It seems when time, money and patience are running thin in the travel industry, that’s precisely when the best innovations comes to fruition. What birthed GDS, OTAs and metasearch if not the same factors? Before PhoCusWright celebrates the latest crop of demonstrators at the Travel Innovation Summit this fall, we point out two new applications that will shake up the airline industry and bring trip planning to your iPhone respectively. Both Flightcaster and Center’d were highlighted in TechCrunch.

As our audience is encouraged to do at The PhoCusWright Conference, please submit your opinion of the effectiveness of these two travel solutions by posting a comment on this page.

YC-Funded Flightcaster Tells You When Your Flight Is Delayed Hours Before The Airline Will

TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid on August 18, 2009

“ON TIME”. It’s the first thing we look for when we arrive at the airport — oftentimes we’ll even check a flight’s status before leaving home to make sure things are proceeding as planned. But as anyone who has done extensive traveling could tell you, that ‘On Time’ indicator isn’t exactly honest. Like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand, sometimes airlines will continue to proclaim that a flight is “On Time” when, minutes before takeoff, your plane is nowhere to be seen. Flightcaster, a new Y Combinator funded company that’s launching today, is looking to provide a much more honest indicator of your flight’s current status, and is capable of alerting you to a delay as long as six hours before the airline will.

So how is that possible? Given how poor the ‘On Time’ indicator can be, it should come as little surprise that the airlines often know your flight will be delayed long before they tell you. In fact, they have an incentive to keep you waiting as long as possible, otherwise they’ll have to manage the logistics of rebooking more people on other flights. Flightcaster taps into a variety of data sources to try to uncover the truth.

The service keeps track of FAA alerts, weather, network congestion, historical trends, and other factors, which are all run through an algorithm to provide an estimate of how likely it is that a given flight will be delayed.

Continue reading at TechCrunch

Center’d Brings Its Local Discovery Engine To The iPhone

TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid on August 18, 2009

Center’d, the service that looks to help you figure out what to do with your day, has released a new iPhone application that lets you tap into the site’s restaurant, event, and activity recommendation engine on the go. The application is free and you can grab it here.

Center’d competes with sites like Yelp and CitySearch, but instead of simply offering text reviews, the service scours the web for reviews and descriptions and performs semantic analysis on them, allowing you to perform more detailed searches than you could on other sites.

Continue reading at TechCrunch

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