This article talks about how travel agents can still offer better prices and perks than the internet. Despite this about 4,000 travel agencies no longer exist between 2010 and a few years earlier, mainly because of the fact that travelers can do all these things on their own now. Travel agents still maintain a close partnership with hotels and airlines so they tend to have a little more push when it comes to getting things done for you.

Global Distribution Systems are slowly taking over our industry, but this does not mean that travel agents are out of work. There are still some benefits that travel agents can provide that Global Distribution Systems cannot. That is to say, that there are still travelers who prefer to have their own travel agent who already knows the travelers preference and will make the booking of their next travel that much easier. Global Distribution Systems are being used by hotels to reach travel agents all around the world. In addition to the fact that travel agents are that third party travelers look for when booking. They want to know the truth about their travel stays and accomodations.

This article talks about how the Santa Barbara Police Department uses Predictive Policing to help fight crime. Professor Cilli mentioned this in class the other day and it really caught my attention. It blew my mind how technology is so advanced that things like this can happen for the better of our country, and our citizens!  What the article talks about is how the Santa Barbara PD needed to make some budget cuts, and could not afford to hire more officers, so they decided a non traditional approach to fight crime, and that was the use of technology to predict crime in certain areas, this is known as Predictive Policing. What happens with this is basically old crimes are inputted into a database with all the details and information, and this piece of technology predicts when and where the next crimes similar to the older ones will happen again. This is all based on previous historical patterns of course, and the predictions obviously have their faults.

This article shows the major impact that chinese Social Media giant (qq.com, compared to Twitter) has had on Australian tourism. Chinese visitors are now the second most valuable tourists of Australia, behind New Zealander's. Experts of say that by the year 2020, tourism is expected to increase to one million Chinese tourists annually. Back in 2012 Chinese tourists brought in an estimated $4.2 billion into Australia. An estimated 8 million people shared pictures of Australia's Hamilton Island last year through the relatively new Instagram photo sharing application