FlySpy – pick the cheapest dates/times/airports, interactively

TechCrunch on FlySpy:

I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple. …. in very little time I can find the best day to fly out, the best price and also the best destination.

This is great! The cycle of entering new dates/airports/times over and over, waiting for the airline site or expedia or orbitz to respsond, slooooowly, hoping for a better price, is brutal. I’m glad someone is finally going to give us a visualization of that data!!

Screenshot on TechCrunch:

FlySpy, make sure you invite information aesthetics when you have an alpha – they’ll eat it up!

Naked Conversations / TechCrunch Party

I’ll be at the Naked Conversations Party tonight (hosted by Michael Arrington at his house). It should be a blast!

Shel and Robert really did a great job on the book. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to blogging, so I was surprised to find so many examples in the book that were new to me. And the examples I was familiar with were given strong, in-depth treatment, showing me the rest of the story. I finished it last night, so I plan to put together a review this weekend.

At home, I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down, so I read half of the hardcover and had Microsoft Mary read the other half to me (using the Digital Edition). I used my laptop (booted to XP) and Adobe’s PDF Reader (with DRM) [Menu->View->Read Out Loud or CTRL-SHIFT-B]. Microsoft Mary is from the Microsoft Speech SDK. There were a few quirks (Read Out Loud doesn’t skip over urls in the footnotes and it mispronounces ‘Scoble’), but it was a pretty positive experience for my first time using text to speech so extensively.

Opera Browser for the Nintendo DS

This is huge news!  I saw all the links marked “Web Browser for the DS”, but I didn’t notice that Opera is building it!  YES!  LionMarine suggests that it might also require a gba cartridge for a RAM upgrade.