21–30 of 125 posts
ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site.
That's probably not completely true. Matrix, although not a booking site, is one of the better flight search sites, allows consumers to find the cheapest time to leave and come back in a given month for a particular number of days of travel.
Is 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.
From the FAQ: ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site. That's probably not completely true. Matrix, although not a booking site, is one of the better flight search sites, allows consumers to find the cheapest time to leave and come back in a given month for a particular number of days of travel. http://matrix2.itasoftware.com
I hope Google leave it as it is (or improve it).
ITA 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.
From the FAQ: ITA Software does not market a consumer oriented flight search site. That's probably not completely true. Matrix, although not a booking site, is one of the better flight search sites, allows consumers to find the cheapest time to leave and come back in a given month for a particular number of days of travel. http://matrix2.itasoftware.com
That being said, I have always gotten the impression that they maintain it as a sort of testbed -- a huge number of Flyertalkers use matrix for very esoteric queries, and I'd imagine the feedback that ITA gets from those users is invaluable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They have substantial revenue, so not taking much investment isn't surprising. I just wonder what the thought process was in deciding to sell to Google at this price. This must still be a huge win for the founders. They probably still had most of the equity since they only took one round of financing, and at a point when the company was already mature.
Is 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.
Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of Lisp (for a outline and link to the talk see: http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html).
RES is a three tier system with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the only choice), stateless Common Lisp middleware and Java with the usual web libraries for the front end. 300 milisecond? general max transaction time, which they weren't finding to be a big issue even with GC.
The problem: someone has to go first. While it's arbitrarily sized/scoped to accommodate American Airlines, Air Canada was going to be the lead customer. In August 2009 they suspended their participation in the project, I strongly suspect due to the general recession/depression in the industry. Switching would be very expensive in all sorts of ways and raw survival almost certainly is taking priority. (ITA has continued developing the system.)
This part/project of ITA is very likely to be a victim of bad timing; I sure can't see Google credibly continuing it, it's all wrong for their service culture, although perhaps it'll get spun off.
ITA 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.
What are the others?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard that the Python folks already drove most of the Lisp folks out. Lisp is only used for a very small part of their infrastructure, from what I've been told.
@smanek is a Lisper and worked for ITA a few years ago I believe so perhaps he'll chime in.