Search + Intelligence: Yapta Receives $2.3 Million in Series A Venture Cap
Search + Intelligence is a growing category of resources that not only provide listings but offer a bit more than only listings. Yes, it's true, all search results could be considered intelligence tools but we're focusing on services that provide more than results or tools to monitor results that change often, like travel pricing. Examples we place in this category include (this is not a comprehensive list):
+ Farecast
Air fare search (for some cities) + historical pricing info along with advice about if/when it's a good time to purchase the ticket. We've posted about Farecast many times in the past year and in this post provide a few links to a research project at the University of Washington in Seattle by Dr. Oren Etzioni, that eventually became FareCast. It was originally named Hamlet (to buy or not to buy). Farecast also offers FareGuard that backs up their predictions by paying out the difference if a fare goes up and their database says it will stay the same or go down.
All we can say is hooray (assuming that it works). Frequent travelers know that they need all the help you can get in finding the best price for a seat on an airplane. It's a cat and mouse game that can depend on constant monitoring of several databases for fare changes, being alerted to them without having to sit and reload pages hourly, and then reacting, one way or another, quickly. Of course, being alerted to fare changes is nothing new. Most of the major players offer them and FareChase/Yahoo also makes them available as a Yahoo Alert and a Yahoo Widget. Yahoo's service is available only for selected cities.
Is Yapta better (faster, more accurate, etc.)? We're going to do some monitoring and comparisons and report back.
+ Requires download of the Yapta Tagger (IE only at this point, Firefox Coming Soon, Sorry Mac users.)
+ Search for flights and fares using major aggregators (Orbitz, Expedia, etc.) and airline web sites (12 sites/databases as of today). In case your're interested, no Southwest.
+ "Tag" the flight(s) your interested in using the Yapta Tagger.
+ If the price drops, you're notified via e-mail (we hope SMS alerts are in the works).
+ If you have already purchased a ticket, enter the confirmation code (directly on the web site) and the price will be monitored. If it drops, you might be able to get the difference as a travel voucher or a cash refund. More here.
+ What's with the name? It stands for: Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
