Hraba Hospitality Consulting

Basically… email has been around 40 years. Wave is a rebuild of the concept, building email as it would look with all the modern tools in today’s world. From our perspective, Wave is going to be perfect for hotels, eventually replacing outlook and slimming down on unnecessary meetings, facilitating real time business.

Watching the hour and twenty minutes was better than a sci-fi movie for a (more…)

Basically.. in 1995 or 1996 there was some fantastic work going on with the use of html and web based programming for nothing more than esoteric or experimental purposes.  Some pretty nifty stuff arose out of that, and I am sad to say I haven’t been able to remember or find any of those sites… interactive, bizarre, weird sites that were meaningless but enveloping.  If any of you know what I am talking about… sites that are nothing more than a portal to interactive art.. not selling anything, not built for any real reason… share those (more…)

I was ranting and raving about not being able to keep structure or organization with social media, so I took some time to find some useful programs to help me out.   Well…. this is pretty cut and dry:    A quick, succinct post for you to be made aware of (and yet another onslaught from) useful social media tools.  Social Media is simply a tool in itself… so they are tools for tools.  With some of my friends’ more sophomoric moments of wit… they might suggest including myself would make it a third tool.  =)

A list of 10 tools that you might know of, or might not.  As many of these lists go you will likely act as I do…. Stoic, dismissive, and blase…  I will find myself say, “I know all these already,” ……. and then (more…)

I am thinking of moving from my HTC Touch Pro to a PALM Pre. I, of course, started considering an iphone for the first time, but after a little research I am BAFFLED… completely and totally baffled. If the stuff below has been fixed, updated, upgraded…. fine. But is the below true? Because that is madness.  I need a phone for business.  Period.

IPHONE PEOPLE… please clear up my misinformation below. (more…)

Has this really happened? Have we found ourselves in the position to have a guest blogger? Oh my have we. I wouldn’t normally do this, but 1) I am always insecure about the pertinence and efficacy of my posts and would love a very, VERY smart man to bolster them, and 2) Property level employees — no matter how thoughtful, philosophical, and skilled — rarely have time to sit down and blog. Therefore, I would love the opportunity to represent some of the finer, more polished minds that are still doing the prop level grind.

So.. I present one Theo McKinney, The Concierge & Guest Service Specialist at Hotel Carlton, a Joie De Vivre property in San Francisco. In the past couple months, working on the previously mentioned “Hotels that Help” (and more to come) charity. In our conversations, Theo had offered some of the most intelligent, passionate, and competent conversation about hotel management and operations. I fear it is a conversation I stray from too (more…)

This is a lazy post endorsing flock in this conversation *HERE*.  Basically, the article talks about Facebook and Firefox coming to a head, of sorts.  It is rational to assume, and I think it is a VERY good post on the subject.  However, I think the Flock Browser built on the FF platform is already there in some ways, and should be given a look to making your life simpler when it comes to the world of 2.0 and social media.  It seemed to get a lot of bad press early on from crashing and memory problems, but… well… my point is this:  if you are in social media in any way, casually or professionally… give a shot.  What’s more, give it a second chance.

—————————————————————————–

Hmmm…. it is odd that flock is so vilified. I have a unique perspective that I am relatively new to the trenches of social media, as I used to be a property level manager for hotels. I think I installed Flock in November? This reminds me of the situation with what I think was likely the best social media site EVER… tribe.net. It was great, basically broke and had so much downtime/maintance time that people eventually moved on. Sure it works again, but the massive disruption to the overall networking effect basically killed it.

Same thing with Flock. The negative experience people had at the outset was so incredibly bad that no one even considers it at this point, although it seems to be an asset to me.

Here’s what I have experienced so far:

If you have a small browser, it may be hard to use with the sidebars open. However, that is the last negative thing you will get from me.

The crashing people talk about has been resolved. I am fairly confident saying it has never crashed on me, unlike both chrome and FF.

The memory seepage or leakage has been resolved. I operate with upwards of 45 tabs open at times, and it doesn’t seem to have any impact on my memory or functionality. In fact, I would say Explorer is a nightmare (of course) and Chrome is pretty fast and not bulky…. but I think Flock operates dead even with FF (I know it’s built on it, but with all the extras it doesn’t slow down)

The home page that aggregates a lot of your faves, etc is nice, but I still like my igoogle page for voice, maps, mail, etc.

The tab that keeps track of Digg, Flickr, FB, Twitter, YouTube and Myspace is incredible.

The video/photo uploader and content stream is incredible.

The RSS feeder has replaced google reader 100%

The mail function is incredibly efficient, and with my 5 webmail accounts handles fairly simple posting between them pretty easily.

It has a bookmark/favourite sidebar that makes links a bit easier. What’s also nice is that since it is built on FF it synchs with Foxmarks.

The blogging tool is AWESOME, as I can open a second window and start riffing and typing away, without leaving the browser. There are some font issues for me at times, but I can post to multiple blogs in the blink of an eye.

There are so many other things I cannot even get into them… highlighting rss or video, etc. It is endless, and I am constantly learning it.

It’s funny… I don’t wear labels on my clothes *ever* because I hate endorsing brands. =) But Flock? No problem! haha….

Michael
@hhotelconsult

Yet another ambly, rambly post from a caffeine fueled hospitality dork. This is more waxing than anything, and is a state of affairs and insight rather than some exciting insider news. Hopefully, if you actually finish it, it will just make you nod your head and think a bit. This is about how we spend out time…. and however it ebbs, however fast; it’s an issue nowadays.  “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”  Might be easy for Albert Einstein to say that…. but it sort of seems like everything *is* happening at once nowadays.

You know what we do. I know (more…)