Before founding Climos in 2006, Dan Whaley was an early pioneer in e-commerce-innovating numerous technical and commercial practices in widespread use today.
In
early 1994, foreseeing the possibility of e-commerce, Dan developed the
first basic software platform allowing any general business to be
transacted online. In the fall of that year he created an online
presence for a west-coast restaurant delivery company, Waiters on
Wheels, that conducted one of the first retail transactions over made
over the web.
About the same time, while reviewing major
commercial categories he realized that travel reservations were ideally
suited to the online world, and founded Internet Travel Network
(ITN.com)-later renamed GetThere-with his father and a good friend. In
June of 1995, the first travel reservation ever made over the web was
booked through a web server based out of his Palo Alto, CA home (it was
a San Francisco - Las Vegas round trip). Today, travel is the dominant
worldwide e-commerce category- 40 cents of every consumer dollar spent
online is spent on travel.
Dan's technical skills (he wrote most of the software for the early
ITN system), business instincts and strategic thinking, along with a
world class management team, helped propel GetThere quickly to its
leadership position, outmaneuvering both Microsoft and Sabre in the
highly competitive business travel segment. In four years, GetThere was
the dominant provider of Internet-based travel reservation
functionality to the airline, corporate and leisure travel
industries--booking more web-based travel reservations than any other
competitor. After an IPO in 1999, the company was sold to The Sabre
Group (NYSE: TSG) in 2000 for nearly 1/3 of Sabre's market
cap--still the largest all cash deal for an Internet company.
Under Sabre, GetThere continues to host the online reservation
function for travel industry customers such as United Airlines and
American Express, as well as major international corporate customers
such as Procter and Gamble, Chevron, Nokia, and Cisco. The GetThere
product today commands close to 75% market share within Fortune 200
companies where it enables ordinary business travelers to book
reservations within corporate policy at the lowest possible price. It
processes more B2B transaction revenue than any other system in the
world.
The ITN/GetThere business pioneered many basic concepts now in broad
use within online commerce, such as the concept of a database driven
website, the service bureau or Application Service Provider (ASP)
business model and the "private labeled" site, which leverages a core
set of functionality and user-interface elements across a broad set of
customers.
In 1996, Dan was recognized by Business Travel News as one of the
"Top 25 Most Influential Executives" in the travel industry. He has
received numerous other awards and has spoken and served in a variety
of capacities within both the Internet and travel industries.
A self-taught computer programmer, he earlier wrote one of the first
software systems to detect reversals of the earth's magnetic pole in
cryogenically cooled deep-sea sediment samples for Dr. John King at the
University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography. He has
also participated in two NSF-funded JGOFS (Joint Global Ocean Flux
Study) cruises in the Equatorial Pacific where he helped run a
piston-coring apparatus to obtain seafloor samples along the
Tahiti-Hawaii transect.
Dan earned his BA in English from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1990. He has traveled extensively, including bicycling solo across the United States, driving overland from California to Argentina and living with Tibetan refugees in Nepal. He is an avid inline skater, a licensed private pilot and a certified ham radio operator.
Dan currently resides in San Francisco, CA.
A few of his technology firsts and innovations...
• The first generalized Internet e-commerce platform (1994)
• The first database driven website (1994)
• The first markup language for abstracting data elements into web pages (1994)
• The first online travel reservation service (May 1995)
• The first private-labeled web site (for Apex travel, 1995)
• The first fully-featured air, car and hotel travel reservation service (early 1996)
• Innovated SaaS (Software as a Service, aka ASP or the Application Service Provider business model) (Corporate version of GetThere to Texas Instruments in early 1996)
• First B2B internet company (1996)
• The first Single Sign-On mechanism for seamless session management across multiple internet applications (1997)
• The first online airline loyalty program allowing booking of air segments from a mileage account (for United Airlines Mileage Plus in 1998)
Current Advisory roles:
2008-Present
COSEE (Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence)
National Advisory Council member
COSEE is an NSF funded ocean education initiative to “spark and nurture collaborations among research scientists and educators to advance ocean discovery and make known the vital role of the ocean in our lives.“
http://www.cosee.net
2009 (Founding year)
Singularity University
Co-Chair, Energy and Ecological Systems Track
NASA Ames campus
SU is an innovative post-graduate summer school course training the next generation of young leaders to tackle humanities greatest challenges
http://www.singularityu.org
2009-Present
Sauce Labs, Inc.
Director
http://www.saucelabs.com
Sauce Labs is an early stage startup in the online web QA functional testing space. They are pursuing a SaaS-centered business model delivering Selenium, an open source tool, to clients via a cloud based infrastructure.
