But standing by silently has a predictable downside.  There is plenty of room for legitimate disagreement about China policy, but allowing unfair attacks on China-focused business to go uncontested gives them credibility.  Slamming imports from China without acknowledging how their reduced price and high quality have benefitted the average US consumer is irresponsible.  Criticizing a pegged Chinese currency without acknowledging the benefits of those rates to US companies operating from China is disingenuous. 

The fact is, US exports to China are increasing and often in ways that defy statistics.  Freeborders and other western companies operating in China as Wholly Owned Foreign Entities (WOFE’s) appear in statistics as Chinese companies even though we create substantial numbers of jobs in the US and send our profits back to the US.  We also increase exports to China by putting our knowledge of the Chinese market to work for other western companies entering China. 

Yes, we are American. Yes, we operate in China.  And yes, we are benefitting the American economy through exports and job creation. Just don’t expect us to boast about it until mid-November.

San Francisco, CA – January 6, 2012 – To help companies create delightful travel experiences for customers and gain competitive advantage, Freeborders Inc., a global provider of IT consulting, technology and outsourcing solutions, identified ten technology trends that will shape the travel industry in 2012 and beyond.
According to Freeborders’ research, travel service providers started using five types of technologies – mobile devices, social media, location based services, personalized marketing and near field communications – to enrich the customer experience of travelers on the front end. These technologies allow offering more personalized and expedited service, reservations and check-in processes.
On the back-end, unseen to the traveler, travel service providers can benefit from a second set of five technologies – service-oriented architecture (SOA), business intelligence (BI), cloud computing, RFID, and virtualization – to deliver greater operational efficiencies.

Together, the tech technologies help travel service providers enrich the overall experience for their customers while improving their internal operations.

“Fasten your seat belt. The travel industry as we know it today will not exist in the future. The industry is constantly changing to deliver better travel experiences for customers. This requires cost-effective business models that leverage technology innovation,” says Shrikant Jaiswal, Director of Business Intelligence Technologies at Freeborders. “The ten technologies that we have identified will open up new routes for the travel industry.”

For more information on how the ten technologies are changing the travel and hospitality landscape, please see the Freeborders Whitepaper “Advances in Travel Technology.”

About Freeborders
Founded in 1999, Freeborders provides global IT consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The company pioneered a unique service model that offers the perfect blend of Eastern and Western business practices and access to broad knowledge of the US, European and Chinese markets. Freeborders’ innovation suites – such as Mobile Web and Cloud – help companies exploit the full potential of their IT investments. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has offices in Denver, New York, London, Stockholm, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Wu Xi. To learn more, visit www.freeborders.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at @freebordersinc.

© 2012 Freeborders, Inc. All rights reserved.

First, the fact that 65% of the “exports” are IT related speaks volumes about the changing demographic of IT professionals globally.  While there are certainly pockets of unemployment among tech workers in the US and Europe, it is increasingly difficult to find qualified local tech talent in many if not most thriving tech markets.  Like India a decade ago, China is capitalizing on this dearth of available talent by graduating staggering numbers of capable technologists and making them available to the global community.

Every week, I will take up one trend to review how this can enable travel industry to
maintain competitive advantage.

Challenges in the Travel Industry

The travel industry is currently facing major challenges, including cut throat competition, pressure to acquire new customers, retaining customers, on demand side and managing partners and alliances on supply side.

In addition there is a continuous pressure on containing cost. This is further complicated by:

• Expectation of superior service and positive travel experience at all touch points,
  from online experience, agent interface and customer service.
• Reduced margin – increased operational efficiency of selling plane tickets has
  prompted airlines to progressively lower the commissions, putting pressure
  for cost reductions.
• Impact of Web 2.0/ social network on brand image and influence on travel
  decisions
• Making sense of massive transaction operational data, supplier and third party      data as well massive unstructured data from social network
• Adoption of newer technology innovation such as:
• Creative rich
  content website,
• Behavioral
  marketing,
• Targeted advertisement,
• Leveraging customer profile to facilitate targeted marketing campaigns

Travel Industry Seeking New Ways to Deal with the Challenges

Challenges and competitive pressures are forcing Travel and Hospitality industry to adopt new innovative ways to face challenges and maintain competitive advantage.  Some of these new technology trends, we will review in this blog are:

• Mobile Technology for Travel Industry
• Use social network on brand image to retain customers influence travel
  decisions, and create new customers
• Differentiate themselves to customers by personalization, behavioral marketing and offer optimization by providing relevant information
• Reducing launch window (Conceptualization to deployment) for launching new products and services using cloud services
• Improve revenue management by optimization of pricing model

• Improve operational efficiency based on business insight through near real time operational data
• Cloud Computing for Travel Industry

A CCP focuses on Trade and Position Management, Collateral and Risk Management and Delivery Management prior to settlement. A core function is Collateral Management, which involves calculating exposure and issuing requests to the counterparties to maintain sufficient collateral against exposure. This function is critical to avoid the events like those leading to the forced sale of Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan, AIG’s bailout due to excessive selling of CDS, and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers due mostly to its widening CDS spread. At the core of these events were large highly-leveraged unregulated positions in CDS – with no sufficient collateral safeguards for default and no readily available position data accounting for outstanding positions.

The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and the CME Group are in the process of implementing open-access clearing solutions and leveraging ISDA-based contracts to standardize the clearing function. They will provide single clearinghouses that regulators can monitor positions and prices, and act to reduce counterparty default. NYSE Euronext, Eurex AG and LCH Clearnet Ltd. all propose to enter this market – with NYSE closest to entry. Regulated swaps trading will be executed in the US through Swaps execution Facilities (SEF) and with these changes, many financial services IT platforms and trading operational processes will require revamping. Keven McPartland, director of fixed income research at Tabb, estimates global IT spending on Clearing OTC derivatives will reach $3.3 Billion USD in 2011.

With the standardization of the derivatives market, it is expected that volumes will increase and IT organizations will be challenged by additional volume along with the need for centralized and near real-time risk analysis and reporting. Many of the problems they will be dealing with have to do with historically siloed implementation, based on specialized regionally-, product- or legal-entity-based implementations. To meet this challenge, IT will need to increase automation and Straight-through-processing (STP), reduce back-to-back processing and unneeded reconciliations, standardize trade representations in their “books of record” and leverage service-oriented architectures to be responsive to a changing market and need for more centralized information and reporting.

“We are thrilled to join the ranks of the fastest growing privately-held tech companies nationwide.  We believe that growth is powered by the ability to innovate. Working closely with our clients, we continuously expanded our portfolio of world class IT services to transform their business with innovative technology,” says Jean Cholka, CEO at Freeborders.

In 2011 Freeborders further deepened its footprint in Europe with an office opening in Stockholm, Sweden. The certified SAP® services partner also expanded its SAP ERP Central Component 6.0 (SAP ECC 6.0) upgrade services. Recently, Freeborders introduced Light Enterprise Architecture Framework (LEAF) consulting service that uses capabilities mapping to help companies better align business and IT.

The Tech 200 List is compiled annually by the information services provider Lead411.  It ranks privately-held technology companies in the United States with the highest percent of revenue growth from 2008 to 2010. Lead411 calculates revenue growth by percentages vs. dollar growth. Finalists come from the following industries: Software, Hardware, Internet, Media, Advertising, Wireless, Telecom, IT Services, eCommerce, and Consulting.

To view the Tech 200 list, please click here.

A  Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP) is being established within the Federal Reserve to provide oversight of consumer financial products and services that will affect mortgage origination, credit cards, or other consumer financial products.

The Federal Reserve will now be limiting fees for processing debit and credit card transactions. Credit/debit card issuers will be collecting less in fees and retailers will be paying more. Examples of market effect have been that both Red Box and Netflix have raised their fees in reaction to the additional overhead.

Businesses that rely heavily on Cards and Payments are looking for intelligent solutions to reduce their costs and risks. One way the marketplace is trying to address this problem is through use of Level 2 and Level 3 credit data. This will be especially important to E-commerce, travel and entertainment markets, where cards and payments are core to their business, and B2B (corporate) accounts make up a large part of their client base.

Credit card processing is setup on a three-level system. These ’levels’ are made to qualify a transaction and have more data about the purchaser associated with each transaction. Corporate and P-card transactions may exceed $185 Billion in 2011 and Corporations and government agencies increasingly rely on this form of payment to compensate their service providers and suppliers.

Downgrade charges can make up 25% or more of a merchant’s total transactions. Some businesses may qualify for ways to process these transactions that allow them to pay lower fees if they can supply additional information in the form of Level 2 or Level 3 data.

Many companies are looking into strategies to interface their in house payments systems to Merchant Services companies where they can take advantage of these lower costs.

What is surprising is that the actions of an online Chinese business and its angry consumers so precisely mimic their US counterparts, and in this global economy we are not even surprised by it!  Could anyone imagine even 15 years ago that the Chinese government would allow faceless sellers and consumers to transact business with scarcely any regulation.  15 years ago, consumer choice in China was extremely limited when compared to the rest of the world, and today Chinese consumers are so demanding of their ability to transact business online that they protest (and win!) when it is threatened. 

Moreover, the tactics used to push back on the heavy-handed retailer are identical to what we use in the west: public protests, boycots, and minor civil disobedience (overwhelming the website to bring it down).  We could be reading about the popular backlash after Facebook’s changes to its privacy policy or Wikileaks attacks on American banks that refuse to allow donor traffic.    Before giving in to customer demands, Taobao summoned its own agressive strategy by going on the attack, claiming that its increase in fees was an effort to honor the governments request to clamp down on fake products.  Nice move! curry favor with the government while mollifying foreign partners like Yahoo!

As with most public disputes, it’s difficult to tell where the truth lies in the Taobao situation, but the open exchange of accusations and the ultimate resolution of the issues sounds about as free market at you can get.  No government intervention; no bureacratic red tape.  We are used to the clout of market forces in the US, and it looks like capitalism with Chinese characteristics is getting used to it as well.  I hope those who claim change in China is slow and incremental are watching.  The globalization ship has sailed and it runs both east and west.

As the implementation of Dodd-Frank is being determined by organizations such as the SEC and CFTC, many CIOs are struggling to figure out how they will consolidate the data and operations between disparate systems to support the emerging requirements. These changes both pose challenges and offer opportunity for IT organizations. They could actually be the impetus to transform IT.

This first blog series  reviews the major provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act and then considers how these new compliance requirements will affect financial services organizations. Next, it considers the relative changes required for technology organizations and concludes with some suggestions for positioning technology to support Dodd-Frank.

This week I plan to address ten innovative technologies that I believe are advancing the travel experience and I will include some thoughts on how to understand and navigate the rapidly changing technology – in order to differentiate, secure customer loyalty, and quickly adapt to new business models.

The first five are technologies that are already making the journey simpler and smooth for travelers – but their innovative possibilities have just scratched the surface. Many travelers today have spent their whole adult life in the digital age. They expect information and personalization whenever and wherever they travel. They are always connected and time is a scarce resource.

The second five technologies are high on the list of those that deliver greater operational efficiencies to the travel industry. Most are deeply embedded into the fabric of IT– hidden from the traveling public – but absolutely playing an equally important part in the travel industry’s competitive bout.