Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
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Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
1–10 of 125 posts
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#2Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#3Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#4Waits for the inevitable "we're switching from Lisp to Python" announcement...
More likely to be a combination of Python, C and/or Java. ITA uses a lot of C and Java as well.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#5gigantic move in the travel industry
ITA runs behind the scenes at Orbitz and many other OTA's. saying it could cause problems for major players in the market would be an understatement.
(I'm a former Orbitz and Cheaptickets engineer, as well as tech advisor to some travel startups)
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#6strong move - shot across the bow at Bing/Farecast. I wonder where we'll start seeing integrations.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#7Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.
The price does seem relatively low. ITA's revenues are probably not very significant for Google, so they may be buying purely for the team and technology. And for a team and technology acquisition $700M is pretty huge.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#8ITA Software is one of the few remaining "sleeper" sites I use constantly but few people have heard of.
Its routing language and "graphical" view of flight times (which have each been there for what, 7 or 8 years?) are still light years ahead of anything else on the web in terms of travel search.
Let's just hope Google doesn't mess it up somehow.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#9Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.
I'm thinking that's going down as a 'returned 2x capital' sort of purchase on the VC score sheets, unless they took most of the company in the Series A. It's impressive that they ran for nearly 5 years on a Series A, if they did.
I also think the value for Google here isn't revenues so much as controlling another piece of the internet transactional infrastructure.
Re: Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
#10This event will also have a chilling effect for some travel startups. Though maybe act as an accelerant for others. Either way it will impact almost every company in the travel space. (Assuming its not blocked by govt.)