Microsoft acquires Farecast

Yesterday's disclosure that Microsoft had acquired Farecast was a surprise to many in the travel industry. Is this a new online travel initiative from the original creators of Expedia? Will Farecast be integrated into Microsoft's Live Search?
First a bit of background. I was first introduced to Oren Etzioni through my client Fetch Technologies. This was back in 2002 when the company was called Hamlet. The founders of Fetch are well recognized experts in AI as is Oren Etzioni . I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical during my initial discussion with Oren on whether a predictive fare model would be embraced by the travel consumer. My next interaction with Oren was at a PhoCusWright Travdex conference in Dallas back in 2005. My colleague and friend Philip Wolf commented to me that Oren's presentation at Travdex was the most technical he had seen. This presentation helped reinforce that Farecast was more than a service that tracked historical fares to recommend a buy or no-buy decision. The algorithms created by Mr. Etzioni use advanced AI technology to look at historical fare history creating a recommendation based on complex data mining techniques. It is my belief that this is the core value recognized by Microsoft and thus triggered the acquisition. I doubt if Microsoft is interested in becoming a major travel player, but I do anticipate that the Farecast technology will be expanded to other non-travel segments and incorporated into Microsoft's Live Search. Of course things could change if the Microsoft/Yahoo deal went through as Yahoo! has many travel properties including Farechase which was the first meta-travel search engine.

Sprice: Meta Search for Static Packages

I had a great conversation this morning with Jerome Thil the CEO of the French meta-travel search company Sprice. In Europe and other parts of the world purchasing static vacation packages has been the norm long before the advent of the Web. That buyer behavior has changed a bit with the concept of dynamic packaging, but roughly 80% of travel-related searches by European consumers still focuses on static packages. The Sprice meta-search capability is currently only available on the Spice French site:



For those not up on their French the "Sejours" button starts the travel search for packages. The package meta-search capability took 4 years to develop and uses an interesting technology approach to capture the unstructured and non standardized content from package seller Websites. Rather than using intelligent agents to screen scrape the site, Sprice built an extraction application as an extension to the open source Mozilla Firefox browser. As a Sprice developer uses this modified browser to identify fields on a given site, the extension records the session and thus captures the structure of the site. When the user enters a search query, behind the scenes, the Sprice technology sends these knowledgeable browsers to the sites tracked and extracts the information. Please note that this is a fairly simplistic way to describe the technology as cleansing and parsing the data is a major step in providing consistent comparisons across sites and thus the 4 year development cycle to bring this to market.

Comparative shopping is at the heart of the Web. Rather than focusing on air or hotel shopping as many competitors are already doing (e.g. Kayak, Mobissimo, Farecast), Sprice is focused on the package segment providing important functionality to markets that still predominantly purchase pre-packed tours. User generated content and mobile applications are on the near Horizon for Sprice, particular as the company has a long standing relationship providing the travel channel for the large European Telco, Orange.