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VivoAquatics, the leading water management and real-time monitoring platform for hotels, resorts, fitness clubs and other commercial facilities announced it has secured Series A financing led by Level Equity, a growth equity firm focused on software and automation companies.

The funding represents another milestone for the company as leading brands and properties continue to adopt the VivoPoint software and IoT platform to proactively manage the risks and costs of water within a facility while improving the guest experience.

We are thrilled to partner with Level Equity and our investor group to help facility and engineering leaders better manage water across commercial properties to protect their brand and assets

tw telecom CEO Keynotes COMPTEL PLUS Fall 2012 Convention & EXPO

called for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to embrace "smart, forward looking competitive telecom policy with price and service quality rules where incumbents have market power, regardless of technology used."

"The FCC should establish technology-neutral policies, a principle that is central to the Telecom Act of 1996 and competition policy,"

Lower interest rates, revenues that are outpacing expense growth and below average supply additions are combining to give lenders and investors a greater comfort level with the U.S. lodging investment market,

"Double-digit profit growth, coupled with the low cost of capital and limited supply growth, make hotel real estate an attractive option to commercial real estate investors," said Scott Smith MAI, vice president in the Atlanta office of PKFC

"Institutional investors and private equity funds are showing a bias towards full-service and resort hotels in the major markets, where profit growth has been the greatest,"

India will ban e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com and Walmart -owned Flipkart Group from selling products from companies in which they have an equity interest.

The new regulations follow complaints from Indian retailers and traders who say e-commerce companies like Amazon have created an unfair marketplace.

India’s retail market is dominated by small corner shops, which are now threatened by the e-commerce giants.

Advances in IT have prompted the hospitality and tourism industries to move in a new direction, i.e. internet marketing or eMarketing (Leung et al., 2015)

On the other hand, from the customer perspective, tourism and hospitality are an information-intensive consumption experience because a customer might make considerable efforts to collect information and understand the image of a travel destination before making a purchase decision (Kim and Law, 2015). In this regard, search engines and social media are two of most fundamental information sources for making such decisions (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010). With their information-sharing capability, social media empower customers, granting them a “democratic consumption culture” by reducing information asymmetry and increasing their bargaining power (Leung et al., 2013). The pervasiveness and powerful computational capability of mobile technology make it possible for tourists to easily access information, book online services or even make impromptu purchases (Kim and Law, 2015). Apparently, the tourism and hospitality industries have been facing a revolution that has arisen largely because of IT turbulence (Piccoli, 2008).

Studies suggest that IT plays a prominent role in the tourism and hospitality industries, and it will be imperative, and indeed beneficial, for tourism and hospitality practitioners and scholars to keep abreast of all the advances in IT

when the Caribbean Tourism Organization gets underway tomorrow, delegates, diplomats, tourism trade representatives and others will also be getting down to some serious business. Thursday’s Investment Power Forum on the Caribbean, honoring internationally-renown Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and featuring the chief executive of Branson’s Caribbean-based Branson Center of Entrepreneurship, an economic development initiative, is a perfect example of the key networking events tailored for decision makers in the tourism, travel and investment fields.

By putting thousands of micro-vertical industry features into the applications, all customers in that specific industry can share those features in a multitenant cloud environment.  Applications rich in industry domain lower the cost and time of deployment and make future enhancements and upgrades far easier.  By enabling mission critical processes to be managed and integrated with applications for CRM, HCM, Marketing, and more in the cloud, Infor delivers a complete CloudSuite for its target industries, which has led to significant growth and larger deal sizes.  

The data breach hitting Marriott Hotels Group was huge. The joint-second largest to have ever taken place, in fact, after Yahoo’s disastrous 2013 breach (and on par with Yahoo’s 2014 breach). While the amount of data that was taken from Starwood Hotels’ reservation systems (a company acquired by Marriott in 2016) was vast, what’s most staggering is the fact the breach went undetected for four years, and an acquisition also took place but the alarm still wasn’t raised. Since news originally broke of the release, it’s also been revealed that the hotel group’s own security team was hit by an attack in June 2017. Clearly something has gone amiss.

The issue is compounded by the fact that security is still not high enough up the list of priorities for business leaders. Despite well-known organizations frequently hitting the headlines for data breaches (in 2018 alone we’ve had Ticketmaster, Quora, British Airways, Under Armour and plenty more) and a ‘when not if’ warning  being peddled by the security industry for years, many businesses still haven't got to grips with just how critical proper security is. The fact that reviewing security may not have been part of the acquisition process of Starwood by Marriott – and if it was, not well enough – is further evidence of this apparent blindness to the impact of poor security. So, what’s going wrong? A research report from security company Bromium earlier this year suggested that the average large enterprise spends $16.7 million per annum on security, with the vast majority found to be on ‘the human cost of maintaining cyber security systems’. While most firms clearly aren’t 2,000 people sized enterprises, the research provides a good indication that spending on security isn’t the issue. Instead, it’s people.

We need to look at different approaches to skills development and, in many ways, imitate cyber criminals themselves who are continually iterating ideas to solve problems, rewarding perseverance and curiosity as well as encouraging further development. The ‘white hats’ need to approach their roles the same way – not rely on what they heard in a classroom six months previously.

Venture capital firms ask themselves tough questions these days.

The software industry has been heavily over-invested in for the last few years, according to panelists at the session "Can Software Recapture Investors' Interest?"

Among them: how can they dig out of the dot-com collapse? How should they invest going forward? How should the leader of a firm strike the right note for the future? And is it a field that graduating MBAs should aspire to enter?

SECAUCUS, N.J. – Northstar Travel Media, the world’s leading business-to-business media company serving the travel and meetings industries, has announced that it is supplying a unique hotel identifier that solves the problems associated with multiple identifiers. “For nearly a decade the travel industry has struggled with the costs and problems created by multiple identifiers, said Sheila Rice, VP Business Development & Licensing. “Over the years, each business created its own system resulting in a proliferation of identification numbers. A single entity may have numerous proprietary codes across different systems. As each segment of the industry tries to integrate information with suppliers, travel agents, hotels, GDS systems, CRS providers, content publishers and payment processors, predictable problems ensue.” With a history spanning more than 70 years, Northstar Travel Media is already established in the business and process of identification numbers. It is uniquely positioned to lead a solution for this long-standing and increasing industry problem. As the content provider of unique hotel identifiers, Northstar Travel Media has been supplying this data to leading travel and hospitality companies for more than a decade. Northstar’s database of 200,000 hotels worldwide contains up to 300 fields of data for each hotel. “Northstar Travel Media has a pristine reputation for providing data that is comprehensive, accurate, reliable and flexible,” said Tom Kemp, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “We look forward to providing more content solutions with our unique hotel identification numbers.” Licensing of the unique hotel identifier data includes hotel name, address and telephone number. Content packages can be customized to provide solutions to meet specific needs. The Unique Hotel Identifier builds on Northstar’s existing hotel products and services that include more than 60,000 hotels around the world reviewed and classified using the company’s industry-standard consumer classification hotel rating system. Northstar Travel Media is the leading provider of news, information and data for the travel, meetings and hospitality industries and parent of brands Travel Weekly, Business Travel News, Meetings & Conventions, Successful Meetings, Incentive and TravelAge West. NTM’s electronic directories — Travel Weekly’s Hotel & Travel Index and M&C Facilities Search — provide in-depth data on hotels, meeting and convention properties, and business travel in the United States and internationally. In addition to its directories and periodicals, NTM publishes a number of online subscription information resources, including travel42, Weissmann Reports, STAR Service Online, Intelliguide Corporate and BTP24. Northstar also is an industry leader in marketing services, custom communications, content licensing and database management serving the travel and meetings industries. Additionally, Northstar recently acquired PhoCusWright, the premier global travel, tourism and hospitality research and event business at the intersection of the Internet and the global travel industry. Based in Secaucus, New Jersey, the company also has offices in New York, Glen Ellyn, Illinois; Los Angeles; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Northstar Travel Media, LLC is a portfolio company of BV Investment Partners, a leading private equity investor in the media and communications sector.

top online marketing trends of 2014

Content Marketing Will be Bigger Than Ever

concentrate on inbound marketing, by producing valuable, engaging content designed for a specific audience

close to half (46 percent) of retailers in the U.S. launched proximity marketing programs or pilots in 2015

An effective strategy depends on marketers simultaneously addressing three important considerations: defining their business goals; designing an effective customer experience; and understanding the technology needed to enable their strategy and realize their goals

its content is often more relevant than most display advertising, because it's sent to those consumers who are most likely to respond at a time when they are close to the point of purchase

the only third-party hotel asset management company offering full owner-entity accounting capabilities

most hotel operators account solely for hotel operations and miss what’s happening with the investment at the owner level, including fixed-asset accounting, debt and equity activity, and managing cash flow after debt service.

We also work closely with asset management. There’s no double communication; when you’ve communicated with asset management, you’ve communicated with us and when you send reports to asset management, you send reports to us.

Hilton Hotels, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Mandarin Oriental and the Trump Collection have all admitted that their payments systems were compromised this year as hackers hunting for credit card details switch their attention to the leisure industry. This week Hilton and Starwood said guests’ personal details had been taken after hackers gained access via payment systems.

Occupancy, which has seen an increase to 66.2 percent in 2018, will receive a further boost from an anticipated 2.1 percent rise in demand. A combination of factors like capital spending, tax-law changes and improved wage growth have affected the industry for the better

There are now more jobs than there are people to fill them.

Hotel employees are taking advantage of this unemployment rate to demand changes like increased wages and benefits, job security and better healthcare.

prepare accurate financial statements

(IFRS)

PCAOB