After three years of reporting on almost 500 TLabs startups and chronicling every day the dizzying number of young companies that rock the digital travel economy... Tnooz decided to join the party.
Tnooz bought a startup.
Yesterday, our crack editorial team, savvy Nodes and lots of people with frequent flier points at risk, were focused on the $11 billion merger of American Airlines and US Airways.
Well, not all of us.
In other M&A news, Tnooz's acquired the assets of Travopia, the cool digital media brainchild of super-smart Karthick Prabu in Bangalore, India.
Karthick joins Tnooz as our general manager for Asia. He will spearhead Tnooz's editorial expansion in the Asia-Pacific region. He also will lead business development in Asia as we expand our virtual and live events in regional and local markets there.
Karthick's background is all about travel tech. He "thinks, breathes and lives travel technology".
He has experience in hospitality, cruise, distribution, website design, product management, reservation systems, mobile computing, social media and travel analytics.
He has worked with Rezopia, TravelCLICK, Travelocity and MakeMyTrip. He started Travopia several years ago as a travel tech blog, then upgraded to an online media platform early in 2012 when Tnooz was introduced to Travopia by one of our many friends and readers in India.
Terms of the deal are not being released, but, for the record, are under $11 billion.
Sorry, Karthick.
Welcome aboard anyway!
And there's more to report about Tnooz in Asia Pacific today. We are kicking off the 2013 THack series with THack @ Sydney on April 10-11 at shared working space called Fishburners.
THack is a creative, competitive collaboration among the developer community and travel companies who run the engine room of the travel industry.
If you are developer who wants to strut your stuff with other innovators from Australia and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region, this is your chance to access APIs from companies like Travelport, Rome2Rio, Jetradar, Viator, Bynd and others to be named soon.
Two winning developers will take home AUS$2,000 ... plus bragging rights and the privilege of buying beers for the rest of us!