The PhoCusWright Conference in Hollywood (Nov 17-20) saw 32 travel companies giving demonstrations at the Travel Innovation Summit on Monday Nov 17. The demonstrations were voted on in real time by audience members, and PhoCusWright has now announced the names of the six companies who got the most votes.

The six winners (two each from the following categories - startups, emerging companies and established companies) are Home&Abroad, Interactive Mobile @dvertising LLC, TripIt, Triporati, Wandrian Inc. and Yapta.com. These six then had another round on Wednesday and Thurday, at Center Stage event, where each of them had 5 minutes to sell themselves to the crowd, explain the reason for their (expected) success, and garner as many votes as possible.

This second and final round was won by Interactive Mobile @dvertising LLC (www.imatnow.com/), which was declared as the company with this year’s most innovative application. The ‘Best in Show’ was chosen by a blue ribbon panel comprised of analysts, pundits, bloggers and media representatives.

According to this Travelpulse editorial, iM@ develops “geo-intelligent” mobile visitors guides for major tourist and business travel destinations. Through a simple, downloadable mobile phone application, it provides travelers with immediate on-demand access to destination-specific information on accommodations, transportation, dining, points of interest and entertainment.

And now for some sustainable news. There’s an organization called Climate Counts, which is going around handing out ratings for companies based on their involvement in, and efforts on behalf of, fighting climate change.

They have this neat scoring system, which divvies up the companies into categories like Airlines, Hotels, Electronics, Apparel, Food Services, Beverages-Beer, and so on. I checked out the Airlines, and Northwest tops the list, followed by Southwest and then American Airlines.

Among hotels,  Marriott, Starwood and Hilton make up the top 3 (in that order). The scoresheet for Marriott says that while they’ve taken steps to reduce their impact on global climate change, the company does not actively support public policy that addresses climate change.

Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by PLing
Filed under: Sustainable Travel, Travel News