Help us change the travel industry - We're hiring!

We're in extraordinarily exciting times in the technology industry. The simultaneous rise of mobile and social creates fantastic opportunities for innovative new products.

The travel industry is especially ready for the next wave of innovation at this moment in time, since social and mobile are such a perfect match for travel, and the field is still wide open.

Our team here in Palo Alto is very fortunate to have the opportunity to play a key role in creating the next generation mobile travel products. We were acquired by TripAdvisor earlier this year, and since then we've worked on some great new projects. Just last week we launched City Guides for Android. The press has been very positive, and users are raving (as evidenced by fantastic reviews in the Android market!)

We have big plans for the future, and we are growing our team with great engineers and product managers.

For the right candidates I believe we offer the best opportunities available anywhere in the world. Some of the key reasons you'll love working in our team:

• We have a highly talented team, and we're all extremely passionate about our work and the impact it has. Team members come from all over the world, including from China, Korea, India, France, The Netherlands, and even three San Francisco Bay Area natives.
• We are focused on a market that is both huge, and fun. Who doesn't love travel? We all do, and we are lucky enough to work on things we love. Since we are part of TripAdvisor we have the means to do what it takes to create successful mobile travel products, but we are still a small, highly flexible team.
  
• Our office is located right at the center of the world's technology hotspot: University Ave in Palo Alto. This means easy accessibility by Cal Train from San Francisco, and great coffee and lunch spots all around us.
  

If this sounds interesting, feel free to reach out to me using Twitter or LinkedIn.

Steve Jobs, enabler of entrepreneurs' dreams

The news of Steve Jobs' death is still shaking the world. It certainly shook me, and like many others it impacted me more than I expected. On Wednesday night, a couple of hours after the news broke, I went over to his house with my family and left a flower and note along hundreds of others, a simple gesture to pay respect. Now, several days later, having read dozens of obituaries and having talked about almost nothing else, I feel the urge to write down some thoughts.

Having moved to Silicon Valley from the Netherlands 7 years ago to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams it is now clear to me that Steve Jobs has had an outsized impact on how my adventure has fared so far.

Initially I was just an admirer of Jobs, who was clearly one of the driving forces in Silicon Valley. I ran into him 3 or 4 times here in Palo Alto, and was always starstruck when it happened. Here's a tweet I posted 2 years ago:

Spotted Steve Jobs getting in his car while I was biking to work. I was in awe like a 12 yr old fanboy... wow, this guy defines tech

Not only was he an inspiration, but his impact on my business became very concrete. The vision for my company EveryTrail depended heavily on smart phones becoming more powerful, easier to use and more open to developers. This turned out to be one of the major barriers to success. Many times over investors and other industry "experts" told me that my plan wouldn't work as key players in the mobile space were too powerful, and would never allow the mobile ecosystem to open up and enable a flourishing mobile start-up economy.

I stubbornly ignored this advice, because I had the gut feeling that something would happen to open up the mobile playing field. It was 2006, and I had no clear idea of how this would happen, but it just felt unavoidable. Maybe a big mobile player like Nokia, Motorola, Verizon or Microsoft would force change in the industry? Or perhaps a start-up would become a disrupting force?

Now we know that Apple and Steve Jobs created the disruption I needed. Initially laughed at as a "toy" by most leading players, the iPhone and the App Store broke the mobile field open and caused a huge wave of creativity and value creation. This was no accident, but instead the result of 30 years of incredible hard work, risk taking and perseverance by Steve Jobs.

Like anything in life, this was not a silver bullet by any means for my company, but it did create a significant opportunity that positively changed its trajectory and eventually led to the successful sale to TripAdvisor. It turned the dream of one optimist into a viable business plan, and eventually into a valuable company that employs a dozen people (and growing) and generated great returns to its investors.

This is just one story by one guy and his dream. When you consider that thousands of similar stories exist, it is clear that Steve Jobs not only was a source of inspiration, but also a concrete enabler of entrepreneurship.

Thank you Steve for enabling the dreams of entrepreneurs to come true.

Google is the king of links. Bing could become the king of likes.

Google has dominated web search over the past decade, mainly because it was the first search engine to figure out how to effectively leverage the web's link graph to serve up the most relevant results to any query. Its main competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft have had a surprisingly hard time catching up with Google's SERP relevance even after investing billions into their efforts.

The rise of Facebook creates a very important challenge to Google: while links were the pivotal signal to determine page authority and relevance during the first 15 years of the web, Facebook "likes" are set to emerge as an important additional signal, and perhaps an even more important one. After all, the link graph leverages the wisdom of the (web) crowds. Now that more people are "liking" than "linking", it only makes sense that "likes" will take over as the most important manifestation of the collective wisdom and taste of the world's web users.

And guess what? Google doesn't have access to the like graph, while Microsoft does.

This makes tomorrow's Bing event very interesting. If (big if) Microsoft figures out a good way to leverage the like-graph into a more robust set of search results for typical web queries, it may have found itself a chance to chip away at Google's leadership. If successful it would still be largely dependent on Facebook's continued willingness to give it access to the like-graph, but that will be a future battle.