I have done my fair share of “consulting” in the past. I even might describe myself as an ecommerce consultant from time to time (including on this blog!) - however mainly my client work has been as an external contractor (with the main difference between a consultant and a contractor being who owns the intellectual property to work undertaken on behalf of a client - consultants do - contractors don’t - the 2nd difference being a few hundred dollars on the day rate)

One of the best ways of generating new business as a consultant is to tell someone they have a problem - because naturally people then want to pay to get their problem solved. This is why I am not very good at consultant marketing because I really don’t like to tell people about problems they are already probably aware of - also I consider it a bit patronising for me to say “did you know you could do this better” - as there is probably a valid reason why they haven’t done it that way in the first place….

As a consultant I tend to get brought in when someone needs a solution - not when someone wants to know if they have any problems or not. Besides, currently I limit myself to a maximum of 1 day a week doing consulting with the rest of my time solving my own business challenges - not other people’s problems!

Sometimes I see other consultants raising this whole “you have a problem, pay us to fix it” and I cringe. The name for this is FUD - raising fear, uncertainty and doubt. Today I read FUD in this weeks Travel Weekly (4th Jan 08 edition).

The consultant who wrote the Travel Weekly article was the Chief Executive of Logan Tod - an ecommerce consultancy with a handful of travel industry clients (UK). I quote:

Typically for every 100 visits to a travel website only one or two result in a booking

OK - so far so good. This is a factual statement that is probably about right. If you do your analysis against unique visitors over a month (rather than visits over a month) your conversion percentage could be higher - but this is standard numbers for a “travel website” (no indication if this is a holiday, a commodity or transport product - or leisure or business travel - so quite a general statement as indicated by the word typically)

However, it is the next sentence that wound me up!

Companies cannot allow this situation to continue, especially when part of the solution is so simple 

What?! This makes it sound like everyone with a simple flip of a switch can solve the problem! That must be the power of consultants! Where is this switch? :)

Is low booking conversion really a problem?
One reason why companies can let this situation continue is that conversion is the WRONG measure. Frankly I only care about whether the customer / user, on an individual site visit, achieved their goal when they first arrived on the site. Very few visits to a travel website set out with a goal of buying a product. Many users just want to check availability, undertake destination research, find the customer service contact details etc….. a low booking conversion doesn’t immediately indicate that there is a critical issue with the performance of a website…..

A second reason that I don’t like booking conversion as a metric is that the modern trend on travel websites is to provide more information - and sometimes even community features (like a forum, blog etc) - and this will make your conversion percentage fall. However, I would prefer to convert 2% of 30,000 visits than 4% of 10,000 visits. I wrote about this previously 

Should every travel website search like Kayak.com?

 See Kayak.co.uk for a modern search interface that works better than almost everything else in the industry

Of course, the Travel Weekly article is right - many travel websites can do with a bit of improvement here or there - however I wouldn’t describe the redesign process as simple. Neither would I describe the search process on Kayak.com as the desired design outcome for every single travel website.

For example niche travel companies may want to NOT have a website that looks like they have spent a hundred thousand dollars on it (Kayak will have cost a lot more than that!)….. because maybe the customer is looking for a local operator with specialist knowledge - and customers correlate small companies with having the best product knowledge.

One mistake that I have seen medium sized travel companies make online is to try to make themselves look like a large travel dot com - and end up getting into trouble when they compete with the big beasts - so there are good reasons not to look like Kayak!

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Tim Hughes over on The BOOT (a blog about the online travel business) has come up with 4 quick rules for success for a travel content focussed website:

1: Content - Lots of it
2: Index - a fantastic Google friendly index and expertise in search engine optimisation
3: Access methods- varying ways and means for consumers to access the content
4: Patience - time (and money) for the traffic to build.

These are great rules. I would add a few more:

5: Create the right environment where people want to publish their own content via your site. Instead of hiring 10 writers (or photographers), convince people (through the power of community) that the benefits of putting their content on your site outweigh the time it will take them (For example, if you are a travel photo website - then you need to create more benefit for a user to post their holiday photos on your website than on someone else’s, or versus just chucking photos on a CD and putting them in the post to family members)

6: Distribution to other websites - Once you have content - let it free to travel around the web…… this may either be full content - or a “taster”, bringing people back to your central website.

7: Keep it fresh - content goes stale quickly. You need to be constantly revisiting old content to check it is still correct. Even better, get your users to alert you to old or stale content.

8: Don’t monetise through CPM advertising - but “something else”. Try selling things. If its great content (and can’t be found anywhere else), then try a subscription model.

9: Let people manipulate content on your site - One reason people may want to come to your site is how they can alter the content around what they want to do. If you have lots of data about different holidays that people can take in a certain destination - let people create travel itineraries using this data - which can be shared between friends etc.

10: Do one thing well - rather than everything at a top level. For example do one destination at an amazing level of detail - rather than an entire country (or the globe). Perhaps instead of creating an entire tool box, you should create a hammer, a screwdriver etc….. but make the best hammers, the best screwdrivers….. let someone else create the saw and the tape measure.

11: Track what people are doing on your website with your content - you may be able to understand trends from this - and these trends may have commercial value to travel companies. If you start getting lots of people researching a new kind of travel via your site - this data may be interesting to a travel company.

12: Decide if you are going to be “expert lead” or “user lead” (and then stick to it). If you are an expert on a topic - then somehow expose this expertise - but without doing so in such a way that a less expert (but knowledgeable) person could come and “borrow” your ideas and information. If you are user lead (by community) then stick with that. If you can join both together you could have a powerful combination.

13: Try to create content that is “all year round” - For example will people just be looking for content when they are thinking of researching their trip - or when buying - or just before travel - or post travel when they want to remind themselves what it was like. Many travel websites focus on the research side of travel….. but tend to forget about all the other opportunities. You may think this conflicts with rule 10 - do one thing well - but unless you are all year round - your revenue stream may not be constant over the year - which can lead either to believe you are doing wonderfully - or that your website is never going to work.

14: I prefer content (or any business) that is based around need rather than around desire - Travel (as a holiday) is normally desire based (but once you have decided to go on holiday, you may need to know certain information). However business travel is often need based. You need to go to a particular meeting in a particular city. Its often easier to create a commercial model based around the principle of need.

15: Get your copyrights sorted out - If you are employing writers, get agreements in place. If users are creating the content for you - what reuse rights do you have? If in 2 years time you want to publish a book - or make a video - can you use the content? What happens if you receive an offer to put your content on another website? Are you covered for that or would you have to renegotiate with your users / writers?

Any more rules?

One question that I haven’t really got my head around fully is the problem with rounding sale prices (or perhaps marking down to a 999 price)

For example, take a 1000 GBP tour.

Should you sell it at

999 GBP
1000 GBP ex sales tax (VAT / TVA) (so price inc. tax is not rounded)
1000 GBP inc sales tax (VAT / TVA)

The questions I have are:

• Do you want to have a rounded price pre-tax…. or should it be a rounded price post-tax
• Is it the total for the booking that needs to be rounded - or individual components (such as the tour, the insurance, the transfer etc)?

The reason that rounding sale prices is becoming more of a problem for travel companies recently is for a couple of reasons:

• Trading standards (in the UK) now require all up front prices to include mandatory fees and components (you can’t add fuel surcharges at the end of the booking process)
• Many new generation tour operator systems now work on “Cost +” rather than “Sales price” driven - meaning that the company loads their costs and their preferred markup % - and then the system devises the sale price at point of sale. (Previously systems worked with commercial people loading sales prices - which could be nicely manually rounded if so desired)
• Websites are now trading in multiple marketplaces - so the price that is on sale in a specific region may be post an exchange rate conversion from an originally loaded rounded price - which has the impact of introducing some horrible decimal place prices.

So should we be concerned about rounding prices - and if so - should we be rounding total booking prices - or individual component prices? Anyone any thoughts?

Phew - great Christmas - spent time driving around Germany enjoying both the Berlin and Frankfurt christmas markets (and finding out that Avis now offer Porsche sports cars for rent from Frankfurt)….. although my budget didn’t quite stretch that far!

Anyway, back now - and my news years resolution is to get back to blog posting daily…. (something I failed to do in December as I was slightly rushed off my feet with all sorts of projects going on)

During the last few days I have spent some time sandpapering our reservation system (TourCMS). I am a great fan of sandpapering - and its something that not enough companies do with their websites or systems.

In essence, sandpapering involves going around a website and smoothing off the sharp edges making them more rounded. Through careful application of sandpaper you can greatly improve a user’s experience of a system. The golden rule of sandpapering though is that you can’t turn a chair into a table…. for that you need a slightly more fundamental project!

Sandpapering normally isn’t an activity that people do except in smaller companies - because normally a designer or developer is asked to “make this new project work” or “make that work” and never really allowed to go and improve the system anywhere they like on work that was undertaken previously (because that would involve significant regression testing that would take too much time vs the benefit).

Improvements that fall into the “sandpapering” category are those like:

• Changing default values for when pages or forms are initially loaded
• Adjusting text copy to make it clearer
• Adding ALT or TITLE tags to HTML elements - giving a bit of “in situ” help where it is most useful (no point hiding things in manuals)
• Sorting out form alignments and spacing

You could argue that the larger companies don’t release a new project until it is perfect - so they don’t need to sandpaper their websites or systems. I would disagree with this - every single time we get a support enquiry where a user has’t understood something we tend to spend a bit of time trying to work out what we could have done to have stopped that request from happening in the first place. The problem at many larger companies is that support is disconnected (within an organisation) from development - so designers / developers never get to hear of where customer confusion is occurring - even where a simple 30 second copy change could make life easier for everyone.

Likewise, when we give training, if we are finding something difficult to explain, this is often a flag that a section needs a bit of sandpapering. These loops need to feed straight back to the designers / developers in order for sandpapering to become useful.

Developers tend to have another word for sandpapering - they would call it “refactoring”. This would be going back through previously written code and maybe rewriting sections to make them work more efficiently. (I take great delight going through code and rewriting SQL to minimise database calls). Unfortunately not many developers have the luxury of refactoring on a regular basis - which tends to mean, in the end, that systems become bloated and difficult to maintain.

Anyway, happy new year to all. I think 2008 will be a big year in online travel.

One of the areas that I don’t believe travel companies spent enough time on is running web design experiments.

It is still early days for the web - and there is still plenty to learn - which is why our collective failure to experiment does surprise me a little. Also, when people do release interesting functionality, I think we are all a bit quick to judge… next year I promise to let things mature a little before I review a new site.

In the UK we have Thomson Labs - which is an interesting place to see what Thomson (one of our leading tour operators) may have coming shortly - but this is hardly at the same scale of R&D as in other industries. Likewise I haven’t seen Universities etc coming up with too much in the web experimentation field…. should I have expected this? What is an academic’s role in this new travel industry?

I myself have done a bit of “R&D” - publishing 3 papers on reservation system usability - which for a small company I feel is a sufficient contribution to our collective knowledge.

Not only does experimentation let you learn what works and doesn’t work - but it also helps you retain those employees who have a bit of creative flair - who are otherwise “bored” with the day to day of running an ecommerce website (which, lets face it, is not as exciting as other web opportunities that are out there)

Anyway, I have an experiment that has been running for a year now…. which is causing me a problem. The question is what do I do about it.

My experiment is a web service called FeedCycle - it is a mechanism that lets you send out RSS feeds that are cyclic… or where subscribers start on day 1 of a feed - regardless of when they subscribe (i.e. if subscriber B starts today they start on day 1 - but subscriber A, who started last week, is now receiving day 7).

A travel example can be found on Go-Overland.com (about overland expeditions). There you can subscribe to a 35 day virtual tour (the same length as the real tour) - and every day you receive a diary entry (via RSS) for what you would experience if you went on the actual trip.

FeedCycle has also been used by other non-travel organisations - for example the UK Open University in sending out course materials. This is quite exciting for a development that only took me a couple of weekends (I do like fiddling around with websites!). Not only that, but FeedCycle got reviewed by TechCrunch - which was an amazing experience I would love to repeat again in the future…. but on a system that I actually spent more time on!

So the problem with experiments is that sometimes you learn from them - but need to stop them. This would be easy if you were doing a desktop tool - as you could just not release an update - but with a web service (where I am still hosting it) - you are stuck - because if you turn it off - all existing users get their service removed.

Umm….. a problem….. and one I will have to solve in the coming weeks - because TourCMS (our travel ecommerce platform) needs the resources that FeedCycle is now taking up….

As reported by M-Travel, Virgin Holidays has recently seen online conversions rise 25%. Key to this strategy was usability.

As quoted by M-Travel, the Virgin Holidays website operations manager, said:

We needed to produce a site that was as simple as possible for our customers to use.  Therefore the imagery was made larger, the navigation easier and the whole user journey considerably enhanced.  Additional search criteria were also added such as the ability to search by region or country through maps and drop down menu

Now of course you can’t put down an increase in this conversion purely down to website design. Other factors that probably have an impact are:

• Their competitors in the UK are busy merging - and maybe are taking their eyes off the ball.
• Maybe they just got better at marketing - because conversion figures are as much about getting the right visitors as about having the right site
• Maybe Virgin Holidays has a strong proportion of repeat bookers who are comfortable going back to a website the next year - as long as the booking process is clear and understandable. i.e. the increase in conversion could be a long term trend from their existing customer base rather than specific design features that have been changed this year. The trend needs to be factored out from the figures in order to understand what impact the website improvements have made.

Also conversion figures can be misleading when used as part of a PR statement or interview - it is entirely possible (but unlikely) that you can have a decrease in sales at the same time as an increase in conversion. Certainly the 25% figure is not a 25% increase in sales.

However, I firmly believe that usability based web design can drive improvements in sales. They are correlated.

Anything obviously different about the Virgin Holidays website to explain the uplift?
One of the elements that I found interesting and fairly unique is the “retained search”. When you make a holiday availability search on the website the search criteria are retained in the top left corner of the page.

For example, I searched for Kissimee for 25th November for 7 nights etc….. and now I can navigate around the site (for example looking at further details about the flight or hotel) - and fairly easily (from every screen) get back to the results list I found previously.

I expect this is a really helpful feature to users and would love to see the feedback from usability testing on this one.

The one competitor that I know has something similar is Thomson.co.uk

Their approach is slightly different in that they are based around retaining recently viewed pages rather than recent product searches.

The advantages about recent pages vs recent searches are:

• It helps users navigate around large websites with many supporting pages (rather than sites centred around a booking engine)
• If you have multiple booking engines (like Thomson do), you don’t have to worry about different display styles depending whether it was a flight, a hotel, a package holiday etc.
• You have less of a legal issue with retained personal data - because you are not storing date and place of proposed holiday (which may be data that ought not be sat in a cookie). (Notice also how Thomson let you turn their functionality off) [This is not legal advice blah blah blah]
• Probably easier to code!

The other interesting aspect of both of these features is that these pages or search results are retained even when the user leaves the website. You can leave either website, navigate to a competitor, check out their prices and availability, come back to either Virgin Holidays or Thomson, and then continue from where you left off. This is probably what makes it a winner.

Everyone will have this next year now although it is probably too late for Jan 08……

I was having a discussion yesterday about a website redesign project that I am currently involved with. It is probably a situation that many people are familiar with.

The question arose regarding how the website should be visually designed. There was a desire to be at the forefront of travel web design - but it was a struggle to understand exactly what that was. Does this mean that the website should be in Flash or Flex, or some other rich interface design? (it won’t be - and for most websites this is still a few years off)

So - what then is “modern web design” within travel ecommerce?

Introducing undesign
There has been some chatter about the concept of “undesign”. I struggled to find a definition of it that I could publish so I am going to come up with my own:

I now define undesign as a web design that has the following characteristics:

• Copy / text is the user interface - The words, the size of text, the length of the sentence, the paragraph breaks - all of this forms the user interface (rather than creating containers with graphics - and placing text / copy inside those containers)
• Links are text based - not images
• There are no gratuitous user interface elements - I define gratuitous as those that either don’t provide information (for example stars on a star rating) nor assist with usability (for example lines between sections - acting as dividers).  
• Usability is prioritised over visual branding - the design is engineered to be used - not admired like a piece of static art.

So what you end up with is a mainly text website. It sounds dull but it isn’t.

Some examples of undesign

• 37signals - Homepage and corporate website. Very clearly the text copy is the user interface
• Google - search and search results
• Amazon - product page - there are very few visual elements on the page except for product images. Apart from that it is mainly text. Some graphics are used to divide sections - but these are kept to a minimum.
• ClearTrip- A travel website example. ClearTrip offer flight bookings for flights within India. The hint towards their design mindset comes from their name!

The cleartrip homepage. See how there is very little imagery….. this is travel undesign. Go and take a look at one of their flight results pages as well. Very clean. (While you are there - go one step further - the accordian checkout is interesting)

Thoughts

So - keep an eye on “undesign”. The problem for its acceptance will be marketing teams who really want a fully branded experience. It will take a leap of faith for a marketing director to say - ok - I am happy to go the undesign route. I expect that undesign will start in the transport sector - trains, flights etc - and then, as it becomes more accepted, move into wider usage.

If you care about your users then you should be considering undesign.

I have written about the Opodo EscapeMap system a couple of times before - both times positively. In essence it is a Google map based system for geographically navigating special offers. It is actually quite nice and I expect is working fairly well for them.

Previous posts: Comparing the Travelocity ExperienceFinder, Opodo EscapeMap and various solutions from Expedia and back in August when they first launched.

Special offer API
In my last coverage I mentioned that Opodo, one of Europe’s largest online travel agencies, managed to leave a nice API open letting anyone come and “collect” Opodo’s special offer data - all nicely formatted in XML. Not a major sin - but I would have made the API a little more secure from simple viewing using a combination of JavaScript obfuscation and XML encryption (and a daily changing key). This wouldn’t be foolproof, but it would stop people like me from messing around.

Example XML response (works best in Firefox, but go view source in IE if you get an error page)

Why is this data exposure wrong?
A competitor could take advantage of this data freely given by Opodo - by incorporating that data into their own revenue management system - so competitors can see how their offers compare to Opodo’s and adjust their own offers in response. This kind of data is gold dust. You could easily look out for the latest change in Opodo special offers and immediately react with your own offers to the destinations they are pushing that week….

As I know that various people from Opodo have read that post I am surprised that they have not changed their system yet (they have had 4 months). Maybe they don’t realise what competitors get up to with this kind of data! Maybe it was just PR people who read the post!

What now?
I was searching for Opodo EscapeMap via Google and I noticed something a little odd:

Yep - if you search as above - what you get is now a nice error message coming up in the Google results.

A couple of points about this:

1. There should be a robots.txt file on http://escapemap.opodo.co.uk -  that would sort Google out within a few days
2. The PHP server(s) running Escape Map should have their error messages turned off. At the moment the messages are going to the end user - which is really bad (it is a simple configuration switch on the web server!)
3. One reason exposing PHP errors is bad is because you can see where the error line is. It is in a file called getMapSearch.php - which is an incorrectly located include file. Include files really need to be out of the webserver public space - otherwise, if you accidentally misconfigure your server (like Facebook did in August this year), you can expose your core, proprietary, code (or things like database passwords etc). Opodo could also try using pre-compiled (encoded) PHP…. which absolutely stops code leaks in situations like server mis-configurations
4. This is really not very good for search engine optimisation - knowing how much companies like Opodo spend on SEO and online marketing - I am amazed that no one is picking up on this.

I am not trying to pick on Opodo specifically however these kinds of examples can really show us all how important good quality control is. People in marketing and web development teams need to understand each others jobs - and what kind of things to look out for when putting new functionality live.

These kinds of problems didn’t happen in the “old days” (I am a bit young to reminisce) - when a site of this size would be run be a small team of people - all with good all round experience. Now when you have hundreds of people responsible for a website - everyone only works in their own section - and never gets the full picture - and may never have actually worked in other areas.

For example, the person responsible for revenue management within Opodo is probably really happy that users can now navigate special offers easily. However they are probably scratching their heads wondering how competitors are reacting so quickly to their new offers!

Normally I tend to review larger travel websites as I know they have a solid web design approach and have budgets that enable them, if they applied appropriate skill, to create a great piece of functionality or website. I also tend to review when a company has stated objectives publicly - and then I can muse on whether those objectives have been met. 

Today I am going to review InsideCruise (http://www.insidecruise.co.uk/). They are a recently launched UK based travel community for those interested in cruise ship holidays. They are not a large company but as they have attracted some main travel industry press recently - I thought I would give them a quick review.

If you go to conferences “everyone” is talking about social networks and communities - and it appears this is the next big thing. Carla Prosser, from the company behind the new site, said as quoted by TravelMole (registration required) that:

We have embraced the community phenomena

More like jumping on the bandwagon - but hey we have a community for our product as well….. so I can hardly talk about bandwagons!

Will users trust the website?
A real key point for any community website is whether users will feel safe and trust the environment that has been created for them.

In an interview with Travel Weekly, Carla Prosser stated:

The website is going to consist of user-generated content, so it can only be unbiased

Therefore we know that Inside Cruise have the right mindset. However they appear to have implemented something that seems to me to break this trust.

Lets look at the “Top 10 web offers page” (see page). Above the offers list is a statement that says “We have hand-picked these cruise offers from selected UK cruise agents to bring you the best deals on the net each week”.

Right - that sounds OK. But hang on a second - what does the advertising page say?

So - lets get this straight - the users are being told that the list is hand picked by Inside Cruise. However advertisers can actually pay for this position if they wish. That can’t be right? Which is it?

Advertising operations for the top 10 list
Not only is the top 10 list misleading users, but there is a real problem with how this advertising is going to be handled operationally. Consider the following situations:

• There are only a couple of advertisers. If I was an advertiser I would start advertising at position 10. Will Inside Cruise then leave me at 10 (vs 9 “free” slots) or will they put me at number 1 (because I am the top paying advertiser?). They would want me to have a successful first advert otherwise I may not come back.
• What happens if two companies want slot 5? I assume the incumbent advertiser stays there if there is one - but what if they are both new? Who will take the slot? Will Inside Cruise give me slot 6 for less money (leaving money on the table - unlikely) or promote me to slot 4 as an “upgrade” for the price of slot 5 - but without telling the first advertiser.
• The market doesn’t set the price (it is a yes / no decision on 10 price points) - instead the pricing is set by the website. I hope they have set the correct pricing based on projected visitor volume. It could be embarrassing if these rates have to go down because of lack of visitors.

It appears to me that there is going to be an awful lot of email and phone communication between Inside Cruise and advertisers to sort all of this out. Operationally it will be inefficient and has all sorts of chances of upsetting advertisers….. (let alone misleading users!). I would have gone the Pay Per Click auction model - and created some kind of “market” - so as visitor volume increases - prices go up - and prices find their natural level. It could also be developed to be “self managed”.

Kick starting a user generated site
Starting a website like this is a real “chicken and egg”. You want to have lots of reviews, videos etc before you drive traffic to the website - but how do you get those reviews in the first place?

Inside Cruise have chosen to reward users for submitting videos, photos and reviews. £5 for a review and £10 for either a video or an image.

Does this then make people inappropriately incentivised to create reviews? Does this make them unbiased? As people are chasing the money - not thinking about content? Wisely Inside Cruise have limited this to a maximum of £15 per user that submits…. but this may just lead to a problem with users creating multiple profiles.

I would have gone the competition route ….. like top prize for a video - maybe by cruise line or destination - so you get a nice spread of videos covering all cruise lines and destinations - which is what they want really. It may have also grabbed some PR attention as well.

They also need to be clear who owns the rights to these reviews and images etc. Will the rights transfer to Inside Cruise? Can they use them for other purposes? (such as licensing them to other websites?). This is not clear within the Terms & Conditions.

What is their web developer thinking of?
Just for the icing on the cake - Inside Cruise have left a trail of web development tales of woe all over the web.

• They have left their test website up: http://dev.insidecruise.co.uk/ - actually coming up number 2 in Google for the term “insidecruise”. It is still up, in all its glory, with a copy of the functionality and data as it was about 4 weeks ago
• There is a nice section of their core code left lying on the CakePHP website - see the code ….. er…. yeah - this code includes the database username and password guys. They may want to remove it or at least change their passwords if they haven’t already.

Oh dear.

Summary
Interesting niche. Poorly executed. Needs a relaunch or rapid evolution.

There is definitely an opportunity here for Inside Cruise. They are pretty close to getting it right. If no competitors of significant size turn up in the next 12 months they may be OK. However with companies like Saga and their SagaZone social network launching recently (users of which will be core cruise target market) - unless Inside Cruise get a bit more Internet savvy, I am not sure they will make it to fulfil the potential that they have.

OK - I know I rant on a bit about how travel websites are normally pretty boring creatures…… but now I have come across something truly a bit mad.

Welcome to 3dMailbox.

In essence avatars represent your emails. The travel link….. well all the avatars are aeroplanes - represented by 80 national carriers.

I have no idea about the service (I have not tried it out) - but the video is great (!). Yes it is Friday. Normal service resumes on Monday.

Thanks to Techcrunch for the story