The average user might book his flight several months before taking a trip, Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein explained, but that same person often waits a lot longer to book his hotel (perhaps explaining the success of companies like Hotel Tonight). And when users do go searching for hotels, they want to know a few critical things: Will the hotel meet the time slots they need? What kind of neighborhood is it located in? And will there be hidden fees or questionable wifi when they check in?

Hipmunk’s new hotel search product attempts to solve these problems from a couple of angles. The site will now provide reviews from local travel writers recommending certain neighborhoods within the city depending on a person’s needs, it will provide pricing and available of wifi and parking, and it will provide calendar integration for business travelers and no-date searching for casual vacationers.

“When we started the site, it was based entirely on what we viewed as the biggest headaches in travel. Which was simply the process for searching flights initially, then moving on to hotels,” Goldstein said. “We thought the flight product does that really well, and the hotel product still has room for improvement. So it’s a big development for us.”

One interesting aspect of Hipmunk’s hotel search is that it isn’t limited to traditional hotels. The company has been listing HomeAway and Airbnb listings already, and Goldstein said while he can’t disclose the exact numbers for traditional versus home-share bookings, Airbnb has been tremendously successful on Hipmunk.

“If those users disappeared, it would have a significant impact on our bottom line,” he said. In June the company raised a Series B funding round of $15 million, with funding so far from  IVP, Ignition Partners, Y Combinator, SV Angel, and a number of angel investors including Ashton Kutcher.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap review
• Flash analysis: the tech startup investment environment, Q3 2011

Huffman, who is teaching an online web programming class on Udacity, was not sold on Google App Engine (GAE) as the development platform up front, but decided to give it a shot, given the subject matter. “I was pretty skeptical going in but it was the only system that looked like it might work for what we were trying to do, which was, first, teach people to write programs and, second, get those programs online fast,” he said. (Huffman blogged about the experience for Google.)

It was the second part that was tricky. “Getting programs online involves a lot of sysadmin stuff that’s a giant pain. GAE gives you free hosting for sites that get a small amount of traffic and they set it all up for you. It seemed like a good fit if it worked as advertised and, well, it worked as advertised,” Huffman told me in an interview.

Google wants developers

Huffman’s approval is clearly a coup for Google, which has been trying to build credibility for GAE among developers. Google’s been touting the fact that 57,000 (!) students have signed up for the course — and will host a Google+ Hangout with him on Thursday.  But PR aside, Huffman makes some convincing points about GAE.

Full disclosure: Udacity was co-founded by Google VP and Fellow Sebastian Thrun and itself runs on GAE (as does the popular Khan Academy online learning site.)  One reason he went with Udacity versus another online company is that David Evans, his former computer science professor at the University of Virginia, is now VP of education at Palo Alto, CA-based Udacity.

GAE: the “right level of abstraction”

Huffman did have a choice in tools and he went with GAE rather than Heroku or another PaaS. One reason was, as serendipity would have it, Huffman found GAE’s basic framework similar to the Python-based web.py framework Reddit developed for its own use because Huffman et al did not like the big, overly complex frameworks available at the time, he said.

“GAE made it possible for the students to build a blog — [set up] the user registration, submit stories, sort them,” he said. In each class, the students are told to add  that feature to their blog and submit the URL of the blog running live.

For Huffman, GAE covered the middle ground between the highly complex and monolithic frameworks he disdained and what he sees as overly simplified tools that don’t teach would-be programmers what they need to know about the basics.

In his view GAE sits at the right level of abstraction for students. “Things like Rails make things so simple that you actually don’t have to know what’s going on. That’s a disservice to the student. The web isn’t that complicated, HTTP isn’t that complicated, but when you hide all that from the developer it’s harder for them to  track down problems later. GAE forces you to think about the difference between things like “get request” and “post request.” These are not hard concepts but you do have to deal with these things by hand.”

Google continues to add developer-friendly perks to GAE, which included adding support for Jenkins continuous integration early this month. Last week, GAE suffered an outage, which probably doesn’t help its case.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Platform as a Service in 2012
• PaaS market accelerators, 2012–2013
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

In a complaint filed Wednesday in Las Vegas, Silver State Intellectual Technologies Inc asked for an injunction and damages related to U.S .Patent 7475057 (“System and method for user navigation”) and U.S. Patent 7343165 (“GPS Publication Application Server”).

Both patents describe the process of pushing information from a remote server to a user based on the location of that user and show diagrams like this one:

Silver State’s short legal filing (embedded below) doesn’t describe how exactly Foursquare infringed on the patent. The popular app relies on location tracking technology to offer a service that lets users and their friends “check in” to restaurants, merchants and other physical locations.

The lawsuit comes at a time when so-called patent trolls like Silver State have become aggressive about suing promising young companies. Handcraft site Etsy and travel site Hipmunk, for instance, were “mugged on payday” when they were hit with patent suits earlier this summer.

Patent trolls like Silver State, more politely called “non-practicing entities,” don’t make anything but instead acquire patents in order to sue companies that do. The trolls’ targets often simply fold their cards and pay a licensing fee for the troll to go away rather than risk the expense of  a prolonged lawsuit even though recent research (via The Verge) suggests doing so may be a mistake.

Applications for the two Silver State patents were filed in 2000 and 2001 and were granted in 2008 and 2009. The named inventor, Michael Obradovich, transfered them to a shell company shortly after.

The shell company structure is advantageous to the patent holders because it’s typically impossible to tell who is collecting on the patent payouts and because their lack of assets or a real business makes them impervious to countersuits.

This is the second time Foursquare has been hit by a patent suit. Last year, another shell company sued it for allegedly infringing on a method for mobile shopping.

Silver State v Foursquare

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Winners and Losers of 2009
• Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Just days after Hipmunk’s June funding announcement, a company called i2z Technology LLC told the travel start-up that it has to buy a license for a 1994 patent that covers a method for displaying data in multiple computer windows.

Despite its high-tech sounding name, i2z is simply a Texas shell company run by a California lawyer that is targeting internet and travel companies including Kayak, Google, Yelp and Microsoft. Under i2z’s business model, known as patent trolling, firms that don’t make anything collect patents in order to extract licensing settlements from companies that do.

In a new twist, trolls have begun laying in wait for start-ups to receive funding before pouncing. That is what happened to hand-crafted goods marketplace Etsy earlier this year.

In an attempt to fight the troll, Hipmunk has taken pre-emptive action by filing a lawsuit asking a federal judge in San Francisco to declare that it’s not infringing the patent and that the patent should be invalidated because it’s obvious.

Hipmunk’s complaint notes that this is the second time it has been threatened by a patent troll this year and that the patent has nothing to do with Hipmunk’s technology. It adds:

Though its funding is intended for innovation, Hipmunk elects to defend its technology rather than spend its hard-earned venture capital paying for a license it does not need.

The patent in question is US Patent 5,345,551, “method and system for synchronizing the presentation of data from different, but related, sources in different windows of a computer display”. Like many patents related to software, it covers seemingly common-place internet functions.

More details can be found in Hipmunk’s complaint here:

Hipmunk v Patent Troll

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

The new apps, which are available Thursday for iPhone, iPad and Android mobile devices, will add an additional level of personalization to a service that already tries to make travel planning a lot easier and more fun. When users try to book flights, for instance, meetings that conflict with flights will show up on screen. Meanwhile, the app takes into account the location of meetings when you try to book hotels, showing lodgings nearby.

Doing so could limit the need for users to jump between different apps, either on their mobile devices or by switching between devices — like browsing an iCal calendar on their PCs while trying to book travel on their iPads. Instead, pretty much everything is shown on-screen all at once.

Frankly, Hipmunk is already one of my favorite apps — I used it to help book a three-city trip between San Francisco, New York City and Austin, Texas around South By Southwest time — and this update should make it even better.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The 2013 task management tools market
• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

Hipmunk's mascot with an Android spin

Hipmunk has finally brought its travel search application to the Android operating system, with a brand new mobile app that will hit the Android marketplace Thursday.

Hipmunk for Android, which for now only facilitates flight searches, is impressive because it retains all the slickness of the company’s existing web and mobile offerings. That’s no small feat for an app made for Android, an operating system that generally takes a backseat to Apple’s iOS when it comes to user interface design.

I played around with the new app at Hipmunk’s San Francisco headquarters this week, and it’s a pleasure to use. For lack of a better comparison,  the experience is just as smooth as using an iPhone or iPad. That’s not an accident, said Hipmunk’s Android developer Ryan Oldenburg, who worked full-time on the app since joining the company in mid-June.

“The biggest thing about our Android app is it doesn’t not do anything the iOS app does,” Oldenburg told me in an interview. “We really went the extra mile on everything.” In fact, a couple of features — such as the ability to easily clear your flight search history — are currently only found on the Android app, and are likely to be added to the next version of Hipmunk for iOS.

Hipmunk’s Android debut could mark a significant inflection point for the year-old company, which has attracted a loyal following among the early adopter set. iPhones and iPad owners are certainly the choice of many influential folks in tech and media, but Android devices currently account for about half of all smartphones sold in the US. Now that Hipmunk can better serve that huge chunk of the mobile world, the travel app beloved by the cool kids could finally start to get the mainstream following it deserves.

Here are some screenshots of Hipmunk for Android (click to enlarge):

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• Netflix may suffer from limited mobility
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

1. Don’t feel that you have to pick sides in HTML5 vs. native

Pandora  is taking a hybrid approach to its rapidly growing music streaming service’s web site and its apps, and its not alone. Pandora launched an HTML5-powered website last week, and CTO Tom Conrad said that he could see the company developing a hybrid HTML5-native app. It’s the best way to get the best of both worlds with the technology that’s available right now, said Conrad. “That gives you integration with the OS and really, really high performance and really fluid user experiences. But integrated with some HTML5 content, whose strong suit is uniform platform dynamics, and rapid turns on user interface development.”

2. Do smaller releases quickly

It took Instagram (which went from essentially zero to 10 million users in the space of a year) a while between the release of their photo app and the first major update last week. But CEO Kevin Systrom wouldn’t recommend that. “Do fewer things more quickly,” he said, rather than waiting a long time between big releases as Instagram did. “It’s not a mistake, it just took us a long time to do v 2.0. But I’d like to move us into smaller iterations more quickly because I think that if you get into a rhythm of releases you end up making more progress in the long run.”

3. Prototype early and often

Danilo Campos, head of mobile at travel-search startup Hipmunk, offered his best advice on how not to waste your developers’ time: “Prototyping is going to save you from shipping crap. It allows you to touch the application in front of you without having to invest a deep amount of resources in it. It’s something you build in an afternoon’s time rather than over the course of weeks and [then] realizing it’s not good at all.”

4. Human intervention is good

Pandora learned you can’t automate everything. “One of the key observations that [founder] Tim [Westergren] made when he started the company was that part of what we love about music is how it sounds,” said Conrad. “So to make a service that really introduces you to new artists, the best way to do that is to have a catalog of the musical fingerprints or underlying musicological attributes. The state of the art in computer listening is insufficient to tease out those hundreds of details, so we have human beings that come in and put on headphones and categorize those 400 attributes.”

5. Throw out your own expectations

This dawned on the Formspring team when they were figuring out how to translate their Q&A site into a mobile app, which they released earlier this month. At first they felt pressured to recreate their site, but they realized that wasn’t realistic for the phone’s small screen. “Some expectations are yours that you need to throw out,” said Tom Wang head of product at Formspring. Your website may look “radically different” than your app, and that’s OK if it gives the best user experience. “You really need to rethink what you’re presenting and how you’re presenting it.”

Grey Area, the company behind the hit mobile location-based massively multiplayer online game Shadow Cities also had their expectations of user behavior turned upside down early on. Co-founder and CEO Ville Vesterinen said they assumed those who played mobile games were casual gamers, meaning they engaged in brief play sessions while in transit. In reality, Vesterinen said, users play their mobile games in places they are most often, meaning they play for longer sessions. That realization made Grey Area rethink engagement and in-game experiences.

6. Compete with yourself

“A great company thinks about competing with itself,” Flipboard Editorial Director Josh Quittner said. “That’s really in the end who they compete with. They don’t think about what everybody else is doing because if you start thinking about what everybody else is doing, you end up following them.”

Keith Rabois of mobile payments startup Square echoed that. “We look at ourselves in the mirror everyday….it doesn’t really matter what other people do. We really strictly believe that. Insofar as a lot of companies start with the premise of, I have to worry about this feature, and they send around emails (asking), ‘Do we have that?’ We try to take ourselves out of that. It’s our job to build amazing products and we either succeed or fail depending on how amazing they are.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• Hyperlocal: opportunities for publishers and developers
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Don’t think that push notifications are the answer. Push notifications are a great way to remind people to use your app, noted Steve Douty, VP of Applications and Mobile at Yahoo. You shouldn’t “leave it up to users to remember to go back to your app,” he said. But at the same time, you don’t want to barrage them with constant popups on their screen that become an annoyance.

As Danilo Campos, head of mobile for flight search app Hipmunk put it, “It all depends on the frequency of push notifications and how those decisions to push those were made. If it’s for the wrong things or things the user doesn’t care about, they’re going to turn it off and you’ve lost an opportunity to build that relationship.” So personalization of apps and frequency and type of notifications is key.

Don’t pack every possible feature inside your app. Apps can die from an overload of features. Just adding more functionality because you can is never the answer, the group agreed. “The more you keep feature creep from happening…that ends up becoming more successful engagement,” said Douty.

“Web applications have a lot of features, [people using them] have time to work, so you can give them additional functionality, but in mobile you’ve got a tiny screen and a tiny slice of users’ time,” said Campos. ”You can best serve them by giving them” a simpler experience.

Don’t assume your app should look and act like your web site. An important part of keeping people returning to an app is that it’s easy and fun to use. If you try to recreate a whole website and all its functionality on a tiny four-inch screen, it might overwhelm or turn off users.

Formspring found that out recently when it was building its app after beginning on the web. “You really need to rethink what you’re presenting and how you’re presenting it,” said Tom Wang, head of product for Formspring. In the end your app might look “radically different” than your site, and that’s totally OK. Don’t be afraid to throw out both your own and users’ expectations in that case.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

Your mobile phone as your travel concierge

Joe Megibow, VP and General Manager at Expedia, who spoke with me at the Mobile Future Forward event in Seattle, on Monday, said that 60 percent of Expedia’s mobile hotel bookings are for stays for that night. The number jumps to 80 percent for its Hotwire property. This data changes how Expedia develops its mobile app. For example when you open it, the app assumes you are searching for a hotel in the location you are currently in and delivers tonight’s rates and availability on the first screen. But it also changes the way Expedia can interact with customers.

“Factor in the idea that you now have this connected computer in your hand that knows I am on a trip, who I am, where I am and the possibilities for services are huge,” Megibow says. Instead of being passive, a mobile experience can be predictive and proactive, reacting to the context provided by knowledge of the itinerary and the phone. When you check into the app from Denver, when you are supposed to be in Phoenix, it might trigger the app to offer to rebook a flight or adjust your hotel on your behalf.

It also could be a way to get rid of inventory at the last minute. There’s the hotel bookings for the night of, but there are also opportunities to serve a user if their plans change suddenly because of weather for example. If someone is on vacation in Orlando, Fla. and it rains, it might be the perfect time to send them a coupon for an indoor activity. The customer would appreciate an alternative and the vendor might appreciate a lead it otherwise might have missed.

Mobile means browser and apps

Megibow says mobile is the glue holding that experience together. However, mobile is not the end all and be all for a site. Expedia has divided its business into four sections: mobile, tablet, desktop and TV and in each channel it has an app and a browser-based strategy. That may seem expensive for anyone without $3.64 billion in sales during the last year, but Megibow says it’s essential because people use different platforms in different ways, and they all can contribute to sales. Half of the traffic to Expedia’s mobile web site comes from attempts to engage with other links he said, so to ignore the mobile browser site would disappoint customers who perhaps clicked through an email on their phone and then weren’t sent to the appropriate place.

Of course, apps have challenges unaffiliated with a web site, such as how to measure conversion rates for apps. “On the web site, conversion is king, but apps are more aspirational,” Megibow said. “You hoard apps that you might need one day.” To that end Expedia is seeing that the transaction growth on the Expedia app is four times the download rate.

So as Expedia adapts to the mobility, it’s doing so with the realization that the web still matters. He hinted that we should expect something along the lines of a user interface improvement after I told him how much I liked and used Hipmunk, so I’ll keep the site bookmarked and my eyes peeled. On mobile, I’m excited to see how far Expedia can take this shift.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mark Wheadon.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom

So viva the in-flight Wi-Fi indicators, and let’s get JetBlue on board with this trend. Also, for those who travel often and have a Boingo subscription, check out their deal with GoGo Internet. Now on flights offered by American Airlines, Delta, Alaska Airlines, U.S. Airways and others, Boingo users can get online using their Boingo log in, though they can’t pay Boingo prices. In-flight Wi-Fi is still a luxury item, it seems.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution