[mitchellhislop]

Cue puts smarts behind all that data.

Case in point: this last Wednesday, I had a going away dinner for a friend. This was put on my GCal. This came via a Facebook message. Without me doing anything, it put 2+2 together. When I opened Cue that morning, there was the event, with a link to the message.

When I fly in August, it knows enough to put all my travel info (passes, emails, events, etc) together in the same way.

Search is still there, and it still rocks. The added AI on top of that makes this killer - I would have used Greplin to surface that data, but Cue was smart enough to do it for me. It's solving a roughly analogous problem, but doing it in a much smarter, faster way.

[ebiester]

How did you get it to do that? Does it depend on something being in the calendar? Because it hasn't been able to pick up my trip in July yet.

[pjscott]

We're scraping flight confirmation emails from several airlines, but getting all of the major ones working is challenging. If you've got a flight, it may be with one of the airlines we don't support in production yet. The easiest work-around is to put the trip in Google Calendar; they have a proper API. It sucks that you have to do that much, though. We're working on it. If you have the time, and you're willing to share details over email, we'd love to hear from you at [e-mail].

Ultimately, we'd like to make a simple open API for various types of events. How cool would it be if (for example) airline companies attached a machine-readable version of your itinerary to the confirmation emails, the same way they send out HTML and text versions? Then you could integrate that with any tools you like. It would be like the "semantic web", except without all the hand-waving and overly-verbose XML stuff. This would be easy to do -- the budget would be peanuts to them -- but in order to get something like that happening, we need to convince those companies that there's a demand for it, that someone would actually use that machine-readable information if they provide it. Our automated email scraping is an attempt to break the chicken-and-egg dilemma, and hasten the spread of open machine-readable data for things that are currently just auto-generated text, by providing a compelling use for it.

[asarazan]

Shoot an email to [e-mail] and we'll look into it.