Though Priceline (NASDAQ:PCLN) is one of the few names people think for online travel services along with competitors Expedia (NASDAQ;EXPE), Travelocity, and Orbitz (NASDAQ:OWW), air travel bookings make up less than 2% of our $479 Trefis price estimate of Priceline’s stock. The real gem here is hotel bookings which constitutes a dominant 91% of its value.

Priceline is the second largest online travel agency in the world after Expedia in terms of booking volumes. Through its online travel portals such as Priceline.com, booking.com, agoda.com, rentalcars.com, breezenet.com and lowestfares.com, Priceline provides consumers with travel services that include bookings for hotel stays, airline tickets, vacation packages, car rentals and cruises.

Priceline makes money by charging a percentage of the dollar value for bookings. H

Find more info…

Soaring gas prices are contributing far more to increases in household energy bills than policies designed to support renewable energy and the other elements of the green economy, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) will say today.

New analysis from the independent body finds the majority of homes have seen their annual bills rise from £604 in 2004 to £1,060 last year. B

Find more info…

Alcohol and social networks can be a dangerous mix. Imagine the results of logging onto your Facebook account after a night of heavy drinking: illogical commentaries about your friend’s pet, a wide variety of insults to a person you hardly know and a huge chain of salutations to your ex, ranging from anger and despair to some weird kind of love. Needless to say, the embarrassment of the next day will be the worst side effect of your hangover. Why go through all of this when you can avoid it? A Find more info…

There is a particular kind of flaw that keeps popping up in Microsoft security advisories. It’s a flaw that sits deep within the system with something known as user-mode callbacks.

Targei Mandt, a researcher with security firm Norman is discussing the flaw in detail at the Black Hat conference this week in Las Vegas. In an interview with Mandt noted that the win32k.sys graphics component element is at the root of the flaw.

Mandt explained that win32k.sys is used to provide notifications back to applications. For example, win32k.sys is used to notify applications for whenever a window is opened or closed.

“Windows also uses this as a mechanism to pass data from the kernel to user-mode and vice versa,” Mandt said.

Find more info…

It’s time for our weekly break from the gear for a few minutes so we can enjoy another round of reader photos from the Photography Bay Flickr Group.

You can mouse over any photo for title and photographer names. A

Find more info…