That is one of the main things the team in Cambridge is working on now. “It will look like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Lalonde says. (He adds that Hopper has been able to recruit talent from bigger local companies like TripAdvisor, Carbonite, and Endeca/Oracle. The startup has 20-some employees currently.)
I asked Lalonde about where Hopper fits into the bigger trends in big data. “Companies are stepping back and looking at their data assets,” he says, and they are “rebuilding a lot of their business practices” around big data and analytics. In the travel sector, this means some companies are looking to form partnerships with Hopper that wouldn’t have before, he says. (Look for news on that in the future.)
What’s more, the whole IT landscape is changing. “Business models are different, the technology is different, the user experience is different,” says Lalonde. We’re starting to see new tech companies, “built from the ground up, consumer and enterprise plays that are just entirely disruptive,” he says.
So who is Hopper looking to disrupt? Lalonde doesn’t say explicitly, but travel guidebooks, certain media sites, and big guys like Google and TripAdvisor might want to watch their backs.
Author: Gregory T. Huang
Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003.
Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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