Trend analysis (Technological, markets and societal-cultural trends)
One topic that can relate technology, market and social-culture can be social media. Social media has been becoming in one of the best form to create marketing and popularize an idea or project, all the benefits that can be achieve with social media can be adapted and used in the hospitality industry and tourism.
The use of social media has been increasing and becoming a powerful tool to do advertisement campaign and reach a great amount of people around the globe, we think that this can be an instrument we can use to become more popular and also take advantage of the trend that’s going on the world on the use of social media.

(Pew Research Center, 2014)
The graph above shows us how the use of social media has been increasing in a fast way, only in 2012-2013 was a little decrease. This can show us the potential amount of people which an advertisement campaign can reach, and increasing.
The Cicero can use this technological tool to increase the number of users and on this way become a more popular website for people traveling around the world. Thecicero.com can make a viral marketing that’s is directly focus on the use of social media as the main channel of transportation of the idea of what thecicero.com is.
Another important trend that’s happening right now is that people are using all kind of websites and app in their mobile device to plan their vacations, According to Think With Google's '5 Stages of Travel,' the average traveler visits about 22 travel-related sites prior to booking a vacation and 70 percent of business travelers will check into their flights and hotels via their mobile devices. thecicero.com is aiming specifically to this kind of tourism, people that are connected to the internet in a daily basis and use it as a tool to plan their trips and vacations.(Vong, 2012)
In a research made by PewReasearchCenter we found another interesting trend that it’s going on in the population of the world. The research made by this company found out that “millennians” (The label refers those born after 1980 – the first generation to come of age in the new millennium.) are the generation of confidence, connections and open to change. The survey found out that this generation use social media in an almost every day basis, that this can be one of the most educated generations in United States history and also that Millennians are open minded as any generation in history. This is a good trend that is going on and that can support our idea of people trying to reach new frontiers and with that make connections with people of another culture.
The article made by Pew Research Center also show us that Millennians are the one more open to racially tolerant, this generation doesn’t care of different type of race or ideology. This also is a great point in favor of The Cicero, this generation is ready to embrace new cultures and wants to know them, and the main idea of the website is what the trends of this generation are showing.

(Pew Research Center, 2014)

We have examples already of this type of websites, a tool that helps tourists and manage to lower prices at the same time that it can work as a social network for the people using it.
Couchsurfing was created in 2004, the amount of users in Couchsurfing is around 10’000,000 people in around 200,000 cities. Using the Trend Analysis in Google we find out that the increase of the search “Couchsurfing” had some very high points but have been in decay in his popularity in the last years. The tendency that we can find is that the popularity of the search depends a lot on the month. It’s clear that in July and August the popularity is the highest, with these we can do a hypothesis that people use a lot the website in planning vacations around the world. The following graph displays the popularity trend in the search of the word “couchsurfing” in Google.

Also using the tools that Google give us we can find out where is more common the use of Couchsurfing, Iceland is the country were Couchsurfing is more searched, the reason of this can be because the website was first used in that region. After that we find out that France, Slovenia and Austria are between the countries with more searches in the world. Italy has an index of volume search of 54, around 50% of the numbers of search made in Iceland. This can be an area we can explode because Couchsurfing has not made a big impact. The next image would show an overall analysis of the “Index of volume search” of the world.

We also can find out the popularity of the search by city, in this part we found that any of the important cities on Italy is listed. This is where Couchsurfing hasn’t reached and therefore an area of opportunity for our own website.
We would do the same trend analysis to AirBnB, since their foundation in 2008 in San Francisco, California, USA. Supported on the own data of AirBnB, since its foundation there has been around 25’000,000 million of guests and its present in more than 34,000 cities in 190 countries. The popularity of the search “airbnb” has been increasing and they had only one major upset near December of 2014, but has the same behavior as “Couchsurfing” in the sense that in time of vacations (July-August) the popularity of the search increases a lot. In this case the increment of the popularity has been very big and doesn’t seem to decrease in a short period of time.
In this case “airbnb” is more popular in Italy than “couchsurfing” in the searches of Google. With these kind of trend we can show that Italian people are using this kind of method to plan their vacations.
France and Iceland are the only countries that maintain their status of popularity in both types of searches. The next image shows how the popularity behavior in each country is.

In the city analysis again any of the important cities in Italy shows a big popularity in the search.
This trend analysis can help us to know that people are using this kind of sites and also that the growth can be good if the website is useful as Couchsurfing and AirBnb. As said before, people are using technology to plan their vacations, and also that the inclusion of a social network can help us a lot because almost every person that has access to internet use social media in regular basis. Also we can find out that our success can come of how we manage to bring more people to our website in certain dates, for example in vacations period we need to have our best performance in the year.
Speaking only for Italy, the popularity of the search are not as good as other countries, coming from a very touristic country as this one, the use of technology to exploit the available spaces for people can be used in the main touristic cities of Italy like Rome, Florence or Venice.

Bibliography
Kan, Mahmood. "Social Media’s Influence on Hospitality & Tourism Management." Business and Hotel Management. 7 June 2012. Web. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. <http://scitechnol.com/social-medias-influence-on-hospitality-3MQb.php?article_id=218>.
"Social Networking Fact Sheet." Internet, Science & Tech. Pew Research Center, 1 Jan. 2014. Web. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. <http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/>.
Vong, Katherine. "How Technology in Tourism Is Taking Travel to the Next Level." Trend Reports. Trend Reports, 11 June 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. <http://www.trendreports.com/article/technology-in-tourism>.
"Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change." Social & Demographic Trends. Pew Research Center, 24 Feb. 2010. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. <http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/02/24/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change/>.