Thursday Buzz: Booking With Bitcoin
A major online travel firm takes a bold first step into the future of currency. Also: an open-ended networking strategy.
It’s too soon to tell whether Bitcoin will become a mainstream phenomenon—for one thing, it’s still pretty complicated for most people—but that hasn’t stopped one major travel booker from supporting it.
On Wednesday, Expedia announced it would begin accepting the digital currency from customers, becoming the first travel agency to do so.
“Bitcoin is becoming a viable currency,” Expedia’s vice president of global product, Michael Gulmann, told CNET. “This is no different from going into any market, understanding how we can do business, and offering the forms of payment customers want.”
Gulmann isn’t the first major e-commerce site to jump on the Bitcoin trend—that honor goes to Overstock.com—but Expedia’s ties to the world of travel could give the currency mainstream mojo.
Would you book a flight or hotel room with Bitcoin?
Ask the Right Questions
"[C]ontinue to ask open-ended questions" #conferences #networking http://t.co/HZ6rhKjTcg via @Inc #eventprofs
— Quinn Banford (@QuinnBanfordVDA) June 11, 2014
The problem with networking? It’s not always easy to get the conversation moving with someone you don’t know that well.
But it’s certainly not a conversation killer if you know how to handle the situation. Inc.com writer Eric V. Holtzclaw, highlighting a recent conversation he had with Conference Crushing author Tyler Wagner, has a little advice on how to keep up the chatter.
“A trick he discusses, and something I learned from one of the best salespeople I ever worked with, is to continue to ask the person you are talking to open-ended questions,” Holtzclaw writes. “The less you say, the more the other person will like you. I would watch this sales professional have a conversation with someone new, telling the person very little about himself, and the person’s parting words would be, ‘It was so nice to meet you. I had such a great conversation!’ He had just made a connection for life.”
Long story short: Ask the right questions, and let them answer. (ht @QuinnBanfordVDA)
Other Links of Note
Here’s a bright idea from Network for Good’s Caryn Stein: Use colors to drive impulses with your fundraising approach.
Dropbox gets lots of love for its products, and a large reason for that is its passion-based approach to project management, according to Fast Company.
Hewlett-Packard has a plan to shrink the data center, and Bloomberg Businessweek says it could be the future of enterprise computing.
(iStock/Thinkstock)
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