eddmc

What is your specific use case? I used to work managing API's for one of the GDS companies

For screen scraping, there are a number of companies that do this already for multiple carriers. I'd suggest making use of one of these rather than reinventing the wheel. Example: http://xmldocs.travelfusion.com

Or you could start using a good travel agent, as they would do these things for you.

Is this a good time investment for you? You have a choice on what you spend your time on. You could install your own plumbing, write your own t's and c's etc. or you could pay someone to do it.

A lot of travel agents are genuine flight experts. If you don't believe that then you haven't spent much time with good travel agents.

Also, it's not about the commissions. That went out with the '90's

Source: I've worked in this field for 13 years now and sell a SAAS product to travel agents.

Is there any other open-sourced trip planning code? The main one I could find on github is OpenTripPlanner [https://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner]

The travel industry is plagued by Trip planning startups that don't make it. I would have thought one of these might have open-sourced their code before.

Car make / model - there's only a finite set of these. Take a look at the categories on Autotrader or something similar. Tire Sizes - ask your local mechanic how they would find this out? There's probably a catalogue they would use.

This is the first thing I thought about too.

I have no idea what size the tires on my car are. But I do know the make, model (and year) of my car. I'd rather enter these details into the size, and the site could tell me what tyre size is recommended, and as part of that do a search for the prices.

Isn't there an opportunity to consolidate what the IT needs really are with the US Airways merger?

"Integration costs" can be allocated to supporting what the business actually needs, and in the long-term there will be a cost saving. I appreciate the reality is not so straightforward.

Yes, you're right. Hosting has a different meaning in the software industry - the correct term is 'Airline reservations system' but the colloquial term used in the travel industry is 'airline hosting'.

A really interesting book I read about this is Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger Jr. This contains more than just a history of Sabre. I read it more because I work in the travel industry ;-)

http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Landing-Contest-Profits-Airlines/...

The hosting company that American Airlines uses is Sabre

This is the same company used by Virgin America, US Airways, JetBlue and Alaska Airlines

Keep the pricing message simple. I'm not a fan of variable pricing - I like to know what the monthly cost is going to be beforehand. I appreciate tiers where I can see what I'm going to hit depending on growth over time.

Someone below said that you should base your pricing on cost - I completely disagree. You should absolutely NOT look at cost when you put pricing together - rather, you need to ask your customers about the value of what it is you're providing. For example, Heap will be saving the time and hassle of deploying a generic solution on a server and the time of customising it. Plus Heap will be improving their product every day whereas the self-hosted version would need a developer to add new features. These sort of things all add up - you'll be surprised what you find out when you ask your customers.

Pricing is hard. There are a lot of good articles and discussions on HN if you do a bit of searching.

Good luck. Heap looks good

I'm not saying that Heap have got the pricing right but you should absolutely NOT look at cost when you put pricing together - rather, you need to ask your customers about the value of what it is you're providing. For example, Heap will be saving the time and hassle of deploying a generic solution on a server and the time of customising it. Plus Heap will be improving their product every day whereas the self-hosted version would need a developer to add new features. These sort of things all add up - you'll be surprised what you find out when you ask your customers.

Pricing is hard. There are a lot of good articles and discussions on HN if you do a bit of searching.

Here is a more realistic attempt at improving the airplane experience for economy class passengers: http://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Projects/Project.aspx?ID=2634...

This is a design concept submitted to for the 2012 James Dyson Awards. Unfortunately this design takes up more floorspace than the existing cabin layout, so they would need to iterate on the design before an airline will consider it.

I use a Chrome extension from www.sessionbuddy.com to retrieve tabs if Chrome unexpectedly crashes. I've found it pretty useful

Microsoft had a social network. It was called MSN Messenger.

Of course, they killed it

This effort looks like another Zune

Another site for budget airlines is travelfusion.com They also have an API

Your link should be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

Interesting stuff!

I agree with the premise of this article. Entreporn is something that almost everyone I know who works for themselves has gone through. The important thing is to get it out of your system, and get on with building your company!

One thing I found useful was reading a set of books called 'The Naked Leader'. It essentially reduces an entire business book into a small chapter of 2 or 3 pages. I came to realise that many business books are these core points (that can be summarised in 2 or 3 pages) spread out over a couple of hundred pages.

I can't say I've never read a business book again. But it has made me very selective.

Here's a suggestion for your value proposition: Collaborative notetaking made simple.

I actually started with a more complicated sentence [Real-time collaborative editing made simple] but then I saw Helen's comment below your blog post and think she has a more concise description.

I suggest you follow this up with a way (such as a story) of how a customer uses your product. This is where you can use the phrases: notetaking, realtime, and capturing ideas.

I understand why you're trying to steer people towards "notes" and "notebooks". You might not like the fact that people are going to assume your competition is [strike]Google[/strike] Apache Wave or Wikipedia (ok - I mean wiki software) or Evernote, but you need to come up with good answers to those questions and this is where you can focus on important features that you have. It doesn't matter who you think your competition is - it matters what your customers think your competition is. Keep in mind that people are familiar with Wikipedia, and understand the idea of editing a wiki. Use this to your advantage. You need to paint the picture of how this affects them by making it real to them i.e. zero in on their pain point - they may not even know that they have it.

Hope this helps

I totally agree with this last point. I help run a small sailing website. We have no ads on our site, but we send out regular email newsletters that contain ads. These ads more than pay for the site itself, and we can easily switch advertisers between the newsletters. It's been a lot easier than I thought to target advertisers, because we have a load of data on how many people have subscribed and click-through rates etc. We typically sell the adverts in blocks of 3 or 6 months, where we send out 2 newsletters per month.

The most clicked-on links in that email newsletter is a list of the recent posts made to the classified section on our website. It's free to post an advert up on the classified section of something you're trying to sell, but you need to be a member of the site to do that. The newsletter acts as a reminder - so people can regularly see what's been recently posted, as they probably haven't visited that part of the website recently.

It's horses for courses.

I like to get into the coding straight away. If what's happening is not immediately obvious to me, I'll start reading around the area I don't understand until I do understand it. Once I've tried a few set examples out, then I'll start putting my own code together. Inevitably, I'll hit a wall, and search around for an example that solves what I'm having a problem with.

And at some point, I'll start reading the high-level, conceptual/philosophical overview. And because I've now got some experience about some of the areas within the code, how everything ties together starts to make some sense.

If I had to read the high-level overview first, then I may never find the time to start coding in it!

I like your feature request of showing my (up/down) voting history within my HN profile.

I agree that points on old stories would be useful as it helps in search results - I find myself searching for stuff on HN quite frequently. Today, I was looking into a way of publishing software contracts to clients online so they could sign them digitally and found out about RightSignature, Tractis, EchoSign and SignNow all from searching HN, and some of the stories that were coming up were from 2 years ago.

Agree with this point, and here's a suggestion about one way of doing this.

You have a set of users who you believe are now using a competitor. Put a survey together specifically for these users. You need to ask them a mixture of questions about your product, and how you compare to your competition. Ask them a mixture of fact-based questions (yes/no, select from this drop down etc) and opinion based questions (both free text, and of the form: very satisfied, satisfied, dissatisfied, very dissatisfied)

Once you've got your survey together, email it to a proportion of these users - maybe 30% of them. In your email, take the approach of... we are beta and are requesting feedback from users on our product and service etc. Keep the email short. Tell them the survey is 10 questions long and should only take 2 minutes to complete (both of these points need to be true!)

Take the view that a 5% response rate is a good response rate (anything over that is a real bonus). Monitor for a few days, maybe a week. See whether the answers to your questions are of any use at all - your questions could come across as lame or open to mis-interpretation. If you are getting problems like that, make some adjustments to your questions. Then email it out to the other 70% of users.

Hopefully you now have some useful information on where you can improve.

What have you got to lose?

The Flip's strength is it's simplicity. Sorry, but I don't buy the idea elsewhere on this thread that Camera phones (w/ video recording) or GoPro's have captured this market. Yes, they both cover some of it, but lets face it we're the geeks - we're likely to spend money on the latest gadget.

The use case I want to suggest is my parents (in their early 60's). They both have cell phones, but they are not smartphones (they're as likely to get an iphone/android device as they are to go base jumping). They got a Flip about 2 years ago and have recorded over 1,000 hours of their grandkids (my kids) on it so far! It's easy to keep in a pocket or a bag, there's an on/off switch and a big red button to record, and of course it easily plugs in to their laptop (mom) / PC (dad). It had made a massive difference to them, and I think they're more likely to record stuff on the Flip than to take a picture of it :-)

Sad to see the Flip go.

To your first question, you should take a look at http://adioso.com/ (YC W09) by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhoward

Has been covered a few times on HN already e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1651737

There is some commentary on the terms that the Department of Justice have put on the deal here: http://www.tnooz.com/2011/04/08/news/google-ita-software-dea...

In brief:

- Google will be required to license QPX software to airfare websites on commercially reasonable terms.

- Google will be required to continue to fund research and develop the product “at least” at similar levels to what ITA had invested.

- Google will be required to develop and offer ITA’s InstaSearch product to other travel websites.

Hipmunk are a customer of ITA. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1912477

In the Google announcement, they say that ITA’s existing contracts will be honored & have extended contracts through to 2016

This deal was announced a long time ago. Hipmunk will have already planned for this situation

This article references a HN comment[1] that suggests that all TripAdvisor developers have root access to all servers

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1620324

This is just flame-bait.

The author essentially admits she bought a coupon for a photo-album website on GroupOn that was cheap, without checking what she was buying first. It then turned out (1) that she had a poor experience because the photo-album website wasn't what she was expecting, and (2) that she tried to use the coupon on the day she thought it was expiring, and the ToS weren't clear if the coupon could be used up to and including the date, or before that date.

You will never get back the 2 minutes of your life that you waste reading this article