201 not out

If doing it twice makes a tradition, welcome to the traditional BOOT speedometer post marking 201 entries in the blog (101 not out is here).

The last 100 posts have clearly been dominated by meta search companies with my Business of Meta-Search Travel (BOMST) side line including:

• Boom time capital raisings for Sidestep, Farecast and a mind blowing round for Fare.net;
• Content deals, UGC deals, elephant deals and product launches a-plenty for Sidestep, Kayak, Lonely Planet and Bezurk; and
• Debates, advice and interviews with start ups Hotelsbycity, Asiatravelmarket and Travelpost.com (in fact I still owe Hotelsbycity an answer)
  

But the other sectors were just as busy:

• The PE firms went crazy buying everything in sight - Flight Centre, Qantas and Sabre.
  Even the smaller guys had a taste of the PE goodness with eDreams and GoVoyages joining the feast;
  
• Qantas managed to annoy me even more than usual by first ignoring me, then playing a game of "no it doesn't" every time someone told them that the Qantas VOD system was busted and finally by being involved in a mile high story what wasnt;
  
• Travelport continued its acquisition fever by merging Worldspan into its Galileo business. In a display of the power of search engines and search logs - the BOOT called the deal early based on record traffic from Atlanta, Denver and Parsippany to the BOOT in the weeks leading up to the deal;
  
• The Transportation Security Agency in the US went a bit crazy and started arresting every Tom, Dick and Harry;
  
• I went a bit video crazy with new business seats that are just plain old, 1950s nostalgia that looks a lot like 2007 marketing and a poker vid makes to sweat more than a Friday night stand-by; and
  
• I bade farewell to full time venture capital work at Netus (though I am helping them out on a project part time at the moment)
  

Things to watch in the next 100 (ie my predictions) are:

• Priceline changing its approach to Asia. With the Hutchison Whampoa group no longer a shareholder and the Asian growing fast - Priceline has to make a new move;
• Heating up in the full service online battle in Australia as Webjet, Travel.com.au, Expedia and Zuji all launch new products but all of them will fail to achieve the growth rates of the hotel only leaders Wotif.com and HotelClub/RatesToGo;
• More rumours and maybe a deal or two around the Travelport break up;
• Even more meta-search and UGC/Travel social networking launches in Asia Pacific, Europe and America; and
  
• More consolidation between the offline players (like the MyTravel-Thomas Cook deal in Europe and the MFS/S8 merger in Australia) as they try and make up for missing the online revolution.
  

And finally through some strange quirk that I did not plan, we had a lot of animals on the blog in this 100 from elephants to dinosaurs to suicide bomber donkeys.

Oh- and England won (some of) the cricket.