Steve Barrow, VP of IS, Luby’s Inc

people have been buying what's known as street food for generations.

Food carts were already a fixture in many cities back in the 1800s.

Food trucks are just starting to become popular in cities like Dallas,