At Mirai we help hotels sell their rooms directly to their customers, saving at the same time lot of money they'd have to pay to online travel agencies. That means reducing intermediation costs, increasing therefore the GOP or Gross Operating Profit.With the Internet, this job was supposed to become easier over time. Unfortunately it's the other way around and it's becoming more difficult.Three big problems the industry faces today:1) Intermediation (especially Booking.com) is winning the war and controlling more and more of hotels' sales (in many cases over 50%-70% of their total sales).2) Price comparison sites such as Trivago, Tripadvisor (TripConnect and Instant Booking), Google Hotel Ads (including the about-to-come Book on Google) and kayak are now showing hundreds of new "travel agencies" (you have never heard of) that sell the same hotel at a lower price (a price hotels do not authorize and have no idea how that rate ended up there). Huge problem.3) Hotels are not taking advantage of "mobile" and losing this new opportunity. Again, intermediation (and again Booking.com) is winning and becoming the true "owners" of the hotels.This situation is not sustainable and has to change.This is Mirai's current value proposition.Not an easy task but a doable one.

Member of the HSMAI Europe Distribution Advisory Board, trying to help hotels optimise their distribution and increase their GOP and long term sustainability.

Worked in Azcar Transportation & Logistics (now Dascher) for 5 months. I was in charge of the project of doing the final testing and integration of the new package tracking tool to be implemented in the company. The tools I used were mainly based on Java and Perl.

Worked for 15 months maintaining a farm of 1,000 servers giving support to a 24x7 manufacturing plant with 1,200 people working in 3 shifts. The technology used was mainly Unix (Solaris), although we ended up having many Linux servers too.

I was the second employee at Mirai. I joined the founder, Minoru Watabe, in a really exciting project related to building a travel portal on the Internet. Remember it was 1999, and things were not as easy as they are today.I had been working with Minoru for 2 years (since 1997, when I was 19). I built an online reservation process entirely in C! What an experience that was! I learned quite a lot: HTTP, HTML, SQL, TCP/IP, Linux, and of course designing the architecture of a client/server application that was to handle sensitive and personal information such as names, email addresses, and credit cards.Since I was the second employee in the company, I also had to work as a sales rep bringing new clients (some of them still are), as well as dealing with administrative work.Overall, a great experience that persuaded me to join Mirai back after 2 years once I left it in October 2000.