Future for Travel Portals?
NY Times : A brief survey on a flight in 2002, told Oren Etzioni, a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington that others had paid less than he had for their tickets. Taking information about seat supply and demand and an algorithm to predict how the airlines’ algorithms were going to price those seats, Etzioni helped to create Farecast, an airfare search engine that also predicts how much the price of an airline ticket will rise or fall over the coming days.
Farecast could become a great tool for consumers because it uses much the same techniques that airline computers have used to extract the maximum amount of money from the flying public. It is the latest Web site to harness cheap computing power to hazard predictions on all sorts of everyday things and make the data available to consumers.
One such site introduced this year was Zillow.com, the real estate voyeur’s guilty pleasure. It mines data in county land records to hazard a guess on the value of 65 million homes across the United States. The Seattle company says its “Zestimate” is within 10 percent of the selling price of a home, though many users have noted that the inaccuracy of the public records distorts the price estimates.
Inrix, based in Kirkland, Wash., crunches data to predict traffic. It measures the speed of a half million commercial vehicles, like delivery vans and taxis, equipped with global positioning satellite receivers and also figures in information on weather and the scheduling of schools, factories and rock concerts.
Similar Companies - Flyspy
Here however, is another take on the topic (thanks Karan)
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