Farecast: Travel Nerds Rumored to Have Been Bought
Seattle PI tech beat reporter and frequent news breaker John Cook is reporting that the math-heavy travel price prediction service Farecast has been bought by parties unknown for $75 million. The Seattle company has refused comment on the acquisition rumor.
Farecast uses extensive historical observation and algorithmic analysis to search for cheap flights in the US and then advise whether the price is likely to rise or fall in coming days.
The company has expanded to include international travel, analysis of the "fairness" of hotel prices and price guarantees or "lock-in" for a small fee. Farecast was founded by Oren Etzioni, the head of the University of Washington Computer Science Department’s Turing Center and the founder of search engine MetaCrawler. TechCrunch has covered the company's development extensively.
The company raised $20m and began development with a small army of computer scientists in 2003. It launched in 2006 and has quietly grown to become a favorite among tool-savvy travel searchers.
Cook doesn't have any information about who is believed to have bought the company but says that Expedia, with offices just down the road in Bellevue, Washington, is the most logical suspect.
Farecast seems like a technology that's been just waiting to be acquired since before it launched, it's almost a mystery that it's taken this long and that the price is as low as Cook says it is. After raising more than $20 million in venture capital, a 4X exit seems modest if the technology is as good as it seems to be. Maybe it's a real deal involving real technology and real cash money, though. The AdSense along the side of the site has just been proof of concept of course. A team like Farecast's is meant to focus on the science of prediction and get picked up by someone else who can sell ads.
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It is very impressive, legitimate technology they've created. It's not the kind of thing a competitor can just instantly copy, it's badass computer science and statistics.
Side note, and I know it's annoying, but I saw it and checked because I can never remember, but it's 'whether' I think you mean and not 'wether'. Wether is a real word so I think that's why I see it so much, a spell catcher wouldn't point it out maybe. Worst case scenario: I'm annoying, but the definition of 'wether' is mildly amusing.
http://www.answers.com/wether
Morgan, it would have been much more annoying had you not pointed that out in comments and left our European readers to think less of our (my) literacy until I woke up in the morning. Plus that's a funny link to a definition I was not familiar with - hopefully that will stick in my head, I guess. Thanks for reading, commenting and for your support.
Got to see this article on Web 2.0 & thought of penning down some thoughts on my mind.
I personally think that Web 2.0 has tremendous potential in India. This statement is not a over-dose of boasting as i strongly believe that there a lot of potential in making our systems go web.
Be it anything from jobs to house search everything is easy when you have internet. In fact, i got across www.ninthcafe.com which seems to be doing the job really well. I am pretty confident that WEb 2.0 will make its mark in India.
http://www.ninthcafe.com
$75 million is not a bad amount. Good technology.
Frequent news breaker? On what planet?