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by inboulder 5773 days ago
"hipmunk" (I really hate domain squatters if this is best URL you guys could find available?) looks good, but I wonder if it's all flash 'agony' and name recognition (hey you got cnn to write an article already, sweet hook up!). As far as I can tell it has a pretty 'info graphic' interface, but doesn't really do the thing that would get me to use it: save money on flights.

Does hipmunk do anything different? It doesn't look like it can tap into sabre, ryan air db, etc, looks like it just scrapes and organizes, nor does it look like it has any fancy back end db of extensive flight info with a smart heuristics engine to predict future prices. So, beyond help those who have trouble visualizing a schedule, I'm not sure how this is any better than farecast et all. Can hipmunk predict if a particular flight's price (not willy nilly flights, I'm looking at you farecast) will go up or down?
2 comments
samratjp 5773 days ago
That's a bit unfair to judge a recently graduated startup on its current face value. I am sure they have more under the hood a-brewin'. They already solved my pain indirectly for group travel - I was screen sharing with my friends and the layout helped us figure out a time much faster! I do hope there could be some sort of group travel exploration feature down the road a la chat or group search :-)

"Hipmunk" is a cool pun - it's a hip c'hipmunk' (or could be Hip Monk :-p) Either way, it's much more personified with the mascot (like the Reddit alien) than vowel dropping startups.

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zach 5772 days ago
It may not the best URL available for what they currently do. I just did a 5-minute IDS check and pickfly.com (WAY better IMHO) is available, for example.

But see, then they would get "stuck" to the market they're starting in, would lose having a Google-unique name and would probably even have to fight their way up to the first result in travel's very-cutthroat SEO environment.

There are so many trade-offs that are hard to evaluate from the outside that I'm a lot more understanding of "weird" names (typified by the notorious Google example) than I used to be.

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