Lastminute.Com
The website lastminute.com is an online travel agency that caters to travelers with the latest information and deals about tour packages mostly around Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa. It provides various leisure options such as short weekend city excursion breaks in select EU cities and offers useful travel guides on spas, information on cinemas and theater events, as well as the best restaurants, hotels and car hire deals that fit any budget needs.
A Short History
The site was created as a publicly listed company by Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox back in 1998 at the height of the dot com craze. Needless to say, a lot of people lost money on its share price slump when the bubble inevitably burst a few months after. But lastminute weathered the crisis as it had real service to offer its markets, not just an e-prefix or a dot com appended to its name.
It came out of it to become a sort of a travel icon among UK travelers. Its success attracted Travelocity, another online travel portal that had made a global mark as one of the pioneers in internet-based travel services. In 2000, lastminute.com changed ownership for the first time when Travelocity bought if for a cool ₤577 million.
In 2007, another change of hands took place when Sabre Holdings which owned Travelocity was acquired by a couple of private equity companies, the Silver Lake Partners and the Texas Pacific Group. This ended lastminute’s presence in the stock exchanges.
Amidst the various ownership changes, the site has managed leave a unique subversive though a bit quirky pop culture that includes creating Release 41, a rock group named after its website application release and made up of company staff from its European offices. It had no qualms dubbing their online customers as “fearless Funmongerers” that have entered local lexicon.
It launched promotional campaigns like the Karmarama-created “Do More Good Stuff” early in 2009 and other TV ads that caught the fancy of UK viewers to give lastminute a top of the mind presence in the public perception. At about the same time, it launched NRU or near you, a search application using GPS information for Android mobile phones in the UK. It created a following and is expected to have a US release in May to come with an online restaurant ratings and review guide called Zagat.
Facebook is a major player among the emerging social networking sites on the net. Online users register to have a Facebook account where they can “socialize” with a listing of friends with whom messages can be exchanged between and among them. You get to your group and your friends’ profiles and they get notified accordingly.
Origins
The name facebook takes off from the popular book name distributed by Harvard University administrators to incoming freshmen to help them get to know each other with information about them. Mark Zuckerberg founded the site with the help of college pals and fellow computer science students at the Harvard University.
Facebook was initially confined to Harvard students. It later became so popular that it expanded to include other Ivy League colleges in Boston. Its popularity went beyond Boston to include any college student and finally became open to all students from 13 years of age. Facebook now has more than 300 million active social networkers worldwide.
Features
Facebook is often compared with a similar social networking site MySpace. The latter offers more flexibility to have user sites customized using HTML and cascading style sheets or CSS. Facebook only allows plain text. But that didn’t prevent it from becoming one of the most popular social networking sites on the planet.
It has enough features to make the users content. There’s the Wall feature that provides enough space on user site where friends can post messages for anyone to see. It can now allow attachments to it whereas you only get to post text messages before. Status is a feature announcing to your online friends your whereabouts and happenings. Photos allow you to upload albums and pictures. This is the most popular feature on the Facebook site.
The site continues to evolve to make it as response as possible. Facebook, along with other social networking sites like Twitter also took on a more commercial appeal as company executives and politicians use it for business and political purposes.
